Trekking / Hiking in November

Acatenango is the trek people come to Guatemala for, and the reason is the volcano next door. You climb through farmland, cloud forest and finally bare volcanic sand to a high camp around 3,600 meters, and from there you look across a saddle at Volcan de Fuego, one of the most active volcanoes in the Americas. Fuego erupts every twenty minutes or so, day and night, throwing ash and glowing rock above its crater, and after dark the camp watches the orange bursts against the sky. The summit push starts before dawn on the second day for sunrise from 3,976 meters, with the whole chain of highland volcanoes floating above the cloud. It is a hard two days at altitude and in the cold, but the payoff, a live eruption seen from a facing ridge, is rare anywhere on earth.

The Annapurna Circuit crosses Thorong La at 5,416m on its way from subtropical river valleys to the Tibetan-plateau edge of Mustang, the greatest ecological transect in trekking. Honesty requires the modern framing: road construction has touched much of the original route, and the road-free heart is now the high section around the pass, Manang to Muktinath, joined by the waymarked NATT trails that restore mostly road-free walking for those who choose them. Framed that way, a ten-to-fourteen-day NATT-plus-Thorong-La trek remains world class, cheaper and more accessible than Khumbu, with no flight required and teahouses the whole way. The pass day, 1,000 meters up and 1,600 down at altitude, is the exam.

Brownsberg is the rainforest you can actually walk into without a week-long expedition, a wooded mountain plateau at around 500 meters that puts Suriname's jungle within a half-day of the capital. The draw is a network of forest trails on foot, threading down through the canopy to three waterfalls, the Leo, the Irene and the Koemboe on the Witi creek, where the reward for a sweaty descent is a swim in a cold forest pool. From the Mazaroni plateau the forest opens onto a long view over the Brokopondo Reservoir, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, its drowned treetops still breaking the surface. The park sits on old gold-mining ground and the birdlife and monkeys are close and loud: eight primate species live here, from howlers to capuchins, alongside toucans, trogons and hundreds of other birds. Trails range from short loops to full-day walks that take in all three falls for those with the legs and an early start. Managed by the conservation foundation STINASU, Brownsberg is the honest introduction to the interior, a place to learn the forest on your feet before committing to the deeper reserves.

The Cardamoms are the largest unbroken rainforest left in mainland Southeast Asia, and trekking here funds the fight to keep it standing. This is proper jungle walking, through dense forest to hidden waterfalls, river crossings and post-Angkorian burial-jar sites, with the chance of hornbills, gibbons and, for the lucky, sign of elephant. Two models sit side by side. At Chi Phat, a village of former loggers and poachers turned guides runs multi-day treks, mountain-bike rides and river kayaking from a community base, with nights in homestays or forest hammock camps. Deeper in, a small tented camp inside a national park lets you trek with a naturalist and shadow the Wildlife Alliance rangers who patrol the trails. Either way the walking is remote, humid and genuinely wild.

Cerro Negro is a short, sharp hike with a payoff you cannot get anywhere else. The cone is the youngest volcano in Central America, born in an 1850 eruption and still active, and its slopes are loose black ash with no vegetation. You carry a board up a 45-minute to one-hour walk to the rim, taking in the raw Maribios volcano chain and the plain toward Leon, then sit or stand on a reinforced sled and slide straight down the ash face. Volcano boarding was invented here in the 2000s and remains a rite of passage on the Central American backpacker trail, with riders clocking speeds well past 50 kilometers an hour on the steepest line. The walk is manageable for anyone with reasonable fitness, and the descent takes seconds, which is the whole absurd charm of it.

Dragon's Back is the hike that proves you can leave a city of seven million and be walking a wild coastal ridge inside half an hour. The trail runs the spine of a low mountain range at the southeast tip of Hong Kong Island, rising and falling in a series of humps that give it its name, with the surf-lined bays of Shek O and Tai Long Wan on one side and the wooded slopes of Shek O Country Park on the other. Time Magazine named it Asia's best urban hike, and the reason is the contrast: paragliders launch off Shek O Peak, the skyline of the island floats in the haze behind you, and the walk ends on the sand at Big Wave Bay where surfers ride the swell. It is a manageable half-day on a clear path, roughly four to eight kilometers depending on where you start and finish, with steady climbs rather than any scrambling, so it suits fit first-timers as much as regular walkers. The forest sections give shade, the ridge gives the views, and public transport drops you at both ends, which is why locals treat it as the default weekend escape. The cooler, drier months from October to April are the time to go, when the humidity drops and the visibility opens up.

The Edge of the World, properly Jebel Fihrayn, is the best day hike within reach of Riyadh. A wall of the Tuwaiq escarpment ends abruptly here, dropping some 300 meters to a plain that runs flat to the horizon, which is where the nickname comes from. The walk up to the rim is short and manageable, but the reward is outsized, a sheer cliff edge with nothing beyond it and, below, the traces of an old caravan route that carried trade toward the Gulf. Most people come for sunset, when the low light turns the limestone orange and the plain goes to shadow, or for sunrise and a quieter rim. Reaching the trailhead means an hour and a half of desert track, so it is a place you visit with a guide who knows the route and the rock rather than alone.

The Fouta Djallon is one of West Africa's great walking landscapes, a cool green highland of sandstone plateaus that break away in cliffs and gorges and pour off the edge in waterfalls. This is the water tower of the region, the source of the Niger, the Senegal and the Gambia, and its terraced hillsides are farmed by Fula herders and villagers whose way of life gives the trekking its character. Trails link village to village across the plateau around Labe, Dalaba and Pita, past the falls of the three cascades, through gallery forest and along escarpment rims with long views over the highlands. You walk between guesthouses and family compounds, sharing meals and paths with the people who live here, in a form of slow community trekking that has become the country's signature journey. The climate is mild by West African standards, the birdlife is rich, and the sense of a place still largely outside mass tourism is complete. For a traveler who wants real village-to-village walking in a corner of Africa few reach, the Fouta Djallon is the reason to come to Guinea.

Kakum is Ghana's best rainforest walk, and its canopy walkway is unlike anything else in West Africa. Seven rope-and-plank suspension bridges run 350 meters from tree to tree at up to 40 meters above the forest floor, level with the crowns of ebony and mahogany giants. The park protects a rare surviving block of the Upper Guinean rainforest, home to forest elephants, bongo, several primates and more than 250 bird species, including the rare white-breasted guineafowl that draws birders from around the world. Beyond the walkway, guided ground trails take you into the forest for birding and tree identification, best in the early morning when the canopy is loud with activity. Paired with the Cape Coast castles half an hour away, it is the classic combination of Ghana's coast: heavy history in the morning, high forest in the afternoon.

Kpalime is the heart of Togo's small but lovely hill country, the greenest and most walkable corner of a mostly flat nation. From the town you can climb Mount Agou, at 986 meters the highest point in Togo, with views that reach across the border into Ghana, or take the forest paths around Mount Klouto, famous for its butterflies and its old German-era plantation trails. Between the peaks lie waterfalls such as Kpime and Wome, coffee and cocoa smallholdings, and villages that keep the Akpesse dance and a strong craft tradition of carving and batik. The walking ranges from a steady road-and-trail ascent of Agou to gentle forest loops around Klouto, all in a cool, misty upland that feels a world away from the coast. For a traveler it is Togo's outdoors at its best, easy to reach from Lome and rewarding on foot with a local guide who knows the plants and the paths.

Luang Namtha is the home of community-based trekking in Laos. The Nam Ha National Protected Area begins a few kilometers south of town, more than two thousand square kilometers of jungle-covered hills, rivers and ethnic-minority villages, and the model of guided treks that share their income with those villages was pioneered here in the early 2000s. Trips run from a single day walk to four-day crossings that overnight in Akha, Khmu, Hmong or Lanten hamlets, eating and sleeping in the village and walking with guides drawn from those communities. The forest is genuine, with gibbons, hornbills and dense bamboo, and many operators combine the walking with kayaking on the Nam Tha river or cycling between villages, so the trek doubles as a slow way into the cultures of the northern uplands.

Middle Caicos is where the flat, beachy Turks and Caicos turns rugged and wild. The island's north shore rises into limestone cliffs cut with blowholes, sea caves and hidden coves, and the Crossing Place Trail runs along it for miles, retracing the old footpath islanders once used to cross between settlements. The walk links Mudjin Harbour, a cliff-ringed beach that is one of the most striking spots in the country, to secret beaches and rolling green headlands, with the open Atlantic crashing below. Inland lies Conch Bar Caves, the largest cave system in the Turks and Caicos and one of the largest in the region, a mile and a half of dark passages hung with stalactites and columns, home to four species of bat and tidal pools, once mined for bat guano and used by the Lucayans before that. A national park managed by the National Trust, the caves can only be entered with a guide. Between the cliff trail and the caves, Middle Caicos offers the country's best walking and a rare, quiet look at its natural and human history, far from the resorts of Provo.

Mount Cameroon is the biggest single climb in West and Central Africa, an active volcano that lifts from sea-level rainforest to a bare 4095 meter summit in one continuous ascent from the town of Buea. Local people call it Mongo ma Ndemi, the mountain of greatness, and it is one of the most active volcanoes on the continent, with lava flows from its 1999 and 2000 eruptions still crossing the standard route. The classic climb is the two to three day Guinness route, named for the beer company that long backed the mountain race that runs the same ground: up through farmland and montane forest to alpine grassland huts, then across black lava and ash to the crater rim and Fako summit, with the Gulf of Guinea far below. Guides and porters are compulsory and arranged in Buea, and the reward is a genuine equatorial big-mountain traverse that few outside the region have heard of.

Pico Duarte is the roof of the Caribbean, a 3,087-meter summit that surprises people who think of the Dominican Republic as only beaches. The standard climb leaves from La Cienaga near Jarabacoa, a two-day walk up through pine forest to the high camp at Comparticion, then a pre-dawn push to the summit for sunrise above the clouds. The Cordillera Central is cool and green, with river crossings, ferns and the burnt-pine paramo near the top, and nights at altitude drop below freezing. Park rules require a licensed local guide and mules carry the gear, so this is a supported trek rather than a solo scramble. Longer routes add the Tetero Valley or link the neighboring peaks of La Pelona and La Rusilla.

The Qadisha Valley is Lebanon's finest walking country and the clearest place to see the mountains that gave the country its cedars. A deep gorge cut below the town of Bsharri, it has sheltered Christian monastic communities for well over a thousand years, and the trail down its floor and along its terraces links rock-cut monasteries and hermitages such as Deir Mar Lichaa and Qannoubine, many still tended, with the river running beneath. Above the valley head stands the Cedars of God, one of the last old groves of the Lebanon cedar at around 1,900 meters, some of the trees many centuries old. The whole valley and grove are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and long-distance walkers pick up sections of the Lebanon Mountain Trail here. Bsharri itself, birthplace of the writer Kahlil Gibran, makes the natural base. Whether you drop into the gorge for a day or link villages over several, this is deep mountain and monastic Lebanon on foot.

Santa Ana Volcano, or Ilamatepec, is the classic day hike of El Salvador, a steep climb to the country's highest summit that rewards you with one of the more surreal crater views in Central America. The trail starts high in Los Volcanes National Park, near the Cerro Verde lookout, and climbs through cloud forest and open lava fields to the 2,381-meter rim in around ninety minutes to two hours. At the top the crater drops to a milky turquoise lake, its color set by dissolved sulfur and minerals, sometimes steaming and occasionally rumbling; this is an active volcano that last erupted in 2005. The panorama takes in the perfect cone of Izalco next door, forested Cerro Verde, and the wide blue circle of Lake Coatepeque in its own collapsed caldera below. The hike itself is manageable for anyone with reasonable fitness, and national-park rules require a guide on the mountain, which keeps groups organized and safe on the exposed upper slopes.

Semuc Champey is one of those places that looks invented. In a fold of Alta Verapaz jungle, the Cahabon river disappears underground into a limestone cave, and over the top runs a 300-meter natural bridge holding a staircase of pools in every shade of turquoise and green. The classic day combines a short, steep hike up to the El Mirador viewpoint, where the whole ladder of pools opens up below the forest, with hours of swimming and pool-hopping down the terraces. Most people add the K'an Ba caves, a river cave explored on foot and by swimming with only a candle in hand, plus a rope swing and tubing on the river outside. It is remote and takes effort to reach, which is part of why the pools stay so clear and the crowds stay small.

The High Trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge is China's most celebrated independent trek, and it earns the name. The path clings to the upper wall of a gorge cut by the Jinsha, an upper reach of the Yangtze, with the 5,596-meter Jade Dragon Snow Mountain on one side and Haba Snow Mountain on the other. Over two days you climb the famous 28 Bends, traverse Naxi farming hamlets, and sleep in family-run guesthouses hung above the drop, the river a constant roar far below. It has drawn walkers since the late 1980s and the trail is well marked and well fed, guesthouse to guesthouse, so a guide adds context and logistics rather than rescue. Late spring and autumn are clearest, with the summer rains left behind.

Dana to Petra is Region 6 of the 675km Jordan Trail and widely cited as the Middle East's finest multi-day walk: 72 to 80 kilometers over four to five days from the stone village above Dana Biosphere Reserve, Jordan's largest nature reserve, through Wadi Malaga and Little Petra, entering Petra itself through the back door. The route drops and climbs through sandstone canyons and Bedouin grazing country, camps are wild and supported, and the finish line is a World Heritage city you walk into rather than queue for. The Jordan Trail Association stewards the route and runs an annual guided spring thru-hike; the trail itself is free to walk.

Jebel Shams gives Oman its most spectacular walking. The mountain's rim drops sheer into Wadi Ghul, a canyon deep enough to earn the name the Grand Canyon of Arabia, and the classic hike, the Balcony Walk (route W6), threads a ledge partway down the cliff with the void falling away on one side the whole way. It is about four hours there and back over uneven rock, ending at the abandoned terraced village of Sab Bani Khamis tucked under an overhang, where a hidden pool still holds water. There is no summit scramble required and the exposure is manageable, so it suits fit walkers rather than technical mountaineers, yet the drops are real and the path is unfenced. Higher up, the plateau near the summit sits above 2,900 meters and can be bitterly cold, with the occasional dusting of frost in winter. Add village walks between old stone hamlets and terraced fields, and the mountain is a two- or three-day base rather than a single stop. It is best from October to April, when the heat down in the wadis has broken.

Jinshanling is the Great Wall hike serious walkers come for. Northeast of Beijing on the border with Hebei, it strings dozens of Ming watchtowers along a broken ridge, some restored, many crumbling, over roughly ten kilometers of steep brick and stone. Unlike the cable-car sections nearer the city, you walk here for hours with the wall mostly to yourself, dropping into saddles and climbing back to towers with long views over the folded hills. The classic longer outing links Gubeikou to Jinshanling and on toward Simatai West, a full day of ridge walking through some of the least touched wall left. Spring and autumn are the season: clear air, low sun on the towers, and none of the summer haze.

The Everest Base Camp trek is the definitive Himalayan teahouse walk: roughly 130km round trip over twelve to fourteen days, from the Lukla airstrip through Namche Bazaar and the Sherpa villages of the Khumbu to Base Camp at 5,364m and the Kala Patthar viewpoint at 5,644m, face to face with Everest, Lhotse, and Ama Dablam. The whole route lies inside Sagarmatha National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the lodge infrastructure has no equal anywhere at this altitude: you sleep in beds and eat dal bhat every night of a walk that tops out higher than any summit in western Europe. No technical skill is required; fitness and respect for acclimatization are the entire entry fee.

Masada is the great set-piece walk of the Judean Desert, and it pairs with the springs of Ein Gedi to make one of the finest desert hiking days in the country. The classic route climbs the Snake Path, a switchbacking trail up the eastern face of the mesa in around 45 minutes, timed to reach the summit as the sun lifts over the mountains of Jordan and floods the Dead Sea below. On top spread the ruins of Herod's first-century palace-fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where a Roman siege ended the Great Revolt in 73 CE and the earthworks of the besieging legion still ring the rock. A short drive north, the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve cuts green canyons of waterfalls and pools into the cliffs, where ibex and rock hyrax come down to drink and trails run from a short family loop to a demanding day. Add a float in the mineral-heavy Dead Sea, the lowest point of dry land on Earth, and you have desert, history and water in a single walk.

Makhtesh Ramon is the largest erosion crater on Earth, a 40-kilometer gash in the Negev highlands that is not a meteor or volcanic crater at all but a landform found almost only in this desert, carved as water stripped away a soft core and left a steep-walled amphitheater of colored rock. Trails drop from the rim town of Mitzpe Ramon into a floor of rainbow sandstone, volcanic dikes, ammonite fossils and the strange prisms of the Carpentry, and the Israel National Trail threads the length of it. Nubian ibex pick along the cliffs, and the crater sits inside one of the darkest reserves in the region, so a night in the makhtesh brings a sky thick with stars. This is desert walking at its most elemental, from a two-hour rim-to-floor descent to multi-day treks that link the crater to the springs of Ein Avdat and the Nabataean ruins along the ancient Incense Route. Spring brings brief desert blooms, and the light at dawn and dusk turns the walls gold and rust.

Mount Roraima is one of the world's great treks and one of the strangest landscapes on the planet. From the savanna of the Gran Sabana the tepui rises as a two-kilometer wall of rock, and the only walkable way up is a natural rock ramp on the southwest face, the route the Pemon have always used. The standard trip is six days from the village of Paraitepui: two days across open grassland and river crossings to a base camp under the wall, a hard climb up the ramp into the cloud, and two days exploring a summit world of wind-carved black rock, crystal-strewn valleys, quartz pools and tiny endemic plants and frogs found nowhere else. Nights are cold and camps are basic, tucked into rock overhangs called hotels. A licensed guide is mandatory and independent trekking is not allowed, so you go with a Pemon crew who carry, cook and read the mountain's fast-changing weather. Few places reward the effort like this one, and almost no one is up there with you.

The Simien Mountains are the great trek of Ethiopia, a UNESCO World Heritage range of thousand-meter escarpments, pinnacles and afro-alpine moorland that earns the local name Roof of Africa. You walk the rim from Sankaber to Geech to Chennek across several days, camping or using huts, with gelada monkeys grazing in troops a few meters away, walia ibex on the crags and, with luck, an Ethiopian wolf on the high plateau. Longer routes push up to Ras Dashen at 4,550 meters, the summit of Ethiopia and one of the highest points in Africa. National park rules require a licensed guide and an armed scout, so this is a place you trek with local people who know the escarpment and its wildlife.

Surama is where you walk Guyana's interior with the people who know it best. The signature hike is the pre-dawn climb of Surama Mountain, a steep pull through rainforest to a ridge that opens over the savannah just as the sun breaks and the mist lifts off the Pakaraima foothills, with red howler monkeys calling and cock-of-the-rock possible on the way up. Beyond the mountain, trails run from the village across savannah and into gallery forest for a chance at giant anteater, brocket deer and hundreds of birds, and a walk to the Burro Burro river links to canoe floats where giant otters and tapir come down to drink. What sets it apart is that this is Guyana's first community-owned lodge: the Makushi villagers guide every trek, and their forest knowledge, from medicinal plants to animal sign, turns a hike into a lesson. It is walking as cultural immersion, low-impact and locally led.

Troodos is where Cyprus goes vertical and green, and its nature trails are the best way to see it on foot. The signposted routes fan out around Chionistra, the summit of Mount Olympus at 1,952 meters, and each has its own character. The Artemis Trail circles the peak at around 1,800 meters through black pine and juniper with long views to both coasts, the Caledonia Trail drops along the Kryos Potamos stream to the island's highest waterfall, and the Atalante Trail starts from Troodos square and passes a drinkable mountain spring. The range is also a living museum: ten of its remote painted churches carry Byzantine frescoes protected as UNESCO World Heritage, and the lower villages are wine and orchard country. Spring brings endemic wildflowers found nowhere else on earth, autumn brings cool light and the grape harvest, and a local guide turns a walk into a reading of the geology, the plants and the mountain villages.

Fiji is known for its reefs, but the interior of Viti Levu is a green wall of grassland ridges, river valleys and cloud forest that almost no visitors see. Talanoa Treks, the country's only dedicated hiking company, opens it up on foot with the highland communities who live there. Routes cross the island's rolling grassland from village to village, sleeping in community bure, and take in the waterfall at Nabalasere, the heritage forest of Koroyanitu above Lautoka, and the climb up Mount Tomanivi, at 1324 meters Fiji's highest peak. The walking is as much cultural as physical: your guides are villagers who show you where they farm, hunt and fish, and each night is spent as a guest in an iTaukei village rather than a lodge.

Chinguetti is the classic starting point for a camel caravan trek into the Erg Ouarane, one of the great sand seas of the Sahara. The town itself is extraordinary, a thousand-year-old ksar of stone and mud on the desert's edge, but the reason to walk from here is the emptiness beyond it. On a multi-day mehariste trek you follow old caravan routes with a local guide and camels carrying the camp, walking through the cool of the morning and evening across dune fields, gravel plains and the occasional palm grove, and sleeping out under some of the darkest skies anywhere. There are no roads, no crowds and no noise, just the rhythm of the caravan and the shift of the light on the sand. It is a slow, physical way to travel that connects you to how the desert was always crossed, and it ends back among the libraries and lanes of Chinguetti. For a traveler after real remoteness and a taste of nomad life, this is the Sahara at its purest.

The Overland Track is a 65km, six-day traverse from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair through the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, run under one of the world's most structured trekking permit systems: in the booked season walking is one-way north to south, capped at 34 independent departures a day, and the summer permits sell out within hours of their July release. The discipline is the point; the track never feels crowded, and side trips to Mount Ossa, Tasmania's highest point, and a string of waterfalls stretch the fit. Licensed operators run parallel guided models from full-pack camping treks to the only private-hut lodge walk on the track, which is as close as trekking gets to first class.

The hike to Paro Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, is the walk that defines Bhutan. The monastery clings to a granite cliff about 900 meters above the Paro valley floor, at roughly 3,120 meters, on the spot where Guru Rinpoche is said to have flown in on a tigress and meditated in the eighth century. The trail climbs through blue-pine forest hung with prayer flags to a teahouse viewpoint, then drops and climbs a final stone staircase across a waterfall to the monastery gate. It is a half-day out and back, four to six hours, steep but non-technical, and the payoff is one of the most photographed sights in the Himalaya. Because everything in Bhutan is guided, you walk with a licensed guide who can read the murals and shrines inside once you reach the top.

Socotra is one of the most biologically isolated places on earth, an island cut off from the mainland for so long that about a third of its plant species grow nowhere else, which is why people call it the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. The signature is the dragon blood tree, Dracaena cinnabari, a slow-growing umbrella of a tree that bleeds red sap and forms whole forests on the misty Diksam plateau and at Firmihin. Alongside it grow bulbous bottle trees and desert roses clinging to bare rock. The way to see it is on foot, over several days, walking the plateau and the wadis and sleeping in simple camps, with side trips to the white sand and turquoise of the Detwah lagoon near Qalansiyah, the limestone chambers of Hoq Cave, and the freshwater pools and frankincense of the Homhil reserve. There are almost no other tourists, the guiding is entirely local, and the landscape looks like nowhere else. It is a hard place to reach and a harder country to enter, but for its own sake Socotra is one of the most extraordinary trekking destinations anywhere.

The Tadrart Acacus is one of the great open-air galleries of prehistoric art on earth, and you reach it on foot and by 4x4 across some of the most beautiful desert in the Sahara. Over thousands of years people painted and carved these canyon walls with herds of cattle, elephants, giraffe and hippo, with hunters, dancers and later the horses and camels that arrived as the land dried into desert. Walking among the panels near Ghat, camping under enormous skies with Tuareg guides, and crossing to the nearby engravings of Wadi Methkandoush and the dune-ringed lakes of the Ubari Sand Sea, is a way to feel the depth of that history rather than glance at it. The rock forms alone would justify the journey, natural arches and pinnacles weathered out of orange sandstone, but it is the art at eye level on the rock that makes the Acacus extraordinary. It is remote, permit-bound and hard-won, and for those few who reach it now, unforgettable.

Tassili n'Ajjer is the greatest open-air gallery of prehistoric art in the world, and the only way to see it properly is on foot. Across a high sandstone plateau the size of a small country, weathered into forests of rock, natural arches and slot canyons, are many thousands of engravings and paintings made over roughly twelve thousand years. They show a Sahara that was green: herds of cattle, elephants, giraffe and hippo, hunters with bows, dancers, and later the horses and camels that came as the land dried. Walking among them for several days, sleeping out under the plateau's enormous skies with Tuareg guides and camels carrying the camp, is a way to feel the depth of that history rather than glance at it. The landscape alone would justify the trip, with ancient cypresses that have survived millennia of drought and dunes running up against black rock, but it is the art, at eye level on the canyon walls, that makes this one of the most extraordinary treks anywhere. It is remote, hard-won and unforgettable.

Tsehlanyane is the most accessible good walking country in Lesotho, a national park in the northern Maloti with a proper network of marked trails rather than the open cross-country navigation the highlands usually demand. From the valley floor on the Hlotse River, routes range from the gentle Lower Trail to the Black Pool, an easy riverside walk, up to the demanding 16-kilometer Circular Route that climbs above 2,600 meters for long views over the Maluti range and down onto the che-che bush, one of the last indigenous woodlands left in a country that is otherwise almost treeless. The park is quiet, the air is thin and clean, and you share the paths with little more than the odd herd boy and his dogs. Most walkers base themselves at Maliba Lodge, Lesotho's only five-star mountain ecolodge, which sits at the trailheads and provides local guides who know the routes and can arrange the same trails on horseback. It is an easier, greener introduction to the Mountain Kingdom than the abseils and passes elsewhere, and a good base for multi-day walks deeper into the range.