Five travel writers journey far and wide to find the world’s last unexplored wildernesses
Patagonia
Lucinda Baring
Arriving in Patagonia, the region spanning Argentina and Chile at the southernmost tip of South America, I really felt I’d reached the end of the earth. The journey is an epic but rewarding one – this was the most spectacular scenery I’d ever seen. My destination was Hotel Salto Chico in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. This small enclave of comfort, surrounded by wide green lagoons and sheltered by snow-capped mountains, is designed specifically to cosset you after a day spent amongst the elements. Windows span the length of every room and with no mobile reception, television or internet in the bedrooms, it is easy to forget the life you have left behind.
Patagonia is the only land in the 51st latitude and the wind blows from west to east with incredible force, bringing with it the most changeable weather. You literally experience four seasons in one day. One minute the sun is shining, the next it’s hailing. But no matter: whatever weather you’re facing, you get up and go. You can’t help it – and that is part of Patagonia’s unrivalled appeal. The energy is intoxicating, with everyone from 90-year-old women to three-year old children desperate to get out there and explore. There are horses to be ridden, glaciers to be crossed and the towers from which the park takes its name to be climbed. I challenge anyone not to leave feeling dramatically revitalised and more than a little sad. Being enveloped by such a dramatic landscape is a once in a lifetime experience and as the sunrise cast its hazy pink glow over the mountains and lagoon on my last day, I realised this view alone had made the arduous journey more than worthwhile.
Lucinda Baring is assistant editor of Spectator Business
How to get there
Exsus Travel: 020 7337 9010; www.exsus.com
Galapagos Islands
Kathleen Wyatt
I had seen sea lions before: in zoos, performing; from boats, darting in and out of the water like otherworldly creatures; and on film, looking strangely human. So being greeted by them in the Galapagos should have been no surprise. But I had underestimated the islands’ ability to transform everything.
We had just stepped off the plane from Ecuador to Baltra, the dusty island that doubles as a landing strip. We were all trying to get our bearings, to make sense of the volcanic masses around us; the alien flora and fauna. We gathered together on the small docks from which we would be taken to our ship, the Eclipse. It was hot and windy, and a strange, exciting dust was in the air – this was much more than jetlag.
As we headed to the sheltered benches by the water, we saw it. Stretched out in the sun, taking up the whole seat, was a huge sea lion – and the stench was formidable. My senses were under assault. Despite the heat, I froze, and it was then that I began to see this great beast with new eyes. There were more on the jetty, but this one dozing sea lion had set the tone for the islands. This wasn’t our world any more, it was theirs. I had yet to see flightless cormorants; Darwin’s finches; George the giant tortoise who was then still a bachelor; hawks; sharks; iguanas; baby albatrosses yet to use their giant wings; Sally Lightfoot crabs and blue-footed boobies. I had yet to discover protected moonscapes, mangrove swamps and underwater oases. I was on the edge of the world, and the journey had just begun.
Kathleen Wyatt is travel editor of the Times
How to get there
Last Frontiers: 01296 653 000; www.lastfrontiers.com
Libya
Sarah Miller
It’s funny how frontiers can get closer during one’s lifetime. As a teenager, an overland family journey to Turkey to see the classical sites along its Mediterranean coastline felt like an adventure to the ends of the earth, and instilled a love of archaeology and ancient cultures. Since then I have flown to Istanbul and Bodrum many times, and getting there appears to be only marginally longer than the average London bus journey.
About the same distance geographically, but a world away, are the treasures of Libya: the amazing ruined city of Leptis Magna, Sabratha and, further east, Ptolemais and the delightful Apollonia and Cyrene. My father spent his national service in Libya and well remembers bathing in Cleopatra’s Pool, as it was called. His photo album from 1948 shows a tanned corporal with two friends resting their chins atop the marble torsos of three headless Roman goddesses. Libya was more familiar to Europe then, just after the war. But when I suggested last year that we go there together, it felt as if a tide of historical and political events had placed this huge North African country as far away as New Zealand. My father jumped at the chance to revisit haunts he hadn’t seen for 60 years; the added extra was an eight-hour drive south to the Western Sahara to see prehistoric rock art in the caves of Akakus. Anyone who has seen Anthony Minghella’s film The English Patient will remember similar great outcrops of rock shimmering in never-ending mountains of sand, and the mysterious paintings. Alone in such terrain we stood and marvelled at what was depicted on the cave walls: rivers, chariots, elephants – a thriving fertile civilisation that had once existed in this now arid, lunar landscape. We were miles away from anywhere, completely alone except for our driver. Suddenly, at the summit of an enormous dune in the distance, we saw a Tuareg appear, swathed in black robes, riding his camel towards us. It was thrilling, remote and utterly extraordinary. We felt we had crossed a frontier that no amount of travelling could ever bring closer in time.
Sarah Miller is editor of Condé Nast Traveller
How to get there
Abercrombie & Kent: 01242 547 700; www.abercrombiekent.co.uk
Yunnan
Melinda Stevens
In China, you have to kiss a lot of tarmac before you meet your handsome wilderness. To get anywhere away from the tsunami of people you have to fly – and you have to keep on flying. And then you have to hike and fight and shuffle and climb, past the rhododendron forests, the soaring peaks and the muscular dirty-brown river that is the mighty Yangtze.
And then you’re here. Out on the great Tibetan plateau, with Burma to the left and Laos and Vietnam below. Waking up to the sound of a cuckoo. Listening to a clearwater river plotting its way across fields of wild flowers.
It’s a little like Switzerland, terrifically pastoral, gentle and undulating (which is surprising since you’re actually so high up and the air is so thin it’s like breathing through cobwebs). And yet it is also utterly exotic and utterly medieval. There are white stupas (buddhist shrines) hung with prayer flags that snap in the breeze and crops drying in the sunshine on great wooden racks. You eat chilli chips and fried peppers, sea cucumber and a significant amount of yak stew. You shop for meat cleavers and snakeskins and pussy willows. In the evenings, you dance in the square alongside villagers, with music squeaking out of speakers from old radio recordings.
Come here to hike; to meet the Tibetans, who have cheeks the colour of Petrus and ride on horses so tiny and strong that they’re like a Gulliver’s cavalry. They’ve lived this way for thousands of years. The Chinese are chomping at the bit to slice up the land with railway lines and tourist shops and, in an ironic twist, phoney Buddhist monasteries. But there are pockets away from the hordes – and they are very fine pockets indeed.
Melinda Stevens is travel editor of Tatler
How to get there
Abercrombie & Kent: 01242 547 700; www.abercrombiekent.co.uk
The Yukon
Tim Jepson
When I first visited the Canadian Rockies, I thought: now this is what I call wilderness. Wrong. Eventually I would travel farther north, through the vastness and unending forests of British Columbia, along the 1,488-mile Alaska Highway, a road of extraordinary grandeur and remoteness; a road where – the odd trapper and lumber camp aside – there was no mark of civilisation for 500 miles either side of the highway. This was frontier country beyond imagining.
Or so I thought. For once the highway passes through Whitehorse, the backwoods capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory – where the human population is 31,000, and the bear population 17,000, and where you lie in bed in your hotel and hear wolves howling – there is still farther you can push into the continent’s northern frontiers.
And there are two ways to do it: by road, joining the grizzled locals in their battered pickups, or by boat, following the majestic Yukon River to Dawson City, 350 miles away, much as thousands did in 1897 when Dawson was the shanty-town heart of the great Klondike gold rush.
Dawson still has gold, and still has a wonderful frontier feel, complete with muddy boardwalks and ramshackle wooden houses, but in the Yukon there always seems another frontier to push, more wilderness to explore.
And here at Dawson is the 457-mile Dempster Highway, the only public road in North America to cross the Arctic Circle. Mostly gravel-surfaced, it runs through the tundra of the northern Yukon, beautiful in its pristine emptiness, where you may see lynx, moose, eagles and more, and where in summer and autumn, the vegetation, coaxed to riotous life by perpetual daylight, is a glorious medley of colours.
You may also encounter the great Porcupine caribou herd crossing the highway, a spectacular sight. There are 40,000 of them, they take four days to cross the road – and they have right of way.
Tim Jepson is commissioning travel editor of the Daily Telegraph
How to get there
Tailor Made Travel: 0845 456 8050; www.tailor-made.co.uk
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