8 essays tagged “deserts”.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is the most engineered city of the modern era — built almost entirely since the 1990s, from a small Trucial Coast pearl-trading port into a 3-million-person globally connected emirate. The city is best read as the architectural laboratory it is.
March 24, 2023
Uyuni, Bolivia
The Salar de Uyuni is a 10,500-square-kilometre salt flat at 3,650 m altitude in southwest Bolivia. In dry season it is a hexagonally-cracked white plain extending to the horizon; in wet season, a thin layer of water turns it into the largest mirror on earth.
March 4, 2023
Sesriem, Namibia
The Sossusvlei dunes of the Namib Desert are some of the oldest and tallest in the world. Climbing one at dawn, with the orange sand turning red against the indigo of the not-yet-lit sky, is one of the iconic experiences of African travel.
October 15, 2022
Yulara, Australia
Uluru — the great red sandstone monolith in the centre of Australia — is one of the most photographed natural features on earth and a deeply sacred site for the Anangu people who have managed this land for tens of thousands of years. Walking around its base, especially at dawn, is one of the most quietly extraordinary experiences in Australian travel.
September 24, 2022
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Mongolia is, by population density, the emptiest country on earth. The steppe and the Gobi Desert stretch for thousands of kilometres of grassland and arid plain. The nomadic-herder culture, with its felt gers (yurts) and seasonal migrations, remains the country's defining cultural form.
August 15, 2022
Seronera, Tanzania
The wildebeest migration through the Serengeti and Maasai Mara — 1.5 million wildebeest, 200,000 zebra, 500,000 gazelle moving in an annual circuit — is the largest movement of land mammals on earth. The trick to seeing it is matching your visit to the herds, which is harder than the brochures suggest.
July 4, 2022
Muscat, Oman
Oman has chosen, deliberately, a different path from its glittering Gulf neighbours. The buildings are low-rise. The architecture is regulated to traditional Omani style. The tourism numbers are smaller. The country is, in every meaningful sense, the antidote to Dubai.
April 26, 2022
Petra, Jordan
The Treasury at Petra is the iconic photograph; the city itself is much larger and much weirder than the photograph suggests. The Nabataean Empire carved an entire capital out of the sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan, and most visitors see less than a quarter of it.
September 22, 2021