Jaw-dropping.

The Harbin ice sculptures are the largest ice festival on earth, by miles. And pictures can’t begin to capture the scale, the blaze of colour.

You wander, snow crunching under your boots, past gigantic ice palaces, lit up in every colour of the rainbow, and then some.

You gawp through colonnades of ice, past ice pagodas, past sculptures glistening in the neon light, to ice temples.

You climb ice steps and race down sinuous whirls of ice slides, one as high as a four-storey building.

You amble across ice bridges, pause on a crenellated ice fortress to look out over an entire fairytale city built of ice, palaces and castles stretching out in all directions.

You stop at a food cart, for candied hawthorn, crisp sugar crunching against your teeth, the sour fruit smooth and granular within.

You gawp at illuminated horse and carriages, glittering tinsel trees, New Year’s fireworks against the city skyline…

You catch your breath and warm your toes in a little, glazed cafe. With the ice thermometer reading 26 below, it’s rather more appealing than the ice bar.

A few carved sculptures. Ooh! More ice slides!

And, oh my lord, who’s that on the giant TV screen on that ice palace?

It’s Shaquille O’Neal marketing Harbin beer, at 23 years old the oldest beer brand in the country.

And, yes, this catapult is Angry Birds themed. And, no, they probably didn’t ask.

Amble past the Angry Birds, and there’s a winter wonderland of fun, even better than the Songhua River: an entire ski slope, with a T-bar lift, ice skates, ice bikes, ice “hovercraft”, snowmobiles and ATVs.

And, if you’re a boy, you jump on an ice bike, pedal for dear life and slew across the hard, scarred ice.

It’s wonderful. Truly, truly wonderful.

By daylight, the sculptures have a serene, almost austere magic.

By night, they’re awe-inspiring.

You’ve come with high expectations. And, truly, they’re more than met.

Looking for more travel inspiration? Check out Lijiang, still the prettiest town we’ve ever visited, Byblos in Lebanon or my favourite pictures of Nepal.

About the Harbin Ice Sculptures
The Harbin Snow & Ice Festival officially opens on 5 January and run until Chinese New Year — in practice, it generally opens in late December and runs until at least the end of February. These pictures are from Harbin Ice & Snow World, the best of the exhibition spaces.

There are direct flights to Harbin from most major Chinese cities, and non-stop international flights from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Russia. From within China, there are bullet trains to Dalian and weekend-friendly overnight trains to and from Beijing — book the Beijing trains well, well ahead.

The post The Harbin Ice Sculptures – a Winter Wonderland appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

When we first arrived in Harbin, the cold seemed so biting that I couldn’t believe locals would go out without gloves or hats. But, just as in the Middle Eastern summer 30°C (86°F) comes to feel cool, in the Manchurian winter -10°C (14°F) comes to feel warm, and -5°C (23°F) so toasty that you go out without your gloves.

2: Floors Are Always Dirty

Cleaners fight a Sisyphean battle against grime – in even the poshest malls, Mrs Mops weave their way around the shoppers, day in, day out, as more and more dirty snow trudges in. In all but the very poshest places, floor tiles look like they’ve been grouted black.

3: Going Out Is a Major Expedition

Leaving the house when temperatures are -30°C or below is a major expedition, a morass of snoods, layers, gloves, hats and earmuffs, with compulsive checking that nothing’s been forgotten. I haven’t spent this much time just trying to leave the house since I was wrangling a baby of a few weeks old.

4: Black Ice Can Set Hard as Cement

In Harbin, street clearers sometimes need to use axes and hammers to clear the black ice from the pavements. This stuff is evil. On the plus side, it does tame the, umm, assertive Chinese driving style.

5: Boiling Water Will Unfreeze Windows

Harbiners in old-style Chinese flats always keep their balcony windows slightly open. That way, if temperatures rise enough for snow to melt and refreeze, sealing the window shut, you can open it again with the aid of boiling water.

6: Indoor Shoes Are a Must

In most Chinese households, guests change from outdoor shoes to indoor shoes from the shoe rack at the door. In Harbin, the dirt makes this critical: workmen and meter readers come equipped with plastic boot covers which they don at the door, and even the very cheapest hotels provide indoor shoes.

7: Doors Are a Pain in the Butt

In -30, every public space has heavy insulating curtains behind the doors, often an entire maze of them, sequences of three or four grimy quilts or plastic fringes through which one has to push. Where buildings have a series of glazed doors, all but one will be locked in winter. The challenge is to work out which.

8: People Fall Over

Yes, people do fall over on ice. A lot. So do dogs, particularly when their loving owners have put them into booties that match their jackets, meaning their paws can’t get the purchase that they’re used to.

9: Snow Can Be a Sign of Warmth

In very cold temperatures, the air is typically very dry, so it’s unusual for snow to fall when the temperature is below -25°C (-13°F) or so. Soft, fat snowflakes mean the day is very warm; even glistening powder indicates it’s less cold than it has been.

10: You Don’t Need to Look Like the Michelin Man

Young urban Chinese women manage to look both slim and stylish in temperatures of -30°C and below. The key? Layers of leggings and thermals, topped off with city shorts, miniskirts or skinny jeans.

The post 10 Random Observations on Life in -30 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The river used to freeze so hard that folk lit bonfires on it, even roasted oxen.

And it didn’t melt!

Rivers don’t freeze in England. Ponds freeze. Streams freeze. Big, big rivers don’t.

And, yes, even after crossing a glacier in the high Himalayas, even after walking over great mountains of moraine, supported by ice that’s hard as rock, there is still something magical, almost unimaginable to me, about a frozen river.

But then there’s something magical about ice. Unlike most other liquids, water expands when it freezes, so ice floats on water, meaning rivers freeze from top to bottom, and melt into liquid life when the sunshine comes.

In Harbin, of course, we are far, far up in northern China, deep in Manchuria, in the heart of the bulge encircled by Russia, Mongolia and North Korea, so ice is not in short supply.

The climate is, quite literally, Siberian. Temperatures routinely drop below -30°C-22°F) in the winter, a dry, bright, tundra cold, with crisp sparkling sun and a sharpness to it that bites at noses, ears, fingers — even eyes! — at least until the human body works its magic of acclimatisation.

There is black ice on the pavements, frozen so hard that workmen have to hack away with axes, hammers, even chisels, and you can spot an out-of-town Chinese from a Harbiner by the way they slip and fall.

It would be easy, I think, to be miserable in this climate. But our apartment is toasty, toasty warm.

I’ve found, completed and billed enough jobs to ensure we’re financially solid next month, or at least can afford to go skiing next month and rebuild funds plus pay my stamps once the ski season ends, but I’m still waiting for people to pay me (what with being a freelance writer and all).

So, insanely, despite being in the home of the biggest ice festival on earth, the ice sculptures that I’ve wanted to see ever since I first read about them, we have to start our winter explorations on the Songhua River.

And it’s wonderful.

The river bank is alive. There are stalls selling candied hawthorns, candied strawberries, candied pineapple, hats, gloves and mittens, a few touts pushing horse and carriage rides or dog sled rides on the river, and ice slide after ice slide after ice slide, decked with lanterns and glistening in the warm afternoon light.

Beyond the ice slides? A vast expanse of snow-encrusted ice, a kilometer wide or so, the Songhua River. Surreally, there’s a cable car, tick-ticking its way across the distance. The train bridge, too, seems utterly redundant now it’s running across what might as well be tundra.

And, oh my god, the place is a giant winter playground!

“ICE SLIDES!” yells the boy, legging it to the nearest one.

“Wait!” I say. “You know we don’t have much money at the moment. You’re going to need to choose one slide and one activity.”

Zac hems and haws. There are slides you can descend in tubes. Slides you ride on mats. Slides you ride just in your cosy down jacket and ice-proof pants. Big slides, wide slides, narrow slides, bumpy slides, snow slides, ice slides…

He plumps for the biggest ice slide, carefully selects an inner tube, and descends, at pace, amid a crowd of howling, whooping Chinese, from the bank onto the frozen river.

He pronounces it good. Me? I’m just gobsmacked — yes, still gobsmacked — that something as transient as ice can support so many people! So many vehicles!

After ice skating in Beijing, I know the Chinese do ice play well, but Harbiners take it to a whole new level.

There’s tuo-luo, a game with a whipcord and a metal spinning top, which seems bewilderingly popular with adults and children alike.

There is skating, snowmobiles, ice bikes, ice skating chairs that you push along with pointed poles, luridly coloured ice “hovercraft”, a tobogganing hill, a quadbike track – yes, a quadbike track — and…

“TANKS!!!!!”

Yes, tanks.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Zac is male. (Further, quadbikes are already part of his repertoire, a fact of which I am rather glad as there are no helmets in evidence and the track is solid ice.)

They are little tanks, child-size tanks, complete with gun turret and two large steering levers, with which to navigate the tight little maze with its walls of compacted snow.

And he’s off, into the setting sun.

He takes the first corner. Fails. Mounts the wall, and almost flips his tank over.

I’d always thought Zac had his father’s driving skills, but it appears he’s inherited mine.

The guys right the tank, and show him how to drive it, and then he’s off and running, sedately cruising, a big broad grin on his face, happy as only a boy driving a tank on a frozen river can be (here’s his take).

Thank god, I think. Harbin’s going to work out OK.

The post The Songhua River appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

And ice skating in Beijing is really something else. Especially on Qianhai Lake.

It’s not just the unavoidable presence of the PLA, whether riding ice dodgems, guarding ice bikes, administering the ice slide or guarding the ice skates.

The Chinese Army is the single biggest employer in the world, and they need to put that manpower somewhere.

It’s not just the robot-powered ice rickshaws, undoubtedly the most unnerving thing I’ve seen or heard in three years of travel. They’re musical, you see. Yes, they are singing, walking Chucky-esque robots.

Honestly. Would you entrust your child to this?

Although the ride-on skating animals, that one propels with a pair of pointy sticks, or a parent or grandparent trudging lovingly behind, are also kind of freaky.

The ice carriages are kinder, and make an excellent snack table.

It wouldn’t, of course, be China without a bit of live entertainment on the ice…

Neither of us had ever skated on natural ice, let alone in the retro white lace-up skating boots they still use in China. While I stuttered along, feeling every ridge, every crack, every embedded stick, terrified of breaking an ankle, Zac was, pretty much, in his element.

Though I like to think even I was marginally more stable than this guy…

I loved this little girl taking her turn at pushing her grandpa on an ice chair.

And these tinier tots enjoying their different rides… And, yes, that guy is about to fall over. That’s kind of part of the fun.

Zac, naturally, loved the ice slide…

And the soldiers who were administering it clearly loved watching the kids have fun.

One of the best things, though? Just watching everyone have so much fun, out in the fresh cold air, framed by birches and lanterns, enjoying a place that would have been reserved for the Emperor and his court back when Qianhai was part of the imperial pleasure gardens.

And if you’re in Beijing in winter, I thoroughly recommend you try it.

Perhaps accompanied by some candyfloss as big as your head.

Want to go ice skating in Beijing? There are two separate skating grounds on Qianhai Lake, one that is well groomed and only for skaters, another that is larger, less well-groomed and includes all ice toys. Head south from Gulou Dajie station (Line 2 and Line 8) and it’s a few hundred metres past the Drum and Bell Towers — cut right through an alley.

Payment for all activities is by a prepay card that you buy at the ticket desks: the card ONLY works on the skating area that you have chosen, but all unused charge is refunded at the end. Just charge your card at the ticket desk, head onto the ice and pay for what you want once you’re there.

Tickets to get on the ice cost 15RMB Monday to Friday daytimes, and 20RMB on weekends, holidays and evenings. Unlimited skate hire is 20RMB plus 100RMB deposit; unlimited ice carriage hire costs 20RMB plus 30RMB deposit; the ice bikes, which are excellent fun, cost 40RMB per hour plus 50RMB deposit; and the ice slide is 5RMB per turn.

For more on things to do in Beijing, click here.

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Everest Base Camp The Lazy Way, Day 12: Gokyo to Dragnag

Dragnag is our jumping off point for the Cho-La, the Himalayan high pass that is beginning to scare the pair of us, and it sits across a hideous slurry of dying glacier from Gokyo.

We have fallen a little in love with ice, up here. Zac’s been skating on frozen lakes, lounging on them, shattering great slabs of fresh water ice on the rocks or yet more ice, jumping on the slabs that have frozen out their water and now sit stranded, balanced on rocks, shattering them with the child’s delight that has yet to give way to adolescence.

The ice roars and creaks and hisses as it expands and contracts in the sun. An animal roar, when there’s a deep crack happening, as if there’s a giant sea snake trapped in the bowels of the ice, something dark and sinister, and, once, I catch a fissure zipping its way across the surface of the ice, just like in a movie.

I’d heard that ice roared. But I never believed it until I heard it.

Watching snowcock pad around the rocks, bright Himalayan ducks skipping deftly from the edge of the roaring ice into the icy water, and the yaks still free in their high pastures, I’m amazed by the life that exists here.

What we’re heading across, though, is not so pretty. It’s marked as glacier on the map, but in fact it’s the ugliest landscape I’ve seen: moraine.

And, if you ever doubted that glaciers were in retreat, here’s the proof right here, a landscape so dazzling in its ugliness, a post-apocalyptic nightmare of mound upon mounds of slag and rubble, sinister pools of grey ice, ice so grey-blue and hard it’s conglomerate rock, holding up the ugly, ugly stuff above.

It looks, to be honest, like the remains of a gigantic, abortive mining project, one conducted by competing individuals rather than a machine.

I would never have thought nature could make such a mess.

But then, of course, with glaciers, it isn’t just nature. It’s us.

A path, continually remade by landslides and marked with totemic cairns, winds up and down and around the rubble, around a wasteland of ice lakes and ice caves, built on hidden arches of rocky ice.

It’s annoying walking, constantly on scree, over the top of one mound after another, sometimes scrambling over big boulders, sometimes slipping as the dust gives way, revealing ice as hard and clear as tinted glass.

“It’s like Norse hell,” I say to Zac, dimly remembering the sagas, the frozen wasteland of Niflheim.

“Yes!” he says. “It is.”

“Go fast here,” says Nir. We’re walking along a path below the spot where the valley descends into moraine, a steep sandy slope decked with rockfalls and adorned with more rocks waiting to fall. “Little bit danger.”

I don’t want to go fast! I got up at 3.30am to see sunrise from Gokyo Ri, I’m carrying our little daypack and, in fact, I don’t really think I can go fast at all.

That said, I’m a mother. So I chivvy Zac to walk fast, which entails walking fast, or faster, myself, one wary eye on the slope above me.

And then there’s a crack, and a shower of dust, and I look to the side and behind me, and, as if in slow motion, a rock comes bounding down the slope.

“RUN!” yells Nir, running.

And we run! Oh Jesus, do we run, pelting down this scree-strewn path that can’t be more than a foot wide, run like I never thought we could.

And, mercifully, the landslide stops, contained behind us. It’s only a few bare handfuls of rocks, some the size of my fist, others the size of my head, and every single one of them big enough to kill my child.

We stop to catch our breath.

“That,” says Zac, looking shaken. “Was the most terrifying experience of my life.” (Which, given the boy had a car crash earlier this year, is saying something.)

“Three or four Nepali people died here,” says Nir.

“In rockfalls?” I ask, redundantly.

“One time I here and a boulder like this,” he taps a chunk of rock the size of an armchair, “Fell here.” He points beside his feet. “Little bit danger,” he concludes.

“And the Cho-La?” I say.

I’m so scared of heights that I haven’t really internalised the other dangers these mountains have to offer. I’m terrified of cliffs, crevasses, long drops to certain death, but otherwise really quite relaxed about safety.

“Danger,” he says.

“Big danger, or little bit danger?” I ask, in Nir-ese.

“Danger,” he says.

For the first time in the mountains (I gave up smoking when I was sick in Pokhara), I could really, really do with a cigarette.

You can read the last post in this series here, start from the beginning here, or join us crossing the Cho-La Pass.

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.

The post This Frozen Hell appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Everest Base Camp the Lazy Way Day 8 – Dole to Machermo

Heading out of Dole up to Macchermo, the landscape shifts ever onwards from late autumn towards winter.

We’ve crossed frozen rivers and waterfalls, some with streams still bubbling below them as the sun warms them into life, webs of twigs and branches still embedded in their fossil flow, mysterious crystallisations in the ice, their surface lumped and bumped as if – and how is this possible? – the cold caught the waves in the act.

And slowly the trees begin to fade, the rhododendrons vanish. The junipers now are tiny, scrabbling, scrunched up things, warped and scrawny shrubs with knotted roots clinging flat for dear life against the wind.

There are still yaks grazing in the high pastures, shaggy, heavy-humped, bad-tempered creatures, though it’s hard to see from the sere yellow fuzz that clings to the dusty earth what there is for them to feed on.

Below us, the Dudh Koshi roars away. Ahead of us, high, high mountains are looming in the distance, white capped, dramatic: Cho Oyu! An 8000m peak.

And yet… we started walking once the sun was up and shining, and in our hats and fleeces with the warm sun in our faces, it’s really very lovely.

It’s a short walk, Dole to Machermo, a fairly steady and leisurely undulation up the valley. Under two hours if you’re fast, over three if you’re ambling and stopping and lazing in the sun and drinking hot lemon in tea houses and taking photos, but, like a lot of days on this trek it’s…. short.

One reason, in fact, why I undertook the Everest Base Camp trek and Zac agreed to do it is for these short, easy days. You can’t rise too high too fast, so a lot of the time you aren’t really going far.

Which is probably a downer if you’re a serious, hardcore, fast-paced hiker, and it’s these hyper-fit, driven people that the rescue helicopters come and go for, because they climb too high, too fast.

But for people like us who like to wander along gawping at stuff and taking in the views, it’s wonderful.

Machermo is our destination, where we’ll spend two days. It’s a kilometre above Namche, at 4470m (14,670 feet), and because Zac’s only twelve, and only just twelve at that, I’m being dutiful about acclimatisation.

Even though neither of us has had so much as a headache yet, this is the highest either of us has ever been, and we’ve got almost a kilometre to go.

There isn’t a lot to Machermo itself. At this altitude, we’re past the heights where anyone lives full-time: it’s a yak herding station in a sunny valley with a stream that freezes at night and races in the day, and a cluster of six or so bright-roofed trekking lodges, all with the so-familiar menu, overshadowed by an impressive black canyon with the slurried remains of what was once a glacier.

One thing Machermo does have? A natural laundry!

We embarked on the Everest Base Camp trek in the full knowledge that we would smell and be filthy. That’s just how it is.

It would be ludicrous to even attempt to carry enough clothes to keep you clean, at higher altitudes it’s really too cold to wash or even strip down to change, and only the one communal area of the lodges has any heat at all, that from a brazier which boils kettles constantly.

The laundry goes like this. Black rubber hosepipes run down from the higher reaches of the stream, feeding the village clear water. When the sun goes down over the pipes, they freeze. When the sun shines on them, it warms the water to a temperature that feels as tolerably cool as tropical mid-ocean.

I take my bowl, squat on my heels, and scrub away at some very crunchy socks, taking turns with the guys filling jerry cans with water for the lodges, and the porters scrubbing their clothes, I avert my eyes as the guys wash their hair and torsos in the sun.

A shadow begins to descend on the valley. All of a sudden, my hands are red and cold.

“Finish tomorrow,” Nir says.

I realise, with a gulp, that with my Western resource-hogging ways I’ve taken bowl after bowl of water that could be used for cooking, for washing, for drinking, for the bathrooms, because I don’t know how to rinse my clothes without wasting water.

I weight our stuff into the drystone wall with rocks and leave it to freeze, melt and then sun-dry, as the yaks lollop, ludicrously, down from the hills above, and Zac concludes a final skate on the frozen stream.

Tomorrow is a rest day, but I figure we should climb a bit, not least because the last couple of days walking have hardly been taxing.

My admittedly limited understanding of acclimatisation to altitude is that it’s good to spend a rest day climbing significantly higher than you will sleep. I’d also like, if possible, to climb something relatively steep.

We are not far, now, from the Cho-La Pass, the glacier crossing at 5330m (17,500 feet) that begins with an ascent of 400 vertical metres (1300 feet) which Nir describes as “very up”. It is not always possible to cross, and sometimes you need ropes and crampons.

Some people have found the pass beautiful, dazzling, awe-inspiring. Others have turned around. One guy reported that “We managed it but all the girls were crying”. Everyone seems unanimous that it’s difficult.

And most cast very beady eyes over Zac, whose 32kg (70 lb) sit lightly on his five foot frame, and who seems to be taking a personal pride in wearing even fewer layers than the Sherpas.

I don’t mention in these conversations that I’m scared of heights.

Anywise, we need to be over the pass early in the day for safety reasons, which means we need to do 400 vertical metres fast, and, although we’ve done one long, tough jungle trek to find hunter-gatherers, climbed high on Mount Kinabalu and done a little bit of valley walking in Tiger Leaping Gorge, we are neither of us particularly fit.

The peak next door to us, a little black-topped thing with a grassy hill festooned with prayer flags looks like our best bet for acclimatising.

It’s only 300m high, the chap at the lodge thinks, though he’s not climbed it, and nor has Nir, nor any of the guides.

That’ll be the perfect way to spend the morning, I think.

Nothing too strenuous. Nothing difficult at all. Just 300m up, not even a thousand feet, past that little band of black rock and onto the black above. There’s a snow peak up there somewhere but that’s not climbable without gear, but the black summit is easy enough to reach.

Sounds perfectly doable, I figure. Easy as.

Machermo Ri, we have your number…

Use the “Previous” and “Next” post buttons below to navigate through this site. Or you can start from Day 1 of our Everest Base Camp trek, read the last post in my Everest Base Camp series or the next post here.

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.

The post Frozen Waterfalls and Fallen Glaciers appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

But this frozen world isn’t made of snow.

In Turkish, Pamukkale means “cotton castle”, and the calcite-rich waters which tumble down from the mineral hot springs at the top of the cliff leave ripples of brilliant white minerals below your feet, and form flawless infinity pools.

Some are so beautiful they look manmade.

But they’re not.They’re natural.

Below the minerals is travertine limestone, formed over long ages.

When the Greeks first built a city there, Hierapolis, to heal themselves with the soft, warm water and this surreal landscape, this frozen world, they were already fully-formed.

The bubbling slopes look frozen in mid-flow. Which, I guess, in geological time they are.

Calcites glitter like ice in the sunlight, smoother than quartz.

Warm water drips like icicles.

In human time, or small human time, the slopes beckon you to climb them.

We pad up through the flowing waters in bare feet, Zac pausing to smear his face with the soft, white sand that accumulates in these natural pools, and pausing again to body block the waters that rush down the narrow channels, cooling as they come.

In the ripples and rivulets of minerals beneath our feet, pools form again, in microcosm, almost fractals.

At the top, the ruins of Hierapolis extend right down to the top of the pools, some of them travertine limestone, others still glittering bright.

We have bathed where Greeks, Phrygians, Romans and countless longlost people bathed before us, felt the same sense of wonder that they did.

Because, even in high summer, even with the tour groups in full flow, Pamukkale is a place of wonder.

Like the sun rising over Uluru, the painted lakes of Flores, the caves of Jeita, Lebanon, and Konglor in Laos, like an undersea volcano or a reef wall dropping into darkness below my fins, it left me simply gobsmacked that a place like this exists.

The post This Frozen World, Like Snow in Midsummer appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

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.

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