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An unusually large tourist will visit Paris in 2010. One of the vast statues of elongated human heads and torsos from Easter Island has "expressed the wish" to visit the French capital to preach - silently - against Western materialism.
The statue let the island's leaders know it wanted to make the pilgrimage, French newspaper Le Figaro reported. Two islanders, including the Governor's nephew, have made a preparatory visit and concluded that one of the statues or moai - which range up to 90m high and 90 tonnes in weight - should stand in the middle of the Tuileries gardens, halfway between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.
"Everyone on the island knows that a moai is going to Paris," Edgard Hedreveri, the Easter Island tourism director, told Le Figaro. "It is going to find a platform in Paris to spread spiritual energy which will change the conscience of humanity. It is going to transform the materialistic conscience of the world into something more humane."
The cost of the anti-materialist pilgrimage over nearly 16,000km will be covered - somewhat inappropriately - by the French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.
There are almost 900 Easter Island statues, carved between 400AD and the early 1700s.
The particular moai has not yet been chosen by the island's 4900 inhabitants.
It will make the journey to France by sea, then, probably, up the Seine by barge.
- INDEPENDENT
