Drive on: the best off-grid road trips

Escape the tourist traps and embark on a less well-trodden driving route for your next getaway, promising breathtaking views and an adventurous experience

Travel and Wellbeing 29 Mar 2022

Piccinini Creek and Bungle Bungles in Purnululu National Park. Image: All Canada Photos / Alamy

Upper Gorge, Lawn Hill, Boodjamulla National Park. Image: Steve Waters / Alamy

Cairns to Broome 

Australia

Crossing America from coast to shining coast is a fabulous yet well-worn drive. But crossing Australia? That’s the road less travelled. The Savannah Way, a 2,300-mile web of tarmac, dirt and gravel between Cairns and Broome links two oceans, three time zones and four World Heritage Sites, along with multiple campsites and 14 national parks. After tropical Queensland’s undulating fruit plantations, you’re into widescreen ochre savannah with vast cattle stations punctuated by the exotic flora of Boodjamulla National Park. 

As dirt replaces tarmac, you’ll trail a dust plume, engage 4WD to navigate shallow creeks and find yourself surviving on surprisingly decent meat pies at outback bars. The Northern Territory offers heavenly swimming spots along with The Lost City’s towering rocks before flat earth surrenders to the buttes, red escarpments and tangled baobab trees of Western Australia’s Kimberley: a surreal landscape peaking with the Bungle Bungles’ 250-metre-high orange and black rock “beehives”. Five hundred miles later, Broome’s turquoise Indian Ocean waves the chequered flag. You’ve just crossed Oz.

savannahway.com.au

Atacama Desert, Chile. Image: Francisco Javier Ramos Rosellon / Alamy

San Pedro to Salta

Chile and Argentina

Hyper-saturated colours, geological wonder sand and pre-Columbian history meld together on this ancient, little-used route across the Andes. Acclimatise to the thin air in Chile’s Atacama Desert by exploring shimmering white salt lakes and the highest geysers on Earth. From San Pedro, it’s 125 savagely beautiful miles to the border: a road bisecting bleak black plains, dwarfed by volcanoes and crossed by the original Inca trail – its faint lines pointing to a sacred summit once used for human sacrifice. 

The road rises among peaks streaked with sulphur, salt and snow above emerald lagoons before entering Argentina at a lonely windswept customs post. Passport stamped, a mazy 16,000ft pass with more than 90 switchbacks delivers a night under canvas and morning descent down the rutted R40 “highway” alongside the ever-widening Calchaquí river past Inca granaries and towering cacti. A night in colonial Cachi and you’re ready to drive off the Andean plateau at Piedra del Molino. More auto-bungee than road, you’ll drop 6,500 feet in 35 minutes, finishing among subtropical Salta’s creeper-clad trees. 

4WD hire at Calama airport: avis.cl (notice period required to obtain border permit)

Riomaggiore village in Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera. Image: Southmind / Alamy

Milan to Cap Ferrat

Italy and France

It’s highly unusual to design a road trip around a hotel brand. But when it’s the Four Seasons and the route, linking three peachy properties, blends divine Italian history, gourmet food and a French Riviera hotspot, it makes perfect sense. Even more so when Four Seasons arranges a pristine 1956 Porsche 356 Speedster (and discreet support vehicle). From the fashionable heart of Milan, it heads south past Piacenza Cathedral into Palma Province for Michelin-starred lunch including buonissimo black Culatello ham at Antica Corte Pallavicina, a 14th-century castle.

The afternoon reveals Tuscany’s Futa Pass, a vertiginous forested leg of the legendary Mille Miglia Rally, before a night in a Florentine hotel straddling two Renaissance palaces awash with frescoes (and more Michelin-starred food). Next morning purrs west to Tuscany’s coast, where route SS1 chases the Mediterranean shoreline (detour to explore the breathtaking Cinque Terre), becoming ever more beautiful as it enters France, crossing gorges in the Alpes Maritimes before ending at the Belle Époque Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, with its fabulous seafront pool.

fourseasons.com

Namib Desert, Namibia. Biosphoto / Alamy

Cape Town to Etosha

South Africa and Namibia

Most road trips from Cape Town head due east along the photogenic Garden Route. Not this one. Instead, after the Mother City’s chilled beaches and cafés, the week-long route starts with a leisurely meander through the Cape Winelands, the vines laced through the Hottentots Holland, Boland and Hex River mountains, before arrowing north up the N7. After stopping to sample Lambert’s Bay’s white beaches and chilly Atlantic surf, and a day later, to raft the Northern Cape’s Orange River, the drive crosses into Namibia (joining the B1 artery) with an early break to witness the Fish River Canyon’s widescreen grandeur. 

Namibia’s decent highways and desert landscape are tailor-made for a road trip, with easterly detours reaping rich reward in Luderitz’s incongruous Bavarian architecture, Kolmanskop’s diamond-mining ghost town and the Namib-Naukluft National Park’s ocean of burnt orange dunes. Finally, 1,200 miles from Cape Town, your arrival is greeted by the Etosha Pan’s prolific wildlife.

Car hire in Cape Town: europcar.co.za (notice period required to obtain border permit)