A staircase cut into limestone drops you into a still, brackish pool that once kept an entire village alive.
We almost skipped Anapala. Every list of Niue’s chasms points you toward the ones that open onto the sea — the turquoise slots you can snorkel through — and Anapala, tucked inland near Liku on the eastern coast, doesn’t do that. It just goes down. I remember standing at the top of the stairway, cut straight into the raised coral limestone that makes up basically all of Niue, and not being able to see the bottom. Lia looked at me and said, “well, we drove all the way out here,” which is how most of our better decisions get made.
The descent takes longer than you’d think for something that isn’t very deep on a map. The steps are narrow, uneven in places, and the limestone walls close in as you go, damp and cool against air that had been sticky hot just a few minutes before. I counted steps for a while and then gave up. What struck me most was the silence — no surf, no wind, just our footsteps and the occasional drip of water finding its way through the rock, the same slow percolation that’s been filling this pool for who knows how long.
At the bottom, the pool itself is strange and beautiful — still, dark, slightly brackish, nothing like the clear sea water we’d been swimming in all week at the other chasms. It’s not connected to the ocean at all; it’s fed by rain filtering down through the makatea, collecting in this one low pocket of rock. Our guide in Liku had mentioned, almost in passing, that this was where the village got its drinking water before pipes ever reached here, and standing there I found myself thinking about how many generations of people had made this exact climb, except carrying jars instead of cameras.
We didn’t stay long — the climb back up is its own small ordeal, and I was grateful for every railing bolted into that rock. But Anapala has stuck with me longer than some of the prettier spots on Niue, maybe because it felt less like a photo op and more like a piece of village history you get to walk down into.
When to go: We went in August, right in the dry season that runs from May to October, and I was still gripping the handrail on the way down — I can’t imagine doing those steps slick with rain.