The Last Best Great Escapes

Writing the first Lonely Planet guidebook more than 25 years ago took my wife, Maureen, and me from London to Sydney via Kabul, Afghanistan, Kathmandu, Nepal and Kuta Beach on Bali in Indonesia, in those days remote places. These days, of course, there are few real escapes left. Not when there are companies dedicated to getting you to the top of Mt. Everest; not when there are flights to the South Pole.

Still, all you have to do is put a little distance between yourself and the nearest airport, and it’s remarkable how the crowds disappear. There are plenty of Pacific islands where a ship’s appearance is the biggest deal of the whole year. There are outback trails in Australia where if your car breaks down, you die. Simple as that.

Let’s get crowds into perspective as well. Before bemoaning the lotus eaters crowding onto Pacific beaches, please contemplate that every hotel room on every island

in French Polynesia (Tahiti, Bora-Bora and so on) wouldn’t add up to the room count of a single mega-hotel on Waikiki Beach. Or that every Western trekker (American, Australian, German, English) setting foot on the Himalayan trails of Nepal for the next 12 months wouldn’t tote up to a single busy day at Yosemite.

So if you really want to get away, here’s my list of the 10 best last great escapes :

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Simpson Desert, Australia: The instructions for crossing the Simpson Desert are extremely straightforward. Go to Birdsville. It’s Australia’s most remote town, tucked away in the far west of the northern state of Queensland. Have a beer in the Birdsville Hotel. Better make it two; this is the last pub you’ll see for a while. Tell the local police station where you’re going. Make sure you’ve got plenty of water and fuel because there are no gas stations where you’re heading. Point your four-wheel-drive’s nose westward--in fact, point all three noses westward because it’s suggested that you bring two extra vehicles. If one breaks down, you’ve still got two backups. Then drive. Three days, 300 miles and several hundred sand dunes later you should emerge at Mt. Dare Homestead near the Northern Territory border. Along the way, you’ll have seen wild camels, salt lakes, historic markers, more stars than you ever knew existed, amazing desert vegetation and some of the most eye-opening red desert scenery in Australia.

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Austral Islands, French Polynesia: Everybody knows French Polynesia’s Society Islands (Tahiti, etc.) and the Tuamotus (scuba-diving heaven). As for the Australs, where on earth are they? Head south of Tahiti, where the Austral group is effectively an extension of the same range of nearly submerged peaks that make up the southern Cook Islands. You can fly to two of the Australs (one, Tubai, was the first stop for Fletcher Christian and the other HMS Bounty mutineers), but apart from the odd passing yacht, few visitors make it to the others. There are five inhabited islands--Rimatara, Rurutu, Tubuai, Raivavae and Rapa--plus two uninhabited ones, with the chain extending about 800 miles from end to end. Remote Rapa is especially worth a visit for its hilltop forts, reminders of when the island was divided into warring tribal groups. Thor Heyerdahl of Kon Tiki fame dropped by in the 1950s and excavated one of the forts.

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Tsaparang, Tibet: Hands up for everybody who knows about Tsaparang in western Tibet? There’s a good reason why it’s not on more itineraries, or even in most atlases. Getting there is distinctly difficult, as I found out last October. First you have to walk a week from western Nepal or, if you’re really tough, drive for a week from Lhasa. On the way, you can pause to make the three-day walk around holy Mt. Kailash, a pilgrimage that devout Buddhists believe wipes out the sins of one lifetime. Finally, you reach this amazing hilltop monastic palace and city, overlooking the arid riverbanks of the subcontinent’s Sutlej River. Naturally, the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s vandals did their best to wreck things, but Tsaparang was so remote and so unknown that they simply didn’t have the energy to do their usual comprehensive job.

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Central Corsica, France: Down the rocky central spine of France’s Mediterranean island runs the GR20, which serious walking aficionados generally reckon to be the best, the most beautiful, the toughest of the country’s Grande Randonees, or “big walks.” The GR20 takes a fit walker about two weeks, but what’s most remarkable is that here, in Europe, you can still find a place where you need to carry four days of food or plan on a stiff diet. Of course, this is still France, so during the summer months you’ll stumble upon lonely shepherd’s shelters, where there’s a handy cellar of hearty Corsican wine so that passing walkers, even if they can’t eat, can still drink.

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Kalahari Desert, Botswana: Want to feel truly alone? Then ride a quad bike (one of those motorcycle-like devices with four big fat wheels) at sunset out from Jack’s Camp onto the salt pans that fringe Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. Walk away from your bike, lie down on the ground, look up at the stars and you could be the last person on earth.

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Antarctic Peninsula: For travelers, the fall of the Soviet Union had one very useful side effect: Lots of ex-USSR polar vessels were suddenly seeking alternative employment, and a number of them made the switch from Antarctic spying to Antarctic tourism. Not only are there more opportunities to visit the ends of the earth, the cost of doing so also has tumbled. The Antarctic Peninsula, that long finger reaching north toward South America, is the tourist playground of Antarctica. It only takes a few days of intense seasickness crossing the stormy Drake Passage to get there, and it has more to see than any other part of the frozen continent. There are plenty of icebergs and all the crisp white expanses any visitor could ask for, but there are also whales, seals, penguins and other chilly wildlife. The peninsula has more abandoned whaling stations and other signs of the exploitation of the continent’s resources--a problem that modern tourism may help keep at bay: Illegal fishing fleets or surreptitious miners are less likely to sneak in if there are lots of visitors to watch out for them.

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Keli Mutu, Indonesia: When I first visited Keli Mutu in 1974, there was no easy way to get there (I went on a beat-up old motorcycle) and nowhere to stay (I slept on a villager’s dirt floor). The guest book at the foot of this extinct volcano on the island of Flores noted that the previous visitor had been there two weeks earlier. Twenty-five years later, tourists are more frequent here. Yet for a place that qualifies as one of the world’s most awesome natural sights, it remains one of the least known. The mountain’s cratered top shelters three differently colored lakes: black and two shades of blue.

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Antrim Coast Road, Northern Ireland: Thirty years of “the Troubles” have pretty firmly kept visitors to Ireland south of the north-south divide, which has left one of the world’s finest coast highways more or less a local secret. It curves seductively up the Northern Irish east coast past Carrickfergus and the Glens of Antrim to the Giant’s Causeway, romantic Dunluce Castle and Portstewart. On this drive, “Avalon Sunset” is the appropriate Van Morrison CD to be playing.

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The Ship’s Graveyard, Australia: Mention scuba diving and Australia, and the Great Barrier Reef automatically pops onto the screen. In fact, the GBR is a long way from Melbourne, which has some of the country’s best dive sites just over an hour’s drive south from the city’s center. Jump on a dive boat at the popular summer resort of Portsea and you’re soon at the Ship’s Graveyard, where divers can explore a whole fleet of World War I submarines. A gift to Australia from the British Royal Navy at the end of the war, these J-class subs, the biggest and fastest in the world at the close of hostilities, proved too expensive to operate. So in the mid-1920s, the Aussies towed them off the coast and scuttled them. Today they’re a major attraction for experienced divers--they lie 90 to 125 feet deep. A visit to submarine J5, its conning tower fetchingly decorated in yellow anemones as if it were auditioning for a Beatles song, is a never-to-be-forgotten scuba experience.

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Evora, Portugal: It’s got UNESCO World Heritage status and it’s pretty as a picture. This city in the Alentejo province has Roman ruins, a Moorish walled center, some wonderful hotels, restaurants and cafes and one of the country’s creepiest tourist attractions. In the San Francisco Church’s “Chapel of Bones,” monks spent years arranging them into fetching patterns.