Five unforgettable global trips built for pure adventure

From starry desert skies to fabled rail routes, these global journeys are custom-made for the part-time explorer craving raw, wild adventure.

Signature Silk Road

By Ute Junker

Few destinations have lingered in my imagination as long as Central Asia. Since I was young, I had dreamed not just of seeing Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s fabled turquoise city, but of the journey that would take me there, in the footsteps of merchants, mystics and marauding armies across the remote valleys, grasslands and high mountain passes that were once part of the Silk Road.

Even after decades of criss-crossing the globe, Samarkand and its surrounds remained elusive. Of course, I had tried to get there. I had even lined up several trips and each time they had fallen through. So the anticipation was high when, only a few years ago, I finally set off on that longed-for journey.

It was easier than I imagined. A four-hour flight from Dubai landed us in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek – a city packed with delightful surprises, lush parks and picturesque mountains on the horizon.

From there, our adventure continued to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, travelling by bus and, occasionally, high-speed train. The transport may have been sedate but our days were anything but.

I’d read so much about this area and its turbulent history over the years – from the Persians through to Muslim and Mongol forces, and on to the Soviet era – that I thought I knew what was in store.

Instead, I gathered plenty of unexpected memories, from the exquisite murals of the Sogdian city Penjikent (ever heard of the Sogdians? Neither had I), in Tajikistan, to watching Kyrgyz youngsters competing in ferocious horseback contests, tackling each other with as much brute force as you would see on a rugby field.

The verdict on Samarkand? Well worth the wait. Rising early one morning, I enjoyed its signature sight – the incredible Registan square, surrounded on three sides by madrassas covered in mosaics – without another soul around. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even my favourite Samarkand highlight. That particular honour went to the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, where each blindingly blue mausoleum tries to outshine the next.

There were so many more discoveries, from the genuine friendliness of the locals, to the incredibly juicy, flavoursome apricots and cherries, to the countless stunning views along the way, including Kyrgyzstan’s vast lakes and Tajikistan’s towering snow-capped peaks.

Central Asia is now more than a place that inspires my imagination: it is the destination that dazzled my eyes, stimulated my brain and won my heart.

THE DETAILS
Renaissance Tours has a 16-day Splendours of Central Asia itinerary visiting Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, from $11,950. See renaissancetours.com World Expeditions has a 21-day Ancient Silk Road Cities – The Five Stans, from $9190. See worldexpeditions.com

How it feels to ride a motorbike across the roof of the world

By Michael Gebicki

As we ride into Zing Zing Bar, we’re stopped by a herd of yaks. We need to pass on our rumbling motorbikes, but the yaks are hogging the road, tossing their heads with horns that brook no argument.

It’s day four of a 10-day ride that takes us 470 kilometres from Manali in Himachal Pradesh, India, to Leh, capital of Ladakh, India’s Little Tibet.

The journey takes us over the Himalayas across a series of cresting passes known as “las” in this part of the world. La-la-la. But these are the alpha and omega of mountain roads. Except for a few passes under military control, these are some of the highest driveable roads on the planet.

Our tour group, under leader-of-the-pack Zander Combe, boss of India-based Extreme Bike Tours, consists of 10 middle-aged blokes and Lindsey, Zander’s all-knowing wingwoman, with Lucy riding pillion on Zander’s bike, plus a support crew in jeeps.

We’re about as far from hellish angels as you could get, but under each of us is a throbbing, Indian-built, 500cc Royal Enfield. Single cylinder, kick-start, four gears upside-down on the wrong side, no tacho. They’re dinosaurs from a departed industrial era, yet kick them to life and they thump like a beating heart.

We leave Manali on a road of a thousand switchbacks, climbing through soaring cedars towards snow-capped peaks. A boulder-leaping torrent races through the hillside and high above a waterfall gushes from the mountainside like a broken fire hydrant. Over the crest at Rohtang-la we’re in the Lahaul Valley. Across the deep valley at our feet are the peaks of the Pir Panjal Range, clouds streaming from their summits, sharp in the crystal air.

Riding a motorbike concentrates the mind. You’re present in the moment in a way that no car driver ever experiences. It’s a form of meditation, and this mountain journey is right on the edge. Most of the time we ride on narrow, dusty roads carved from mountainsides with a hundred metres of freefall alongside. Every day brings loose gravel, water crossings and deep sand but there are moments of speed and exhilaration.

On the Morey Plains, the road runs across a desert cradled between Himalayan peaks and our speedometers tremble over the 80 km/h mark. In warm sunshine we descend from Tanglang-la, at about 5300 metres, winding the throttles open on a road that swoops into the valley, emboldened by fresh, wide tarmac that grips our wheels. We let it all hang out on the corners, hips and arms choreographing the delicate ballet between risk and reward.

The final ride into Leh is a lark, past white-walled Buddhist monasteries garlanded with prayer flags. For the next few days we’ll be hoofing it, but in Leh, at 3500 metres, I’ll miss my thumping mount.

THE DETAILS
Extreme Bike Tours’ High Himalayas “Through the clouds” 16-day motorcycle tour departs in June 2027. It now follows a different and longer route to Leh, starting from Shimla and costs $6660. See extremebiketours.com

Steppe by steppe

By Paul Marshall

If you’ve ever wondered what purgatory looks like, chances are you’ll find your answer in Mongolia. I’ve never seen a country more vast, more empty, and yet more undeniably beautiful than when I rode the Trans-Mongolian Railway. Starting in Beijing, it was a journey that took me through China, Mongolia and to Ulan-Ude, where it connected with the Trans-Siberian and shipped me off to Moscow.

While the Moscow leg of the journey is now off-limits (for obvious reasons), the Trans-Mongolian is alive and well, offering a window into what was quite possibly the greatest (if not strangest) travel experience of my life.

There were Mongolian smugglers who used us as mules, hiding blue jeans between our bunks and stuffed in our mattresses. Then you had drunk Russians who gave us a taste of our own cultural medicine, yelling at us more loudly, as if that would somehow help us understand. These days, the drunk Russians and Mongolian smugglers might be gone, but I have it on good authority that the best parts of the Trans-Mongolian still remain.

The landscape, for one, is like landing on Mars. You’ll spend hours staring out the window, wondering how somewhere like this could exist. From the Inner Mongolian Steppe to the heart of the Gobi Desert, there’s almost no point trying to describe it. Better to leave the space blank and the cursor blinking, as nothing articulates the simplistic beauty of a place like Mongolia.

Of course, the train is only part of the journey, and travel is about more than sticking to the tracks. To explore the countryside is to understand its people, who are some of the most welcoming I’ve met. They quite literally gave me the clothes off their backs, as I was so woefully unprepared for the cold that I had to wear my underpants on my head to stay warm.

Seeing me looking mildly ridiculous, locals were quick to offer me their beanies and jackets. All I had to do in exchange was choke down a few glasses of airag, which is much harder than it sounds.

And while drinking fermented horse milk and getting hypothermia might not sound like your idea of a good time, to me it was worth every pair of jeans smuggled across the border.

THE DETAILS
If you, too, like your horse milk fermented, Intrepid now runs an 11-day tour through sections of the railway. See intrepidtravel.com.au. Alternatively, tour agencies in China (such as China Highlights) can book the train for you, as the official UBTZ e-ticketing system is notoriously difficult to navigate. Tickets are point-to-point, so if you do want to get out and explore, make sure to book each segment individually.

Roar pleasures

By Ben Groundwater

Few things bring you closer – physically it turns out, as well as emotionally – than lying in a small tent in the middle of the night and listening to lions.

The roar of a lion is phenomenal, it’s a sound that rattles you to your bones, that taps a primal fear deep within. And so we huddle there, Jess and I, in the pitch dark under cover of canvas and listen to roaring and growling, a sound that travels far in the Namibian bush, that rolls across the plains and shakes you to your core.

A few weeks later we will be sitting around a fire in a campsite in Botswana, drinking the cans of Windhoek lager that have been rattling around in the back of our ute since Swakopmund, and an elephant will just appear from out of the darkness.

It will make its way past us, this huge animal, close enough to hit it with one of those beer cans, its great wrinkled bulk lit by the flames, and then it will just disappear over the other side, into the black night, like it never happened.

This is the greatest trip I’ve ever been on. Four weeks in Southern Africa with a ute and a tent on the roof, a vague plan and a thirst for adventure. My travel companion is Jess, now my partner of 12 years and the mother of our two sons, though then our relationship wasn’t nearly as entrenched.

This journey would be our glue, the experience that would solidify our bond, the shared challenge of making our way alone through an unfamiliar world.

We started and ended in Johannesburg, and in four weeks made our way south to Port Elizabeth, west to Cape Town, up through the wildflowers to Namib-Naukluft National Park, to beachside Swakopmund, through Etosha into the Caprivi Strip, down into the Okavango Delta, back into South Africa.

We had baboons try to steal our food in Aus; vervet monkeys try to pinch our supplies in Rustenburg. Lions roared in Etosha and Mt Brandberg. Elephants strolled by in the Okavango.

An experience this basic and elemental – a tent, a fire, a map – reminds you that none of the other stuff in your life really matters. The clothes, the gadgets, the big house, the luxury trappings: all that fades away when you’re lying in a tent at dawn, peeking out of the canvas flap and watching as a honey badger snuffles around your campsite.

This matters, here and now. The person with you matters. The challenge, the excitement, the raw beauty of the world. There’s never been another journey like it.

THE DETAILS
The South African company Bushtrackers rents out HiLuxes kitted out for the African bush, with roof tents and camping supplies, for about $200 a day. See bushtrackers.com

Stars in her eyes

By Catherine Marshall

This singular trip takes me back to the very beginning, to the metaphysical realm where heaven and earth meet. Draped above me is the Milky Way, so close I can caress it. Sprawled around me is northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, so alien I might as well be standing on another planet.

“This one is 200,000 light years away,” says guide Pablo Biggi, plunging his laser pointer into a Magellanic cloud.
“What this means is that we’re seeing what that dwarf galaxy looked like 200,000 years ago.”

Lying back in Nayara Alto Atacama lodge’s outdoor observatory, I peer into a vaulted ceiling stippled with stars made from the same iron, carbon and calcium that constitutes my bones.

I’m privileged to have had not one trip of a lifetime, but a handful of uncommonly extraordinary adventures. Still, this is the first time I’ve seen the universe up close.

For a journey to live forever in the marrow of my celestial bones, it must embolden me, challenge my perceptions, change my way of thinking. The mission is fulfilled here in the world’s driest non-polar desert, compressed between Chile’s coastal pampas and the Andean Plateau.

Volcanoes menace the skyline, and the hot breath of geysers clouds the geothermal fields. Life defies the desolation: mesquite forests sprout from sterile bedrock, flamingos tiptoe across salt lagoons, humans inhabit dwellings indistinguishable from the desert’s adobe massifs.

But it’s the night skies – so dry and unpolluted their starlight remains pure – that reframe my perspective. Like the world’s most powerful radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), whose antennas spill across the Chajnantor Plateau, I’m plumbing a destination almost beyond reach.

“Let’s imagine that within this galaxy there is a planet with a highly evolved civilisation,” Biggi says, his laser strobing the abyss. “Now let’s imagine that they have a powerful telescope. Seen from 200,000 light years away, there would be no cities, no roads, not even swords or armour. What they would see from that distance are the very first bands of Homo sapiens.”

Laying flat again, I lose myself in the cosmos and imagine a powerful telescope trained on me 200 millennia hence. From that civilisation’s vantage point I’d be smaller than a pinprick, less substantial than a grain of Atacama Desert sand.

THE DETAILS
The Classic Safari Company’s four-night Atacama experience costs from $3250 a person twin share and includes transfers from Calama Airport, full board at Nayara Alto Atacama, stargazing and daily guided excursions. See classicsafaricompany.com

Five train journeys of a lifetime

By Brian Johnston

The Indian Pacific, Australia
This rail journey takes you 4352 kilometres across our continent from Sydney to Perth, unwinding a glorious spectacle of quintessential Aussie landscapes: the Blue Mountains, orange-coloured NSW outback, Flinders Ranges, the daunting Nullarbor and sun-splashed wheat fields of Western Australia. Awesome. See journeybeyondrail.com.au

Golden Eagle Silk Road Express, Central Asia
Combine an ultra-luxury train with one of the world’s most fabulous routes – the Silk Road through western China and Central Asia – and you have an incredible journey. The route runs from Beijing to Tashkent through mountain and desert landscape, history and culture. See goldeneagleluxurytrains.com

Shinkansen, Japan
Public trains can take you on memorable journeys, and none more so than a sleek-nosed bullet-train on the Tokyo to Kyoto run, which hurtles you at nearly 300 km/h past Mount Fuji views. Shinkansens were launched 60 years ago, but still feel futuristic. See smart-ex.jp

Palace on Wheels, India
This is the prototype of all India’s luxe trains and trundles around its most colourful corner, Rajasthan. You travel and dine like a maharaja, and are wafted around beyond the clamour of dusty roads to eye-popping destinations filled with palaces, temples and desert landscapes. See palaceonwheelstrain.com

Mount Pilatus Railway, Switzerland
Incredible train journeys don’t have to be long or luxury. Your jaw will drop as you chug up a rock face on the world’s steepest cog railway track, and drop again at the staggering views over lakes and nearly the entire Swiss Alps. See pilatus.ch