Sunday 25 March 2012

Happy Easter

This is such an interesting place. For a start, how crazy to come to the most remote island on the planet and find yourself grumbling about slow download speeds and having to go and sit in the bar to get connected. But more importantly, here we are further away from civilisation than anywhere else, yet the island is the perfect example of how ruinous man can be to an environment: no native vegetation left, the place overrun by horses, the sea clearer than anywhere else, but nothing much to see in it because of over-fishing. I was more than a bit dismayed by all this, and the dead horse we walked past this morning (they roam freely and eat the seedpods of lupins, which kill them) was especially horrible for me - as well as smelly.

But things improved when we got to see the moai, the famous heads that I could never remember which way they faced. It's looking inland, people! Except for the ones that look seaward - but there are only 7 of them. Strangely, in most of my photos of this row of heads, there are only 6, and I was tempted to get a bit supernatural about the missing one (these are three metres high, how could I miss one?) but then I looked at all my horizons, 30 degrees off to a man, and blamed sheer fatigue.

But it's a puzzle, how these massive lumps of stone were carved in one crater and hauled across the island to stand along the coast. The aliens explanation is much neater than all the others - but tomorrow we go to the quarry and perhaps it will all be made clear. Or perhaps not...

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