To Sua is a swimming hole sunk thirty metres into a lava field on the south coast of Upolu, the main island of Samoa, a round pool of clear green water at the bottom of a shaft of black rock hung with vines, fed by the sea through channels in the stone and reached only down a tall wooden ladder. The name means big hole, and it began as a dome, not a hole: a bubble in the old lava whose roof fell in, leaving a pit with gardens on the rim, ferns on the walls and the sea filtering in below. You back down the ladder bolted to the rim, rung by rung, thirty metres to a platform at the water, and swim out to the middle, where the pool is deep enough to float still with the circle of sky overhead and the walls green around you. On the shaded side a low rock opening marks where the hidden channels connect the trench to the ocean, and swimming toward it you feel a gentle surge, or see a small reef fish, proof that this calm-looking pool is the open sea coming in through the rock.
The trench is what people come for, but the black lava field across the road is the other half of the site: the coast there is bare rock where the Pacific breaks, with blowholes throwing spray, tide pools and a rough beach, and the gardens around the rim are kept by the family that owns the land and charges the entry, as most of Samoa's sights are. The pool is swum in the morning before the day trippers arrive from Apia, and the light drops straight down the shaft around midday. To Sua sits on the coast road near Lotofaga, an hour from the capital, among villages of open-sided houses and churches. To Sua is a piece of the ocean at the bottom of a well, and the ladder is the only way to it.