Desert Travel Experiences Around the World

Yes, and they drink less than their savannah cousins. An elephant can swallow up to 140 litres of water a day, its trunk holding ten litres per draw; in arid zones the population has adapted to far smaller rations and covers considerable distances between two waterholes. At Etosha, in the dry season, they arrive in single file and keep everyone else waiting, which I watched for two hours in this overview of the park. The Namib bordering the region stretches more than 2 000 kilometres, 50 to 160 wide, and its age of 80 million years makes it the oldest desert on earth, as my review of the great deserts recalls.

By filtering salt lagoons that nothing else colonises. Three species share the Salar de Atacama and are told apart by their legs: the Chilean flamingo has grey legs with red joints, the Andean one yellow legs and black wingtips, the James flamingo a yellow bill with a black tip. The Chaxa, Barros Negros, Salada and La Punta lagoons form their territory, inside Los Flamencos National Reserve, the first co-management between the Chilean state and the Lickan Antai people, which I recount in this life in pink beside the salar. At 4 300 metres, the El Tatio geysers complete the geothermal picture in this daybreak at minus ten degrees.

Salares, and the Atacama one covers 3 000 square kilometres. Its crust is grey, rough, spiky: nothing like the smooth white sheet people picture. For the perfect mirror you have to cross the border. The Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia, spreads 12 000 square kilometres and remains the largest salt desert on earth, which I describe in this crossing of the Bolivian altiplano. The Salar de Chiguana, 415 square kilometres perched above 3 600 metres, is even crossed by train. On the Chilean side the texture of the salt makes better sense from the shore of the Los Flamencos reserve.

Because it is the driest desert on earth, across 100 000 square kilometres. Some stations have never recorded measurable rain. The Valle de la Luna, a natural sanctuary since 1982, lines up ridges of salt and clay where the ground cracks at sunset, and Licancabur volcano closes the horizon at 5 916 metres, a setting I cross in this stay in Martian mode. San Pedro de Atacama, founded in 1450, holds at 2 400 metres with some 5 000 inhabitants. New Mexico offers a white variant of the same exercise, in the gypsum dunes of White Sands.

The Sahara leads with 9 million square kilometres. The Arabian desert follows with 2 330 000 square kilometres spread across nine countries, then the Kalahari and its 900 000 square kilometres shared by Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The Namib plays age rather than size: 81 000 square kilometres of dunes passing 300 metres, listed by Unesco in 2013. In the United States, the Great Basin covers 518 000 square kilometres between 1 200 and 3 000 metres of altitude, and the Mojave 40 000, which I set out in this round of the finest deserts. In Oman the Wahiba Sands count 12 500 square kilometres, as my bivouac in the Omani sand shows.

Enough to handle a seventy-degree temperature swing. In the Wahiba Sands the thermometer runs from minus ten to plus sixty degrees depending on season and hour, and it is that swing which wears you out, not the heat alone. Carry water in quantity, a warm layer for the night and something to keep sand out of the camera. In central Australia, distance sets the rules: road trains run 50 metres long at 110 kilometres an hour, and you do not overtake them lightly, which I explain in this passage through the Red Centre. Solitude is part of the programme, as my notebook of the long Australian tracks recounts.