Rapa Nui....

I thought I needed something really special to post for my 500th blip on this site. And this is what I found.

Rapa Nui is a place I've always wanted to visit but it is so inaccessible even today, so far away and so expensive to get to that I thought I will never manage it. And, so far, I haven't. The island is more widely known as Easter Island in the South Pacific and the reason I want to visit is to see the extraordinary statues, some wearing their red hats, that have been set up around the island.

Their purpose isn't clear but people think they were set up as monuments to ancestors. To build them it is thought that the people so over exploited the resources of their small island and so degraded the environment that their society imploded and they fought each other almost to the point of extinction. Even today, over 500 years after they were believed to have been set up, the island is still suffering and hasn't returned to anything like it was before the statues were created. A lesson to us all I think.

There are 887 of these monolithic statues, called Moai, on Rapa Nui and two of them have made it to Manchester Museum on Oxford Road. They are there until September. So if you are like me, not planning a long, expensive trip to Easter Island, they are there to be seen for the price of a bus ticket down Oxford Road.