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In Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression the ground comes in lime green, sulphur yellow and rust, and the air smells like a box of struck matches. A few thousand kilometres west, in Bolivia, you can walk across a shallow sheet of water for an hour and lose all sense of up and down. Earth is far stranger than most of us give it credit for. You just have to know where the weird parts are.
I’ve spent years collecting these places, half out of curiosity and half because a landscape that doesn’t behave the way a landscape should is oddly calming. Below are the top 7 places on Earth that look like another planet, with honest notes on access, timing and what the photos leave out. If you like the sound of this, there’s a whole genre of extraordinary places where the world stops behaving normally worth working through.
1. Socotra Island, Yemen
The dragon’s blood trees are the giveaway. They grow into flat, upturned umbrellas, their branches packed so tightly that from a distance the canopy looks like a mushroom cap made of green needles. Around a third of Socotra’s plant species grow nowhere else on the planet. The same goes for several of its birds, including the Socotra starling and the Socotra sunbird.
The island sits 380 km south of mainland Yemen, which explains both the endemism and the difficulty of getting there. Seasonal flights and charters run from Abu Dhabi, with the odd connection from Cairo. Check your government’s travel advisory before booking anything, because the security picture shifts. October to April is the window; the monsoon between June and September is strong enough to shut the airport. Detwah Lagoon on the west coast gives you white sand and turquoise water, then twenty minutes inland you’re on a limestone plateau that could be Mars. It also belongs on any list of beautiful places that few tourists visit, simply because the flight is enough to put most people off.
2. Dallol, Ethiopia
Dallol sits in the Danakil Depression at about 125 metres below sea level, one of the lowest and hottest inhabited points on Earth. Average temperatures hover around 35°C, and summer days push past 45°C. What you get for the discomfort is a hydrothermal field of acid pools, salt terraces and mineral crusts in colours that look digitally enhanced but aren’t.
What the photos don’t show
The heat, mostly. And the smell. And the fact that you cannot wander freely. Dallol is visited on guided expeditions from Mekele, usually two to four days, often combined with the lava lake at Erta Ale. Groups travel with local escorts, camp in the open, and move on a fixed schedule. November to February is the least punishing stretch. Go with a reputable operator and take the safety briefing seriously; the pools are acidic enough to ruin boots and skin.
3. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
At 10,582 square kilometres, this is the largest salt flat on the planet, sitting at 3,656 metres in the Altiplano. In the wet season, roughly December to April, a thin layer of water turns the whole thing into a mirror and the horizon disappears. In the dry season the water recedes and you get the other famous look: pale hexagonal salt polygons stretching to nothing.
Incahuasi Island rises out of the middle of the flat, covered in trichocereus cacti, some of them over a thousand years old. Tours leave from the town of Uyuni, ranging from a single sunrise trip to a three-day crossing into Chile’s Atacama Desert. Bring sunglasses with real UV protection, because the glare is brutal, and give yourself a day to acclimatise before you go higher.
4. Wadi Rum, Jordan
You’ve seen this one without knowing it. Wadi Rum has stood in for Mars in The Martian, for Arrakis in Dune, and for Jedha in Rogue One, which tells you something about how convincing the place is on camera. The protected area covers 720 square kilometres of sandstone and granite, with Jebel Rum topping out at 1,734 metres and narrow canyons like Khazali scratched with Nabataean inscriptions.
How to do it properly
Drive time from Amman is about three and a half hours. A few practical notes from experience:
- Spend at least one night in a Bedouin camp rather than day-tripping from Aqaba; the desert at 4am is the whole point.
- Book a jeep tour with a local guide and ask for the quieter canyons, not just the seven pillars stop.
- Eat the zarb, meat and vegetables slow-cooked in a sand oven. It’s the kind of dish that makes you rethink an entire cuisine, which is the argument behind this piece on why first impressions of world cuisines are usually wrong.
- Pack a warm layer. Desert nights at that elevation get genuinely cold.
5. Deadvlei, Namibia
A white clay pan, a sky so blue it looks painted, and a scatter of blackened camel thorn trees that died around 600 years ago and never decomposed because there’s no moisture for the bacteria to work with. Carbon dating puts the trees at roughly 900 years old. The dunes surrounding the pan, including Big Daddy at about 325 metres, cut off the Tsauchab River and starved the place dry. The result is a landscape that looks less like Earth and more like a set built for a film about loss.
You reach it through Sesriem gate, then a 60 km drive, then a short shuttle in a 4×4 for the final stretch. Arrive at sunrise. By 9am the tour buses land, the shadows go flat, and the temperature climbs. It sits alongside other places where nature looks almost unreal without a filter, and unlike most of them, you can drive to this one in a normal rental car.
6. Lençóis Maranhenses, Brazil
This shouldn’t exist. It looks like the Sahara, except it rains here, over 1,000 mm a year. Between January and June the rainwater collects between the dunes and forms thousands of freshwater lagoons, some of them deep enough to swim in and warm as a bath. The white sand is quartz, washed down from the interior and pushed back inland by wind and tide.
Peak season runs June to September, when the lagoons are full and the sky is clear. Base yourself in Atins for the dunes-meets-ocean side, or Santo Amaro for the bigger lagoons. Getting there means flying to São Luís and driving four to five hours, then switching to a 4×4. Go with a local guide: the dunes shift, the lagoons migrate, and the good ones are not where they were two years ago.
7. The McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
Parts of the Dry Valleys have seen no significant rain for around two million years. Katabatic winds tear down off the polar plateau at up to 320 km/h and evaporate whatever moisture tries to land. The Onyx River, the longest river in Antarctica at roughly 30 km, flows for six to eight weeks a year and then vanishes. At Taylor Glacier, iron-rich brine seeps out of the ice at a place called Blood Falls, staining the snow rust red.
This is the one you almost certainly won’t visit. Access is by helicopter from McMurdo Station and is reserved for scientific work, and that’s not going to change. What you can do is take a Ross Sea expedition cruise in the November to February window, or book a scenic flyover from Christchurch or Queenstown that crosses the Transantarctic Mountains and returns the same day. Sitting in a window seat while a continent of blue ice slides underneath you is a strange, quiet experience, and closer to another planet than most of us will ever get.
