The Emptiest Landscapes on Earth

Looking for solitude? Drama? Isolation?

Some of the world’s wildest places are more accessible than ever before.

From deserts to steppe to swathes of frozen ice, here are some places to get far, far from the madding crowd, and wow your mind with beauty…

1: Antarctica

The only continent on which humans have never lived unsupported, three miles deep in ice, the aridest landscape on earth, Antarctica can get so cold that a spilled cup of coffee will freeze before it hits the ground. Though few but explorers, climbers and scientists venture far into the interior, the island fringes are becoming more reachable by the day, offering even ordinary folk dazzling, snowblind vistas in hues of blue and white.

2: Mongolia

Genghis Khan and his Mongols came out of these inhospitable lands some centuries ago, and today Mongolia is the emptiest nation on earth. Its deserts and grassy steppes remain substantially untouched by roads, even today, studded with yurt habitations where locals still ride their stocky ponies as they have since time immemorial. The climate oscillates between savage heat and bitter cold – especially in the desert.

3: Namibia

Want emptiness? Head to Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, an extraordinarily arid landscape named for the bones of whales and seals on its shores – or into the Namib or Kalahari deserts. During and after the country’s struggle for freedom from South African apartheid rule, many considered Namibia unsafe. Now its rolling golden deserts, unique wildlife and dazzling emptiness make it an adventure destination par excellence.

4: Mauritania

Have you ever watched a desert shade from red to gold to white, camels plodding between barely marked oases and sand dunes creeping across the roads and plains? No? Then Mauritania, the West African country which spans much of the Sahara, is right for you. A wild place, where slavery was only abolished recently and still holds force in the interior, its savage beauty will grab you tight and hold you close.

5: Iceland

A young country, its thin soil scattered over a volcanic core that explodes through towering black peaks and bubbling hot springs, exposed to blistering winds, Iceland provides a gloomily Nordic landscape of blacks, greys, greens and snow, interspersed with waterfalls, geysers and sparkling lakes. Almost all the island’s 300,000 people live in and around Reykjavik, making the trip around the circumferential road an exercise in isolation.

6: Outback Australia

Almost all of Australia’s people live in its coastal cities, the metropolises of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth… So in the Red Centre you can travel for hours, if not days, without seeing another human being, through flatlands as red as the sky above is blue, up towards the vast sweeping beaches of the north coast, passing crazy Outback towns like Coober Pedy and Woomera as you do. An extraordinary and accessible road trip.