I’d mentioned earlier that there are two sites you only get to visit once during your time on Easter Island, but didn’t get into the details. So here’s how it works.

Once you exit your plane at Mataveri International Airport, but before you get your luggage, there’s a booth where you can buy the ticket which allows entrance to all of Rapa Nui National Park. The ticket is good for five days, starting not at the moment of purchase, but from the time it’s stamped at one of those two sites with limited entries, either Ranu Raraku or Orongo. You can revisit any other site as many times as you want—and there are several Irene and I did return to—but those two, being the largest and most popular, are restricted.

Ranu Raraku is the quarry from which almost all of the island’s moai were carved, and contains hundreds of them, some upright, some fallen or buried, some never completed or moved—such as “El Gigante” above, the largest moai ever, nearly 72 feet tall.

There are many moai revealed in the stone of Ranu Raraku, seemingly abandoned by their makers.

We spent around two hours here in the company of our guide, Cristin Arvalo Pakarati, who also took us to six other sites that day. We could easily and happily have spent several hours more here alone.

I don’t regret hiring a guide for our first two days on Easter Island, but knowing what I know now about how easily drivable the island is, and how it’s nearly impossible to get lost, I’d have left both Ranu Raraku and Orongo for the days when we were on our own, and had the freedom for quiet contemplation.

One fascinating aspect to the moai seen here is that unlike the ones you find facedown elsewhere, these were not toppled during the island’s civil wars.

I’m perhaps reading into it something that isn’t really there, but I kept imagining the Rapa Nui who were transporting the moai of Ranu Raraku standing around the fallen ones much the same way piano movers would look down in disgust at a Steinway they’d dropped and destroyed.

Maybe that’s why time shrank more here than at any other place on Easter Island, making me feel close to the early inhabitants. I could feel their pain.

Although scholars are still arguing about the meaning of these apparently abandoned moai, I prefer my fantasy of saddened workers centuries gone, who in my mind were thinking, “Oh, great! Now we have to start all over again!”