18 July 2026

Haka Pei: Easter Island's Ancient Extreme Sport That Sends Warriors Racing Down a Volcano

Take two banana tree trunks, lash them together, point them downhill and jump on board.  Get your mates involved and turn it into a competition.  You might not associate Easter Island with extreme sports, but they have been part of the island's culture for centuries (with the occasional hiatus).  There is no doubt that the highlight of the annual Tapati Rapa Nui Festival is the Haka Pei competition. Although the festival also celebrates Rapa Nui culture through singing, swimming, cooking demonstrations and countless other events, few can compete with the spectacle of hurtling down the side of an extinct volcano wearing nothing more than a loincloth and body paint. Image Credit

The origins of this sport trace back to an ancient Rapa Nui rite of passage, where young people tested their courage by taking on the daring haka pei descent. Completing the challenge proved they possessed the bravery and resilience expected of adults, earning some the status of matato'a - elite warriors. In this tradition, the haka pei marked the passage from childhood into adulthood.

Another account tells a different story. Rather than a coming-of-age ritual, the haka pei may have been a form of warrior training, designed to instil fearlessness and prepare fighters for clashes between rival clans on the island.

Does the exact origin of the sport matter?  Not to the huge crowds gathered at the bottom of the hill, waiting to see how each of the twenty or so competitors will fare.  Who will travel the furthest? Or who will be unfortunate and be flung off their fragile sled half-way down?  The anticipation is huge, not least among the competitors, and it is great to see how they congratulate each other so enthusiastically when their mission is complete.  The hill is covered in grass, but beneath that thin layer lies volcanic tuff capable of breaking bones when riders crash. And crashes do happen. As you might imagine, health-and-safety officials are not among Haka Pei's biggest fans. However, it all seems the height of fun for young men with more courage than common sense!  Flippancy aside, I can’t think of a better way to keep an ancient culture alive.  Watch the video below to enjoy haka pei in all its glory for yourself.

28 May 2010

The Last Secret of the Moai

The impassive monoliths of Easter Island have for many years flummoxed and baffled archaeologists. The theory had for many years gone that out of all these magnificent moai, those inland had simply been abandoned by the tracks.

Some suggested they were possibly too heavy to cart to the perimeter of the island. Thor Heyerdhal (left) the famous adventurer explorer suggested that they had no spiritual meaning whatsoever and were most likely the ones that were simply left to lie at the side of the road because for whatever reason they did not make it to the coast.
A new team of academics from the United Kingdom have come up with an alternative suggestion – and perhaps the moai are finally to give up their last secret. The monoliths, it is now argued, played a pivotal role in the island’s road system and were left in their places much more specifically than the old consensus ever suggested. Contrary to the Norwegian explorer’s hypothesis the new evidence suggests that they had a religious, possibly mystic raison d'être.

Legend has it that the statues arrived at their final resting places when the king of the island called upon the gods and ordered the statues to walk to their destinations. He would have had to have had an incredibly long reign as the statues were sculpted over a period of three hundred years from 1200 to 1500CE. It was more likely then that the islanders took the monoliths to their end point by an elaborate system of rollers and A frames made from the island’s soon to be decimated tree population.

The above picture shows just how big a moai can be - and that is big. However, the inland effigies are now considered to have been placed not with the assumed randomness because the islanders were not able to move them any further but with a deliberate intent. The new team have discovered that each has its own plinth (just like the ones on the coast) now buried and this would very much suggest that they were not simply left to their own devices but that there was design to their placement.

These platforms were discovered by the use of state of the art imaging equipment and the teams from University College London and Manchester University now believe that Heyerdahl was in fact mistaken. These giants, some of them weighing up to eighty six tons were placed there for a reason – and that reason was the very quarry from which they were extracted.

The academic team believes that the monoliths formed part of a complex religious avenue, criss crossing the island but eventually ending up at the quarry where the moai were born. Although the vast majority of the inland maoi of the archipelago are overturned they now think that this is simply the result of standing up for too long – some of them up to eight hundred years – rather than abandonment ab origine.

They have worked out that all of them would have looked inward on to the roads and that as the traveller nears the quarry (known as Rabo Raraku) their incidence becomes much more frequent. So, as the religious pilgrims got closer to the volcano cones of the quarry, thought by Polynesian cultures to be openings to the underworld, more and more of the statues would appear, creating an entrancing stone culmination to the pilgrimage and heralding the entry of the ancient islanders to a sacred place, indeed their most sacred of places.

Now it has been explained – perhaps not finally nevertheless – it does all seem rather obvious. Have the inscrutable statues really given up their last secret? Even though it's not a holy grail like garcinia, there is a review to say otherwise.