Lake Lanoto'o

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.