The Desert Town Built Around a Mirage, Come True

When I imagine a mirage, I think of epic tales of adventure and perilous journeys through the desert where our hero is dangerously lost, hallucinating in the barren landscape ahead. Rarely does the mirage turn out to be something real. Except this one did, and you don’t have to be a character in a storybook…

Forget Route 66: Get Your Road Trip Kicks on Route 62

Sun-bleached buildings, a hot convertible, and the smell of a dusty roadside town. There’s nothing more American than a stretch of quiet highway, and photographer Ashley Noelle has been on a quest to capture its old haunts before time and decay beat her to it. “I started at the beginning of route 62 and the…

Journey to the Most Inhospitable Place on Earth: The Skeleton Coast

Photography by Xenia Ivanoff-Erb Let’s assume you’ve made it to the Namibian coastline, that you’re finding yourself somewhere above the Ugab and below the Kunene River and more importantly, that you have the stomach for this kind of adventure – whether on land or by air. Boy you’re in for a treat of arid proportions.…

The Apocalypse came early for the Salton Riviera

There is a place where beaches are made not of sand, but of the skeletons of millions of fish. Luxury yacht clubs are now frequented only by pigeons, vacation homes lay open to the elements and RV camp grounds look more like burial grounds. (c) above Jeremy Engleman & JBennett Fitts below Not 60 miles from the…

Greetings from France’s Slice of the Sahara Desert

You’d think you were stranded in an African desert, but the Dune du Pilat (Dune of Pilat) has a grandeur all its own. All 60,000,000 m³ of it are sandwiched between the aquamarine waters of the Atlantic and the emerald Landes forest, making it quite unlike any other ‘desert’ oasis on our lovely planet. Mainly, because it’s in…

My Desert Rock Tub: Weekend in a Mojave Mirage

What Bonnie & Clyde really needed was a desert hideaway like this … complete with a cowboy tub and rubber ducky, of course. Naturally that little pool had me at hello, but the seclusion that this dream house offers, masterfully camouflaged amongst those weathered desert boulders is calling to my inner Bonnie & Clyde… Welcome to the…

Escape to the Bohemian Dome in the Desert

I spent some time in Joshua Tree, California last summer and it quickly became my favourite place in the golden state, possibly on the planet. But of course, only now that I’m nearly 9,000 kilometres away in Paris, do I discover my desert dream house where I could have spent the night gazing at the stars…

America’s Boneyards: Where Airplanes go to Die

Before they are put to rest, airplanes undergo funeral-esque rituals known as ‘pickling’. Their engines are removed, the windows covered and the fluids drained. But of course these giants are too big to bury. In the parched deserts, where a dry climate is an old machine’s best ally, aircrafts young and old lie nose to…

There’s a Miniature Earth in the Desert of Arizona with a Very Strange Story

It may sound (and look) like something from a sci fi movie, but it’s a real place. In the middle of the desert, beneath a glass dome, are wetlands, savannah grasslands, a rainforest, fog desert and an ocean with a coral reef. Constructed between 1987 and 1991 in Oracle Arizona, Biosphere 2 remains the largest…

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The Real Life ‘Indiana Jones’ Was Just as Cool as You Think.

He said he “was born under a lucky star”. Yet, Roy Chapman Andrews, that good ‘ole American chaser of bandits, dinosaur eggs and lost civilisations, was always the kind of man who made his own luck. He charmed a generation of daydreamers with his stories of the Gobi desert — and that hat —and while there’s…

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