Ofu Beach is two miles of empty white sand on the island of Ofu in the Manu'a group of American Samoa, under the blade of Sunu'itao peak, fronting a reef whose corals survive water hot enough to kill reefs elsewhere, and it is the heart of a national park that nobody sold, since land in Samoa belongs to extended families and cannot be bought by a government, so the park leases it. The beach faces south with the green wall of the neighbouring island of Olosega closing the view beyond a strait of 137 metres that people once waded and a bridge now crosses, and from the rocky ground at its western end the full curve of sand opens with the peak rising behind it; the reef crest walls off pools behind it at low tide, most no deeper than the chest, and the swimming is flat over them with the fins held still, above corals that scientists have studied for decades because they take heat that bleaches reefs elsewhere, cooked in barely a metre of water by the sun until the tide returns. The island has a few hundred people, one guesthouse and a flight from Tutuila a few times a week.
A steep, humid jeep track switchbacks up through rainforest to the high point of Tumu mountain at roughly 490 metres, with the beach, the reef and the strait below and Ta'u, the largest of the Manu'a islands, across the water. Humpback whales cross into these waters to calve, peaking in September and October, and from the beach and the boat crossings the blow is spotted first, then the tail as they sound beyond the reef; flying foxes cross the sky at dusk and the villages keep the Samoan way, with the evening prayer curfew observed. The beach is the least visited in any American national park, and most days there is no one on it. Ofu is a beach at the end of the Pacific, and its coral has learned the heat.