Tapati Rapa Nui, a yearly Easter Island festival since 1975, began as a song and poetry festival to attract more tourists to this most isolated inhabited part of our world. Nowadays it's a big festival that spans over 14 days where Rapa Nui islanders remember their ancestral habits. There are activities and competitions spinning around the election of a beauty queen. This year's candidates for Tapati Rapa Nui 2006 Queen were
Tamy Rapu Atan and
Vai A Heva Icka Riroroko.
The candidates for the queen amass points from the competitors, all of whom are competing in the name of one or the other of the queen candidates. The whole competition looks like small Olympic Games. During the 14 days of the festival each day there would be different competitions like making of traditional clothing, carving of a moai statues and traditional wooden objects, fishing with bamboo sticks, underwater fishing, production of shell necklaces, making of typical garments from natural materials, rowing, horse race, bananatreetrunk race, Rapa Nui Triathlon, kai kai (string figures), body painting, native dancing, Rapa Nui tango...
The most amazing part is that both candidates for the queen participate in most of the above events, that's what, in my opinion, makes this the hardest beauty queen competition a girl can be in. The hottest part of the competition was presentation of traditional clothing when both candidates changed their clothes like five times and stripped down to a bikini explaining to a detail from which material their clothing was made of. Unfortunately there is no big prize for the Queen at the end of the competition just the honor to represent a small island and it's culture for one year.
Here are few pictures with a nip slip of a potential Tapati 2006 Queen and a bittorrent link to a movie with both
candidates in a bikini from the first week of the contest for the Tapati Rapa Nui 2006 Queen. The festival ended 2 days ago and I assume Tamy Rapu Atan is the new queen since she had a substantial lead over the Vai A Heva when I left the Easter Island.