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Saudi Arabia Tips & articles

Mar 16, 2011 10:51:34 AM

Best ‘middle of nowhere’ places

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Want to get off the beaten path? Then here are 10 places that will stump most travel agents and reward you with original experiences. But remember, these are ‘no pain, no gain’ destinations so you’ll need to be prepared for long transit times there and back – and you won’t be able to recover at a five star hotel after a day of walking up 300m sand dunes or climbing an active volcano.

Concordia, Pakistan

Image by *_*

To reach Concordia, the junction of the Baltoro, Godwin-Austen and Vigne Glaciers in Baltistan, northern Pakistan, you must walk for about 10 days, eventually arriving at the foot of K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Easy ways in do not exist, and there are few places on earth where you can be buried so deep within a mountainscape. Described by the photographer Galen Rowell as the ‘throne room of the mountain gods’, Concordia is as starkly beautiful as it is remote. Its name was given by European explorers, who thought it looked like a spot in the European Alps.

Empty Quarter, Saudi Arabia

Image by yosoynuts

Whether you call it the Empty Quarter (Rub al-Khali) or the Abode of Silence, the largest area of sand on earth is, well, rather empty. Covering an area of the Arabian Peninsula that’s larger than France, Belgium and the Netherlands combined, it also has sand dunes as high as the Eiffel Tower, rising to more than 300m in height and stretching for hundreds of kilometres. And while the Eiffel Tower remains firmly rooted in Parisian soil, these dunes can move up to 30m a year, pushed along by strong winds.

Cape York, Australia

Image by jwbenwell

Australia is renowned as a place of nowheres but even to Aussies, Cape York presents a remote and forbidding frontier. The northernmost tip in the country is reached along corrugated 4WD tracks that will rattle the teeth loose from your jaw. You’ll find the cape approximately 1000km from Cairns, which means days and days of driving, including crossing creeks inhabited by estuarine crocodiles. For your reward, you’ll find a rocky headland and, well, not much else. Now the only thing left to do is to turn around and clatter your way back.

Quttinirpaaq National Park, Canada

Canada’s second-largest national park is probably also its least visited. Straddling the 80th parallel on Ellesmere Island, it reaches to North America’s northernmost point (Cape Columbia) and, for visitors, deep into their pockets – a charter flight in from the town of Resolute will set you back an immodest C$32,000. The park has no facilities, roads or even trees. What it does have are bears and bares: polar bears and beautiful, bare mountains. While here you may as well pay a visit to Grise Fiord, Canada’s most northerly town.

North Pole

The earth’s northernmost point is a place so far off the human radar that somebody turned it into the mythical home of Santa Claus – after all, who’d come here to prove the story wrong. Unlike the South Pole, there is no land at the North Pole. The few adventurers who come here do so by literally walking on water across the frozen Arctic Ocean. The ice cover fluctuates between nine million sq km in summer and 16 million sq km in winter, and is rarely more than 5m in depth; a disturbing thought when compared to the 3000mthick Antarctic ice shield.

Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile

The most famous loneliest person in literary history is Robinson Crusoe. As lonely as the man is the island that bears his name, 670km off the South American coast. It was here, in 1704, that Alexander Selkirk asked to be put ashore after a dispute with his ship’s captain. He lived here alone for four years, inspiring Daniel Defoe to create Robinson Crusoe. Today, around 500 people live on the Pacific island named for its very solitude. Few others come here; visitor numbers rarely top 100 in a year.

Nevado Mismi, Peru

The Amazon is the world’s most voluminous river but it wasn’t until a few years ago that anybody could truly pinpoint its headwaters. In 2001 a GPS-laden National Geographic survey team climbed high into the Andes of southern Peru, about 700km from Lima and 3000km from the Amazon’s mouth. Here, on a rock wall on the 5597m high mountain, Nevado Mismi, they identified a dribble of water as the river’s origin. If you’re intrepid enough to want to visit Nevado Mismi, begin in Arequipa and head for the village of Tuti; the walk in is not difficult.

Olkhon Island, Russia

Image by xJasonRogersx

Travel on the Trans- Siberian Railway as it skirts Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, and you appreciate the place’s remoteness – about 3½ days by train from Moscow, and three days from Beijing. Containing around 20% of the world’s fresh water, the lake also contains Olkhon Island near its midpoint. Around 72km long, Olkhon is Baikal’s largest island, and by some climatic quirk it’s said to get more sunny days than the Black Sea coast, even as the rest of the lake and its surrounds mope beneath heavy cloud.

Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia

Image by Sputnik Mania

Want a sense of just how big Russia really is? Then picture this: Kamchatka Peninsula, drooping off its east coast, is closer to Los Angeles than Moscow. Among Russia’s least visited areas, the 1200km-long peninsula is also perhaps its most spectacular, a hyperactive geothermal land containing more than 200 volcanoes. The surrounding lava fields were used as testing grounds for Russia’s lunar vehicles. Once, it was a six-month journey to get here; today you can fly from Moscow, though it’s still an 11-hour flight, surely the longest domestic flight on the planet.

Scotty’s Castle, USA

Image by loop_oh

In the 1920s Chicago millionaire Albert Johnson was sold the ultimate snake oil – the idea that there was gold in California’s Death Valley. In the dry, scorching conditions the ailing Johnson found something more precious: improved health. So, he built a castle in the desert valley with the second-highest temperature on record. Today, the Spanish-style ranch 70km from the nearest Death Valley settlements looks like a folly, although it’s rather snug behind its sheepskin curtains and with its 1000- pipe theatre organ.

Also read our article on where to escape the daily grind of the modern world.




Get right away from it all with Lonely Planet’s Middle of Nowhere

Comments

  1. 22 March 2011 10:42PM tamosher Report this comment

    for me it's been, Filicudi and Stromboli, two of the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily. Also St. Lucia, in the day when it wasn't a tourist destination.

  2. 22 March 2011 10:58PM liesz78 Report this comment

    The most "in the middle of nowhere" I felt was in Mondulkiri, Cambodia. I've staid there a couple of days in 2006. Only the capital of the province has paved roads, and when plains have to land there, they have to remove the cows first..! :-) If you want to see a relatively undiscovered piece of Cambodia, you really have to go to Mondulkiri! Further, on a cold and gloomy day you will also feel in the middle of nowhere in Noordpolderzijl, The Netherlands...

  3. 31 March 2011 3:43AM guesthousetheth Report this comment

    Middle of nowhere is THeth Albania

  4. 31 March 2011 5:50AM nowornever Report this comment

    i´ve been to tupuai in iles d áustral, 2 days by ship south of tahiti, there you have a remote feeling as well

  5. 4 April 2011 9:29PM envoyhostel Report this comment

    Another off the beaten track destination is Armenia. Definitely worth visiting!!

  6. 5 April 2011 2:11AM luvcali Report this comment

    interesting article

  7. 5 April 2011 4:31AM adragavon Report this comment

    As a local, I can tell you that Scotty's Castle is a tourist trap. Continue further into nowhere, into the hinterlands of Death Valley to the Amargosa desert. Visit Devil's Hole, and its scientifically renowned pupfish population. Then stay the night at the Amargosa Hotel and Opera House, a one-of-a kind establishment right out of Sunset Boulevard.

  8. 5 April 2011 7:44AM sunsetsandcervezas Report this comment

    Very nice list! I have always wanted to go to Baikal, and Olkhon Island seems to be a hidden gem. And the fact on Kamchatka - a name that always reminds me of Risk - about its distance to L.A., is very cool.

    Os at sunsetsandcervezas.com

  9. 3 May 2011 1:44PM lilly48 Report this comment

    As an Aussie who has been to the Cape I have to wonder if your writer has been there. The road can be rutted or often good after grading. All creeks have safe and usually dry crossings and one has a barge. There are great places to see on the way (waterfalls and safe swimming holes for example) and towns and settlements nearby to see when you get there. You can also take a day trip out to Thursday Is. I don't know anyone who has been there that hasn't loved it.

  10. 3 May 2011 4:24PM stormgray Report this comment

    lilly48, your observation about the writer who allegedly visited Cape York is spot on. When I read his/her description of Cape York, I thought to myself, "why would I want to go there if there's nothing to see?" Thanks for the additional info.

  11. 3 May 2011 10:56PM pinkaspic Report this comment

    My partner and I met on Olkhon Island 4.5 years ago - going to places in the middle of nowhere can be well worth it (not just for the people you meet).

  12. 4 May 2011 12:24AM sloopington Report this comment

    Stormgray - having nothing to see & being in the middle of nowhere have nothing to do with each other.

  13. 4 May 2011 6:07AM shazbo Report this comment

    Concordia is one of those places that once you reach it you have to pinch yourself to believe you are there. Photo captures K2's awesome surroundings - its well worth making the trek to see it for yourself to appreciate the scale of the mighty K2 and the other 8000m + peaks

  14. 6 May 2011 4:03AM oldladywho Report this comment

    Mexico has many beautiful and unusual places, for example the "Zone of Silence" the blistering hot desert area where the states of Durango and Chihuahua meet. Here, radio and television signals are said to disappear and watches cease to run. UFO activity is also recorded. At this time, it is probably unsafe to travel there because of the drug wars, but put it on your list for future.

  15. 23 February 2012 7:46AM hristinab Report this comment

    I've enjoyed every word of this great article!

    The most "far far away" place I've ever been to was a miniature uninhabited island in New Caledonia, called Ile de Brosse (Brush Island -- it looks like a giant brush floating in the Pacific).

    Although not entirely unknown (French football player super star Zinedin Zidan hosted a party here after France won the World Championship and guests included another football player super star, New Caledonian Christian Karembeu), the island is blessed with the softest, whitest sand, multi-colored fish around coral reefs and the sacred (highly venomous!) "tricot raye" orange-and-black stripped snake.

    Our guide said we were the first Greeks to have set foot on the island... and I kinda felt like the explorers of old, when they would discover a new land. That trip to Australia - New Caledonia was the best experience of my entire life so far.

    sunsetsandcervezas, hats off to you for mentioning Risk, I've been thinking of the same thing!

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