Mount Kinabalu
Borneo's highest mountain, held by the Kadazan-Dusun to be the resting place of ancestral spirits. Until the 1990s a rite involving the sacrifice of seven white chickens was required before climbing, and it is still performed once a year. In 2015 a group of tourists stripped at the summit for photographs; days later an earthquake killed eighteen people, and local authorities connected the two directly.
Lake Fundudzi
The sacred lake of the Venda people in northern South Africa, one of the country's few natural freshwater lakes, formed by an ancient landslide. Nobody approaches the water without the chief's permission, and the lake is properly viewed with one's back to it, through the legs. Tradition places a guardian white crocodile in it, and a drowned village on the bottom whose people refused hospitality to a leper.
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