After dinner at an in town restaurant, that was pretty basic, we walked down the road to the nightly performance of culture and dance at the Kari Kari Cultural Centre. Here we watched a young, enthusiastic and talented dance group doing their performance. The dance looked to us very similar to the ones that we’d seen in Tahiti and Hawaii. The dress was similar too. The girls with headdresses made from palm leaves, tops and short frilly skirts. They let their hips do the dancing. The technique of gyrating at the hips while the upper body remains stationery is fascinating to watch especially as the movement increased with the tempo of the drums.
Later dressed in a more “ceremonial” attire that we associated with Tahitian culture, with tall headdresses and longer skirts, they presented a more mythical tale set to music. The boys, young, bare-chested and fit-looking competed on equal terms with the girls. The show was packed with wild drumming, gyrating dancers, colourful costumes, energy and enjoyment by both the performers and spectators alike. At the end, the audience were invited to join the dancers on the stage.
The next day, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast and fruit on the attractive terrace overlooking the tropical gardens, we headed off early to circle the island counter clockwise, mainly because many of the tours did the circle clockwise and we wanted to catch the late afternoon sunset behind Rano Raraku - the Nursery. On the South coast, it was overcast and at a number of times during the day, we experienced rain showers. Our first area of exploration were a number of sites with remains of buildings and classical stonework. At Ahu Vinapu there is an impressive ahu site with a wall of mortar-less blocks that very much reminded us of the Inca walls that we’d visited in Ollantaytambo, near Cusco in Peru. The moai lay broken and facedown. Our guidebook told us that other smaller statues were present in this area. It was a moai with short legs. This resembled a number of figures that has been unearthed at a number of Inca sites in the Andes. A shower blew in, ending a more detailed investigation.
