Mick Hartley

Here are some of The World’s Wackiest Holidays. In fact they’re festivals, not holidays. Still…nice photos. The one that intrigues me is the last one, “Eastern Island, Chile: Tapati Festival” (should be Easter Island):

A week-long festival begun in the 1970s in an effort to drum up more tourism, Tapati includes a triathlon in which native participates run around the lake of the Rano Raraku vulcano carrying a large bunch of bananas.

So are we to understand that there are people out there who wouldn’t be interested in a visit to Easter Island for the purpose of seeing those remarkable stone statues, the Moai, but who might just be lured across the 2250-odd miles over the Pacific from mainland Chile by the prospect of watching semi-naked men running around carrying large bunches of bananas?