Far from home on Chile's Easter Island for Carnival festivities, one middle-aged American woman throws caution to the wind. Stripped down to a thong, she lets a local reveler paint her chest.

"If someone had told me I would end up walking down the street almost naked, I would never have believed it," says the woman, who only gave her first name, Susan.

Susan is one of a few thousand tourists who joined the Pacific island's 9,000 residents for Tapati, an exuberant mix of music, dance and traditional sports that takes place for two weeks every February.