The vast brackish estuary beside New Orleans, on whose shores voodoo rites were held through the nineteenth century — most famously Marie Laveau's St John's Eve gatherings at Bayou St John. Traces of offerings still turn up at night: candles, coins, bones. A causeway nearly twenty-four miles long crosses the lake, and from its middle no shore is visible at all — a sensation locals count as its own reason not to drive it in fog.

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Ha Long Bay

Fifteen hundred limestone islands in the Gulf of Tonkin. The name means descending dragon: gods sent dragons to defend the Vietnamese against invaders, tradition holds, and they spat out pearls and jade that became the islands. A separate strand is sailors' accounts of a sea creature that French colonial officers reported in the bay in the 1890s.