Lake Lanoto'o
"The color changes as you walk around it — sometimes emerald, sometimes almost black."
A jade-green crater lake hidden in Upolu's rainforest interior, reached by a muddy hike that makes the swim at the end feel earned.
Nobody had actually told me how muddy the trail to Lake Lanoto’o gets, which is probably deliberate, because if they had I might not have gone, and I would have missed one of the strangest, quietest places I found in Samoa. The track climbs into the island’s volcanic interior from a turnoff near Lalomalava, through forest thick enough that the light drops to a dim green well before you reach the crater rim, and by the time I got there my shoes had essentially stopped being shoes and become something closer to clay.
The lake itself sits inside a dormant volcanic crater, and its color shifts depending on where the light is coming from and what’s blooming underwater — jade in some spots, nearly black in the shaded corners, with patches of water lilies drifting on the surface that made it feel less like a swimming hole and more like something out of a Rousseau painting. I’m told the green tinge comes from copper deposits in the crater floor, which is a strangely specific fact I’ve never been able to independently verify but choose to believe anyway.
Swimming there is genuinely eerie in the best sense — the water is cool rather than tropical-warm, the crater walls muffle sound so completely that your own splashing seems too loud, and there’s a resident population of very large goldfish, descendants of fish released decades ago, that will nose up against you with a total lack of fear that’s somehow more unsettling than if they’d fled. I floated on my back for a long time just listening to birds I couldn’t see and couldn’t identify, which is a fairly reliable sign you’ve found somewhere worth the mud.
When to go: Go in the dry season, May to October — the trail is a genuine slog after rain, sometimes ankle-deep in mud, and a local guide from a nearby village is worth arranging since the track isn’t always obvious. Wear shoes you don’t mind ruining.