Overlanding / Expedition Driving in July

The Peruvian altiplano between Cusco and Puno, running at 3,800m elevation along the shore of Lake Titicaca, is one of the world's most dramatic high-altitude driving environments. Cross the border at Desaguadero into Bolivia and the routes extend across the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni and south through the Atacama. From Cusco alone, the circuit toward Puno takes in colonial churches, pre-Inca ruins, and altiplano landscapes that are genuinely unlike anything at lower elevation. The remoteness is real; mechanical preparation and spare parts matter here.

The Gobi is where Mongolian overlanding earns its name. There are almost no sealed roads across the south, so a Gobi expedition means days of driving braided tracks between gers and seasonal camps, navigating by land and local knowledge. The route strings together the singing dunes of Khongoryn Els, the ice-filled gorge of Yolyn Am, and the red Flaming Cliffs of Bayanzag, where Roy Chapman Andrews found the first known dinosaur eggs in the 1920s. Nights are in ger camps or under a sky with no light for hundreds of kilometers. This is expedition travel: long distances, self-sufficient vehicles, and camel- and horse-herding families as your only neighbors for days at a time.

Somaliland is one of the few places left where overland travel still feels like exploration rather than a set route. From Hargeisa you can string together a self-contained 4x4 circuit that most of the world has never seen: out to the Laas Geel rock art, on to the Ottoman and colonial port of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, up into the Golis mountains and the juniper forest around Daallo, and back through country grazed by camel herders. Roads are rough, fuel and water need planning, and a permit and armed escort travel with you, which is part of what makes it an expedition. You move with a local driver-guide who knows the checkpoints and the towns, sleep in simple guesthouses, and the payoff is a corner of the Horn of Africa with almost no other travelers and a genuine welcome in the market towns.

Namibia is the country the self-drive safari was built for. Good gravel roads, low traffic, a stable climate and safe towns let you cover the whole story on your own: dunes at Sossusvlei, the coast at Swakopmund, rhino country in Damaraland, the waterholes of Etosha, all on a single loop from Windhoek in a kitted 4x4 with a roof tent and a fridge. The distances are long and the fuel stops far apart, so the discipline is planning, not bravery. Bushlore hands over fully equipped 4x4s with a proper pre-departure briefing, and Secret Namibia will plan the route, book the camps and put a local guide on the ground if you want a hand.

The Pamir Highway, the M41, is one of the world's great overland drives, a rough ribbon of road that runs east from Dushanbe through the Gorno-Badakhshan region and over a string of high passes toward Osh in Kyrgyzstan. It climbs onto a treeless plateau that sits mostly above 3,500 meters, crossing the Ak-Baital pass at 4,655 meters, past the deep blue of Karakul lake in its meteorite basin and the salt flats around Bulunkul. The classic run follows the Panj river along the Afghan border, where a branch drops into the Wakhan Corridor beneath the snow wall of the Hindu Kush, past the Yamchun fort, the Bibi Fatima hot springs and the Ismaili Pamiri villages of the valley. You travel it in a 4WD with a local driver, sleeping in family homestays, and you need a GBAO permit for the whole region. It is remote, high and slow, which is the point.

Iceland's F-roads are what overland travel looks like without concessions to comfort. These are highland tracks designated for 4x4 vehicles only, crossing rivers without bridges, climbing into volcanic fields, and passing through landscapes that have no visual equivalent elsewhere. The Kjolur route bisects the island's interior. The Landmannalaugar area gives access to rhyolite mountains and geothermal springs. The Sprengisandur track is a full-day crossing of the central desert with no services. None of this is accessible in a conventional car, which is what makes it genuinely remote in a European context.

This is arguably South America's definitive 4x4 traverse, and it is an A-to-B expedition rather than a loop: three to four days entirely off pavement from the salt flat across the high altiplano to the Chilean border, sleeping in remote refugios with no connectivity. The route stacks Laguna Colorada red with three breeding flamingo species, the Sol de Manana geothermal field near 4,900 meters, the Salvador Dali Desert, the Polques hot springs, and Laguna Verde under the cone of Licancabur, before dropping you in San Pedro de Atacama. Few road journeys left on the continent are this far off the grid.

East Africa has the most mature overland infrastructure on the continent, and Nairobi is where it centers. From here you can run a self-drive safari circuit through the Masai Mara, Amboseli at the foot of Kilimanjaro, Samburu in the north, and Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley. Cross-border circuits extend into Tanzania to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. The Nairobi 4x4 rental market is established and professional, with properly prepared Land Cruisers stocked with recovery gear, camping equipment, and rooftop tents available from specialist operators. This is the region where overland travel as a discipline was essentially invented.

The Namibe region is Angola's great desert drive, the northern end of the Namib and one of the last big overlanding frontiers in Africa. From the port town of Namibe you run south into Iona National Park, the country's largest, a stark landscape of dunes, gravel plains and the bizarre welwitschia, a plant that lives a thousand years on two ever-growing leaves, where the desert falls straight into the cold Atlantic. Turning inland, the route climbs the Serra da Leba pass, a famous ribbon of hairpins cut into the escarpment, up to the highlands around Lubango and the Tundavala Gap, where the plateau simply ends in a sheer drop of around a thousand meters to the plains below. It is a self-contained expedition of desert, mountain and coast, thin on fuel and services, that rewards a well-prepared four-wheel-drive convoy and a good local guide. The emptiness, the light and the sheer scale are the draw, along with the sense of driving country that very few outsiders have seen.

The Argentine Puna is expedition driving in the strict sense: a 4,000-meter desert plateau where you carry your fuel and water, camp wild or sleep in high-altitude hosterias, and can go days without passing another vehicle. The reward is a catalog of landscapes that look rendered rather than real: the Campo de Piedra Pomez pumice field, the perfect pyramid of the Cono de Arita rising off the Salar de Arizaro, flamingo lagoons at altitudes where nothing should be pink, all rimmed by giants like Ojos del Salado and Llullaillaco. Entry and exit run through the UNESCO-listed Quebrada de Humahuaca and the high vineyards of the Calchaqui valleys, so even the transit days earn their place.

Dirt tracks climb from the plateau into the Dikti range and drop toward the south coast, on ground that needs clearance rather than skill.