As my flight back to Lima was only in the late afternoon, I had plenty of time to see some more stuff on the island. In the morning, I did something very strange (for me, at least): I attended the Sunday morning mass at Hanga Roa's church.
What's special about this mass is that all the singing is done in the Rapa Nui language. Little as I may know about church chants, I believe they were not the typical songs you might hear in a German church, but actually songs from Rapa Nui. Also, instead of an organ, they had two guitar players and one accordion player sitting in the audience. So the musical part was definitely interesting, while I found the sermon to be too long and boring for my taste ;-)
After church, I went to the museum, the only place still missing on my mental list of things to see on Easter Island. They had a few interesting exhibits that were too small or delicate to show anywhere else on the island, like this wooden moai statue, called moai kava-kava:
They also pieced together coral fragments found during excavations to a complete moai eye:
Finally, they also had a few replicas of tablets covered in rongo rongo script. This script hasn't actually been deciphered, and the islanders' knowledge to read it was lost during the Peruvian slave raids: at one point, the slavers abducted all leaders and wise men, who then died because of the horrible working conditions in Peru. Thus, with a single slaver's ship, all knowledge of rongo rongo was wiped out. Because of the few remaining examples of rongo rongo writing, nobody has yet been able to figure out its meaning.
What's special about this mass is that all the singing is done in the Rapa Nui language. Little as I may know about church chants, I believe they were not the typical songs you might hear in a German church, but actually songs from Rapa Nui. Also, instead of an organ, they had two guitar players and one accordion player sitting in the audience. So the musical part was definitely interesting, while I found the sermon to be too long and boring for my taste ;-)
After church, I went to the museum, the only place still missing on my mental list of things to see on Easter Island. They had a few interesting exhibits that were too small or delicate to show anywhere else on the island, like this wooden moai statue, called moai kava-kava:
They also pieced together coral fragments found during excavations to a complete moai eye:
Finally, they also had a few replicas of tablets covered in rongo rongo script. This script hasn't actually been deciphered, and the islanders' knowledge to read it was lost during the Peruvian slave raids: at one point, the slavers abducted all leaders and wise men, who then died because of the horrible working conditions in Peru. Thus, with a single slaver's ship, all knowledge of rongo rongo was wiped out. Because of the few remaining examples of rongo rongo writing, nobody has yet been able to figure out its meaning.
