Swimming with wild turtles in Samoa, alone

Back on Upolu after a day trip across the water to Savai'i, I had a couple of
hours to spare and spent them on the strangest, best snorkel of the trip. Along
the coast there is a giant clam sanctuary, marked by nothing more than a flag
planted a few hundred metres offshore. I rented a snorkel from some guys by the
road, swam out to it, and found them: enormous clams, gathered in colonies
across the seabed. I went back and forth above them for ages, working out how
far the colonies ran.

Then I asked about turtles, because I had not seen a single one in the water. A
local pointed vaguely down the coast, a few hundred metres on. I waded in, not
even out of my depth, and there they were: around ten wild turtles, gliding
around me close enough to photograph. No boat, no guide, no other tourists,
just me and the turtles in the shallows. The locals could not have been less
impressed; they have grown up with more turtles than they can count.

That is the whole character of Samoa. The encounter that would be a ticketed,
booked-out excursion almost anywhere else costs, here, the price of a borrowed
snorkel and the nerve to wade in and look. It is the kind of half-hour that
quietly outlasts most of what you book months ahead. I have paid a great deal,
in glossier places, for far less than this.

Bring a mask. The best things in Samoa are underwater, and nobody is charging
for them.