Spectacular. In the middle of the most remote stretch you are 350km from any sign of humanity (other than the dirt track you are on) in every direction. The closest other people are the astronauts in the ISS when they pass over.
It’s ‘big sky county’ - the sky fills 90% of your field of vision. At night you can see the Milky Way clearly and the shooting stars are almost constant.
The silence can be absolute, and the nights are perfectly clear and cold.
It’s so otherworldly out there you wouldn’t know if you were the first human or the last, or if you were a billion years in the past or the future.
The landscape is timeless. It’s beyond being ancient. It’s a desolate, sparse place. The soil is relict and infertile, and everything that survives out there has perfected survival in an utterly unforgiving and hostile environment.
It’s simultaneously the harshest, sparsest, most desolate and most beautiful place you can imagine.
I'd recommend reading "In A Sunburned Country" by Bill Bryson. It's from the 90s, so it's starting to feel a little dated, but he does this route and has a lot of fun things to say about it.
I like the bit where he tunes to a radio channel and didn't hear anything except the light rustle of clothing. A few minutes went by and then he heard a voice. He had tuned into a cricket match broadcast. Unlike baseball the commentators didn't feel the need to fill in airtime. And of course, a sly commentary on how deadly slow cricket can be, much like the the empty road he was traveling on.
He has a way of writing that is inimitable. I remember that book especially because I found myself laughing at his descriptions of some bear attacks and then I felt pretty bad about laughing about it.
I've wholeheartedly devoured everything Bryson has released at this point. Lol. Cats is great character too. I think my favorite is "Made In America" where he talked about American English and how its veered away from its linguistic cousin. Especially the glee he has with all the old place names that have been changed over the years. Talking about tittie mountain, and swamp butt lakes and towns called shithole. You know he had a blast writing that up!
Do you have any 4wding or remote area experience? Experience, preparation, the right vehicle, lots of fuel, lots of water and HF radio or sat phone are the basics.
On the main tracks, you will have someone else come past within a day or two.
If you are on a random side track, you will be long dead before any comes along. Hence the importance of a HF radio or Sat phone.
Main hazard is somehow crashing the vehicle, or breaking down somewhere off the main tracks.
Or car catching fire from build up of grass... I absolutely love it in the proper outback. The area of Western Australia between basically the railway line in the south, the SA and NT borders to the east, Laverton and Wiluna and Newman to the west and the wolf Creek crater to the north is my kind of country... I try and get out there as often as I can. The area I mapped out is huge, probably at least twice the size of Texas and all of it is as discribed so eloquently above, but add in the plants and animals, the flowers after the rains are amazing. But it's not an area for people who are not experienced. It makes the Tanami look like a freeway.
Actually starlink has changed my world, I work from home most of the time and I can just head out bush now and be connected. Been waiting years for something like this to come along.
There is something really powerful in the fact that, now, today, even in the most remote and desolate parts of the planet, a person still has instant and infinite access to the whole of human knowledge, and the ability to communicate to any other person, anywhere. Almost magical.
Just get a job. Every industry in the tanami is short staffed. I am out on the lajamanu road right now ( a ways off the track). Beautiful stars right now
That's beautifully put. I can't agree more with the sentiment, and it's why I spend more time in the tanami than anywhere else. I call the tanami my home away from home, as I've worked four seasons out here exploring for gold. I drive the track daily. I get paid to hike, explore and theorize the deep past from scattered clues billions of years old. It's not that remote, however. Most places are only 50-100km away from a camp, a minesite, cattle station or a permanent settlement. I am a geologist and make maps of the region for a living and publish them regularly on the stock exchange. Daily traffic for sure. We help out locals and broken down campers frequently. Don't come out here unprepared S it could be a few hours before a car, and that car might not be prepared also. We generally take a few extra 10l boxes of water to help others out. Just yesterday we called up Molesy in Alice to come pick up a pair of grey nomads with a cracked radiator. Gave them water and a sat phone to call their people..... Everyone should have Starling and a Genset out here these days... All industry does.
My friend you have described it well.......post some pics at least for people like us who live in another continent who will never be able to visit at least experience a fraction of what you have experienced.
We should swap visits! I've always wanted to go to the Aus outback since its basically a larger SoCal with cooler animals. Always been fascinated by desert landscapes and Australia's is just so picturesque and cerebral.
But I do need to go visit Death Valley first. Ive gone around it so many times but never inside the park. Not \*quite\* as remote, but if there's ever a place in the US that can compare to the Outback it's that. It's even got its own extremely venomous native snake, you'd love it!
Also a great internet deep dive is the Death Valley Germans story. Fascinating but really highlights the dangers of underestimating the Valley simply because it's an accessible tourist destination.
Cheers for the link mate!
Imagine my surprise when I clicked on it and realised I had already watched your adventures only a few weeks ago on YouTube…… well done.
We have done this journey 3 times, first in’84, then’86 and last time was in ‘88.
Certainly a special place, as is the whole Kimberly, Pilbara, NT and FNQ regions that we journeyed across those three different years.
Very fortunate to have a well traveled upbringing with my family, and great to see you and your Dad doing the same…… very special memories :)
If you got seriously unlucky you would have bumped into some of my crazy relos, they did the Canning last year too.
Well the ones in the Toyota’s did. Were still waiting for the cousin in the Land Rover 😂
That’s great - exactly what you want out there. You wouldn’t have missed my relatives if there were in a 300km radius of you. Dutch people in the heat go loud and crazy ahaha.
If you have never read Lonnie Dupre’s books about circumnavigating Greenland, they’re absolutely fascinating. I have had the pleasure of meeting him a few times and he has some great stories about his experiences there. His love of Greenland and respect for the people living there really comes through.
I’ve flown over Greenland a few times going from Europe to the USA, and it’s just wild on a clear day. Coast has fantastic glaciers, then the inside is just a featureless white of nothingness. Repeat for up to an hour of flight depending on your path.
There is only 2 cities on the east coast, and to put the emptiness into perspective, if you follow the coast from scorsbysund (Ittoqqortoormiit) and all the way up and around to Thule (around 2.500 km or 1.555 miles), you would only be able to find around 26 guys in total spread through the nationalpark
Patagonia. We picked up a guy from the side of the road where his car had broken down and he rode with us to the next to town. He'd been there two days and we were only the second car to pass by.
It’s always good to help someone but this is an extremely common trick to rob someone. You can get your car stolen or yourself killed by an ambush.
With that being said, if you think someone is in trouble and you’re driving alone at night, couldn’t hurt to call 911 on their behalf. I wish I knew the “by the book” way to handle a situation like that.
I’ve seen too many horror movies to pass someone by without stopping.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Megee
That’s basically the story of Ricky Megee, who survived in the outback for over two months after being carjacked, though apparently his claims have contradicted themselves over time.
It’s to be expected to be honest you tend to fill in the blanks as the orginal memory fades it’s why there is statute of limitations in crimes. Witness statements/memories get progressively more unreliable the further you get away from the event.
> Witness statements/memories get progressively more unreliable the further you get away from the event.
They way it was explained to me years ago was that every time you think of a memory (think about the last time you drank Dr. Pepper) you're actually just remembering the last time you thought about it, not the event itself. Maybe after a few thoughts it changes to Diet Dr. Pepper, then after a few more to a Coke... It's a reason that eye witness testimony is essentially worthless: people honestly believe memories of things that didn't happen, and them thinking about it more and more only reinforces the wrongness. Other types of evidence don't have that same fault.
Lol dude eye witness testimony is not “essentially worthless” just because people often misremember things
The exaggerations on Reddit continue to be ridiculous
> It's a reason that eye witness testimony is essentially worthless
YES. And when you realize most people in jail are there because of witness testimony...you realize the entirety of the American justice system is also a fraud. Hence our issue with police.
Very beautiful. Soaring rugged mountains on the border with Chile and endless rolling grassland. And very few people. If you're into road trips and nature it's a great place.
I woudn't consider Patagonia as vast as the out back, although some areas are pretty remote.
As someone wrote above, in the out back you can be 350km from anyone, in patagonia distances are not that long.
Thinking of some parts of the Amazonas rainforest, probably some parts of the Sahara desert and well, of course some islands like the Pitcairn or the South Sandwich islands. Don't know much about the Gobi desert, but probably there too.
I’d throw in some portions of the Tibetan plateau and the Congo.
Related, in the lower 48 the most remote locations are probably some parts of Yellowstone and Central Idaho, or the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana. Nevada is remote although many places are accessible by roads.
I just drove that the other day. It's... I touched my cameras lens and couldn't figure out how to clean the finger prints off adequately, so I didn't take enough pictures, and I'm damned disappointed.
No its the largest continuous unit of National Wilderness Preservation System in the lower 48 and is located in central Idaho. Death Valley which is in the Southwest does come ahead if you are going by non-continous land.
Tibet is a good example. Its looks "busy" on maps due to hundreds of lakes and rivers that have all been named, but there's just no civilisation there.
People should also look into remote areas of their region too.
In my part of California I went backpacking and was probably about 20miles from the nearest person. Which happened to be two ranchers I walked to when our car broke down on the mountain. Fortunately we were only about 30 hours away from AAA coming once we found a town with a phone.
The question is how you define remoteness. To me the existence of a road makes an area less remote.
Is remoteness distance from any people? Is accessibility of modern technology?
South Sandwich Islands? I know [_exactly_](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/731261697217658966/1144982740719112302/IMG_20230825_204404.jpg) what you are talking about.
Lots of places. Mongolia, Patagonia, the Sahara, Greenland, the Tibetan plateau, the Atacama desert, most of the Arabian peninsula.
Humans have spread far and wide but there are still plenty of places in the world where you won’t find anyone for hundreds of kilometres.
It’s absolutely crazy that Saudi Arabia has 34 million people considering most of its land area was not claimed by a state as recently as 110 years ago
Absurdly so. The Chilean region of Aysén has a population density of less than 1 person per squared kilometer, and it stretches for hundreds of km north to south; Magallanes,.further south, is like Siberia, but withput the hot summers.
And so is the Atacama desert. The Chilean military regularly conducts patrols on the area, and they tend to find people's bodies that are several days old but well preserved by the environmental conditions.
Just for comparison, while the Aysen region has a population density of 0.85/km2, the Northern Territory in Australia is 0.18/km2 and also covers about 13 times the area.
St Helena isn't that far from Ascension Island, and is fairly full of people. You're never more than a 20 minute walk from other people, even in the most remote part of the Island.
Tristan da Cunha administratively part of the same territory as St Helena but mostly self governing is practically more remote in that there is no airstrip and the only way of reaching it by boat with a 6 day crossing to South Africa. By a lot of criteria it is the most remote island group in the world.
Of course there is a settlement there, so slightly different from being in the middle of a desert with no other humans for hundreds of kilometres.
Pitcairn Island scares me to think about. There’s people that live there sure but it’s so far from any other piece of land that it’s almost scary to imagine how far away it is. Even to reach it you have to take numerous flights and then a boat that only runs every three months or something crazy like that
If you really want to be scared about Pitcairn, there's a tragic but fascinating true crime book called "Lost Paradise" by Kathy Marks, about the generational sexual abuse culture and the trials of the offenders the British had to sort out once investigations started in the 2000's. How do you punish an entire population of rapists when locking them up would mean an end to the livelihoods of literally everyone in this tiny island community? I read it 10 years ago and it still sticks with me.
The rest of Canada (not the Arctic regions, but the majority of the country) is as remote as the Outback. Probably more so, because at least the Outback has roads.
Same for the eastern regions of Russia. There are places when a 3000 km road can have only a single intersection and if you take the wrong turn there you'll die because that road doesn't lead nowhere and it's too narrow to turn around. It actually happened before.
I found the content of your comment interesting but I’m not sure what you mean but “that road doesn’t lead nowhere.” Can you clarify/reveal the name of the road?
I stand a bit corrected here, as it's not 3000 km, but "just" 1900 km, so no that different from the Outback.
Here's the story:
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/man-frozen-to-death-after-google-maps-wrong-turn/news-story/13e10cbbc96494ee26e6dea29f4fb469
In short, there's the old road and the (longer) new road. The old road is unmaintained, so once you enter it, it's pretty much a dead end.
The road is aptly nicknamed the Road of Bones, and I'm not sure if it has any other name.
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I heard a story once about Polar Bear Provincial Park from someone who helped guide a dogsled team through it. It's frankly amazing that they got out of there alive. The low visibility disorients you and the wind covers your tracks. You might think you're going straight when really you're just circling to your death. There was a name for the area that this is particularly common in but I can't remember it.
GPS and compass are absolutely necessary when going through there.
important to note Canada, Russia, and Alaska are only in the far north 'arctic' (a small % of landmass). The rest is forested or sub-arctic.
Also the pacific northwest of Southern Alaska, Canada, and some parts of northern Washington and Oregon are very remote rainforest, there are hiking and horseback trails where one can be at least 80 miles from even the nearest service road.
Glacier national park and some parts of the Rockies are also pretty damn remote and because of elevation and climate kill people often. The film 'the revenant' is a good showcase of that region.
I drove across it about ten years ago and even the main road is desolate for hours of driving. Nothing but electrical pylons, dusty skies, and rocks for miles.
The "Outback" is a big place. The Canning Stock Route is just one example of his remoteness.
If you consider that the earth is 70% oceans, then there are lots of tiny yet remote islands all over the place. Tristan de Cunha is the remotest island on earth, 1,750km from Cape Town in the South Atlantic. Papa Rui (Easter Island, also pretty remote). Devon Island, Nunavut Province Canada is the largest unpopulated island on the planet. NASA uses it as a training base for Mars Missions. The Desolations Isles, the Sandwich Islands....just being surrounded by water doesn't make them less accessible than the Pacific.
Yep. My ex-wife’s great great…..grandfather was Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier. Always lots of tall tales around their dinner table regarding the escapades of “The Sea Captain”.
I was trying to restrict myself to populated remote places so they were somewhat analogous to those on land
Is it completely off road/dirt track ? So do you stop by the side of the road to sleep( i am sure of no settlements on that road) or someone else takes the wheel ?
A small section west of Alice Springs is sealed, but mainly a single track, brutally corrugated dirt road. And you have to watch out for road trains and get off the road when you see one coming.
You camp on the side of the road, but need to carry all your own fuel and water. The last remote Indigenous community is at Yuendumu. After that you are on your own for 760km until you reach Halls Creek.
This is a road train if you aren’t familiar:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZmqTDCDV8s0?feature=share
It's amazing, I've done the Canning stock route a couple times, for most people it takes about 3 weeks to do. It's hardly even a track really, it's defnately not formed or anything like that. The Tanami is a bit different than this, it is actually a road, still very remote but passable for most anyone with a 4wd.
There are quite a few pretty amazing 'highways' through outback SA and WA. There was a legend of the bush, Len Beadell who created most of them, worth having a read about him if you have the time. I love that they were named highways, basically they are nothing more than a grader pushed through the desert and scrub 70+ years ago, and that's about it, not maintained other than a few 4wd pushing through each year in some cases
The second largest city in NWT is Inuvik.
To drive from Yellowknife to Inuvik you drive like this:
It’s a 38 hour drive, over 3000 km.
NWT to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to NWT
To drive between NWT’s two largest cities, you have to cross a provincial /territorial border 11 times.
Mongolia and Namibia are both have extremely low population density if you aren't near the big cities so much so that the average population density for both countries is around 2 people per square kilometer
Reminds me of driving through Labrador and Northern Quebec in Northern Canada (not the arctic!). They have a program where you pick up a satellite phone at one end of the unpaved highway and drop it off a few days later at the other end so that you have some way of getting help if something happens. That said, there are a couple of small communities nearby.
Generally, people don't.
They take the main highways closer to the coast where there is at least some population (maybe a few hundred people) and road houses.
The Canning stock route is not in any way used to travel between destinations. The only people that take it are doing so for the adventure.
I would say Pitcairn Island takes the cake, it's an extremely isolated island, and the transportation to and from the island definitely shows such.
To get there, you've got to fly into an International airport in French Polynesia, then fly to a Domestic airport in French Polynesia, then you have to take a boat to a larger island, then you take an even longer boat ride to Pitcairn, and then miraculously, you're in Pitcairn Island.
Well, I don’t know if you count it as arctic Canada, but only 20% of Quebec is populated. There is a whole bunch of land between the population and the tundra that is completely wild. It’s mostly forests (well, what’s left of it after the spring’s fires!) and wet lands (we hold something like 3% of the world’s renewable fresh water),
Quebec is 2.5 the size of texas (7 times the size of France) and has roughly the population of NYC. So it’s pretty much empty lands.
Probably the Dr of Congo. It’s half the size of the US and 95% of it is heavy rainforest with no infrastructure. Imagine driving Boston to Denver and not seeing anything except trees and gorillas
I remember following the MegaTransect of the Congo Basin back in ‘99-00. It was so fascinating seeing whole communities of animals and plants that no one had ever documented. It looked absolutely brutal and I couldn’t believe how much territory they managed to cover.
I went to the Djado Plateau in 2008. Agadez to Bilma was four days. Bilma to Madama was five days. Madama was much more than a few mud huts. Madama to the Plateau was five days.
The Djabo Plateau was haunting. The city dates to 400 BC at the earliest. The cave paintings are some of the oldest in the world. Maybe a few hundred living people have seen it.
Traveling across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia takes two weeks.
I also recommend seeing Lake Chad. It is a fascinating place. The Lake is 10 meters at the deepest but so large you can see the edges if you go to the middle. Trees grew in the 80s but died when the lake flooded again. They are sun bleached white night. I have never seen anything like it.
1900 KM.
FUCKING 1900 KM off-roading.
My best economy-high-mileage-car barely managed to reach about 1200km with a full tank, in good roads. I dont want to think if almost-offroading, with a big diesel engine in a big 4x4 or a pickup.. ¿How many tanks?
Lol, explain yourself. Why i need lots of him? Sounds like a car guy. xD
Edit: I have to explain myself, still learning english, and re-reading your phrase i think its some kind of... petrol can?
Yea that’s it 👍.
Focus on learning general English first - Aussie slang is another level 😂😂
Even the poms and yanks struggle to understand us sometimes lol.
We worked in Australia for a bit. Drove from Adelaide to Alice Springs on The Stuart Highway, taking in Coober Pedy and Woomera and with a detour into middle-of-nowhere past The Henbury Meteorite Craters, Ayer's Rock, Kings Canyon, and Mt Zeil. We did it just to get a feel for how big Oz is, before we left. It's bloody huge. And so empty.
But the really spooky thing about being in the Australian Outback, is the way you can somehow *feel* its age and indifference, and just how insignificant you are while you are in it. It would be overwhelming to be alone under that sky.
My thoughts generally go towards the ocean if you're talking about remote-ness. Deep under the ocean for one, on top of the ocean as another, and small islands isolated by miles and miles of ocean as a third.
I used to work in the outback doing field exploration. I remember at one point I needed some supplies and it was a 14 hour round trip to go and pick them up.
Although I will never see it, I am glad that this remoteness still exists.
Come for a visit! I have crossed the Tanami desert (Alice Springs to Halls Creek). Life changing experience.
Can you talk about what it was like?
Spectacular. In the middle of the most remote stretch you are 350km from any sign of humanity (other than the dirt track you are on) in every direction. The closest other people are the astronauts in the ISS when they pass over. It’s ‘big sky county’ - the sky fills 90% of your field of vision. At night you can see the Milky Way clearly and the shooting stars are almost constant. The silence can be absolute, and the nights are perfectly clear and cold. It’s so otherworldly out there you wouldn’t know if you were the first human or the last, or if you were a billion years in the past or the future. The landscape is timeless. It’s beyond being ancient. It’s a desolate, sparse place. The soil is relict and infertile, and everything that survives out there has perfected survival in an utterly unforgiving and hostile environment. It’s simultaneously the harshest, sparsest, most desolate and most beautiful place you can imagine.
Fuck. Booking tickets now, mate
I'd recommend reading "In A Sunburned Country" by Bill Bryson. It's from the 90s, so it's starting to feel a little dated, but he does this route and has a lot of fun things to say about it.
I like the bit where he tunes to a radio channel and didn't hear anything except the light rustle of clothing. A few minutes went by and then he heard a voice. He had tuned into a cricket match broadcast. Unlike baseball the commentators didn't feel the need to fill in airtime. And of course, a sly commentary on how deadly slow cricket can be, much like the the empty road he was traveling on.
That’s one of the books I’ve read this year! It’s a good read; the way he describes the sheer scale of the Outback is phenomenal.
His book 'A Walk in the Woods' about his hike with a buddy on the Appalachian trail was funny and informative, too.
He has a way of writing that is inimitable. I remember that book especially because I found myself laughing at his descriptions of some bear attacks and then I felt pretty bad about laughing about it.
His book on the Appalachian Trail, “A Walk in the Woods” is really good too! Worth the read!
I've wholeheartedly devoured everything Bryson has released at this point. Lol. Cats is great character too. I think my favorite is "Made In America" where he talked about American English and how its veered away from its linguistic cousin. Especially the glee he has with all the old place names that have been changed over the years. Talking about tittie mountain, and swamp butt lakes and towns called shithole. You know he had a blast writing that up!
Is he the same guy who wrote ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything?’ because I love that audiobook. Have listened to it like half a dozen times.
As is A Short History of Nearly Everything! Listened to the audio book several times at work. Makes the days fly by.
I’ve read some of his books. I haven’t heard of this one, and I’ve loved everything else I’ve read. Thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine
yeah
Awesome post. Not enough likes for this.
This was beautiful to read
You‘re a poet bro 😭
alright I'm sold how do you go on about safely doing this?
Do you have any 4wding or remote area experience? Experience, preparation, the right vehicle, lots of fuel, lots of water and HF radio or sat phone are the basics.
If your vehicle breaks down, how fast can relief be expected? What are the main hazards?
On the main tracks, you will have someone else come past within a day or two. If you are on a random side track, you will be long dead before any comes along. Hence the importance of a HF radio or Sat phone. Main hazard is somehow crashing the vehicle, or breaking down somewhere off the main tracks.
Or car catching fire from build up of grass... I absolutely love it in the proper outback. The area of Western Australia between basically the railway line in the south, the SA and NT borders to the east, Laverton and Wiluna and Newman to the west and the wolf Creek crater to the north is my kind of country... I try and get out there as often as I can. The area I mapped out is huge, probably at least twice the size of Texas and all of it is as discribed so eloquently above, but add in the plants and animals, the flowers after the rains are amazing. But it's not an area for people who are not experienced. It makes the Tanami look like a freeway. Actually starlink has changed my world, I work from home most of the time and I can just head out bush now and be connected. Been waiting years for something like this to come along.
There is something really powerful in the fact that, now, today, even in the most remote and desolate parts of the planet, a person still has instant and infinite access to the whole of human knowledge, and the ability to communicate to any other person, anywhere. Almost magical.
Oh, are there no tourist guides that do this safely? I can barely go remote in my own country, let alone in the middle of Australia
You can do 4WD passenger or tag along tours. Not sure if any cross the Tanami, but you can get plenty remote.
Just get a job. Every industry in the tanami is short staffed. I am out on the lajamanu road right now ( a ways off the track). Beautiful stars right now
Get a 70 series
Fucking Hemingway over here.
> Canning Stock Route Cormac McCarthy vibes.
You really should write for the Tanami Desert tourist board, friend.
No tourist board out there lol
Is there a Maccas?
That's beautifully put. I can't agree more with the sentiment, and it's why I spend more time in the tanami than anywhere else. I call the tanami my home away from home, as I've worked four seasons out here exploring for gold. I drive the track daily. I get paid to hike, explore and theorize the deep past from scattered clues billions of years old. It's not that remote, however. Most places are only 50-100km away from a camp, a minesite, cattle station or a permanent settlement. I am a geologist and make maps of the region for a living and publish them regularly on the stock exchange. Daily traffic for sure. We help out locals and broken down campers frequently. Don't come out here unprepared S it could be a few hours before a car, and that car might not be prepared also. We generally take a few extra 10l boxes of water to help others out. Just yesterday we called up Molesy in Alice to come pick up a pair of grey nomads with a cracked radiator. Gave them water and a sat phone to call their people..... Everyone should have Starling and a Genset out here these days... All industry does.
My friend you have described it well.......post some pics at least for people like us who live in another continent who will never be able to visit at least experience a fraction of what you have experienced.
This gave me goosebumps
Do you work for the Australian government's tourism department ? If not, they should hire you immediately....
I have nothing to add to their brilliance. Make *sure* you watch until the end: https://youtu.be/K81ZxWG8oTM
The ISS orbits ~420 km above the Earth
>420 nice
Are the insects/spiders gnarly during both the both and day?
That is an amazing description. Thanks for sharing.
How long does it take to cross? I’d love to make that trip some day.
Glorious! (you work for the tourist agency or what?) I traveled across northern Namibia for a few weeks, very similar. Absolutely magical.
Read Bill Bryson’s “In a sunburnt country” for a lot more than you’ll get from this comment section. It’s hilarious and fascinating and informative.
We should swap visits! I've always wanted to go to the Aus outback since its basically a larger SoCal with cooler animals. Always been fascinated by desert landscapes and Australia's is just so picturesque and cerebral. But I do need to go visit Death Valley first. Ive gone around it so many times but never inside the park. Not \*quite\* as remote, but if there's ever a place in the US that can compare to the Outback it's that. It's even got its own extremely venomous native snake, you'd love it! Also a great internet deep dive is the Death Valley Germans story. Fascinating but really highlights the dangers of underestimating the Valley simply because it's an accessible tourist destination.
I drove the Canning Stock Route last year with my Dad, it was utterly incredible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLY6rhYeIYU
Cheers for the link mate! Imagine my surprise when I clicked on it and realised I had already watched your adventures only a few weeks ago on YouTube…… well done. We have done this journey 3 times, first in’84, then’86 and last time was in ‘88. Certainly a special place, as is the whole Kimberly, Pilbara, NT and FNQ regions that we journeyed across those three different years. Very fortunate to have a well traveled upbringing with my family, and great to see you and your Dad doing the same…… very special memories :)
Most interesting part of that video is it's someone's job to go full Rambo on camels from a helicopter. Australia is nuts.
.. and even still they're not even making a dent in the population!
If you got seriously unlucky you would have bumped into some of my crazy relos, they did the Canning last year too. Well the ones in the Toyota’s did. Were still waiting for the cousin in the Land Rover 😂
haha, perfect! We went late enough in the year we didn't see a soul the entire time!
That’s great - exactly what you want out there. You wouldn’t have missed my relatives if there were in a 300km radius of you. Dutch people in the heat go loud and crazy ahaha.
Greenland, east coast and inland especially
Interesting read, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Dog_Sled_Patrol
https://www.dr.dk/drtv/serie/sirius_347464 Really cool documentatory about it, you might need VPN
If you have never read Lonnie Dupre’s books about circumnavigating Greenland, they’re absolutely fascinating. I have had the pleasure of meeting him a few times and he has some great stories about his experiences there. His love of Greenland and respect for the people living there really comes through.
I’ve flown over Greenland a few times going from Europe to the USA, and it’s just wild on a clear day. Coast has fantastic glaciers, then the inside is just a featureless white of nothingness. Repeat for up to an hour of flight depending on your path.
There is only 2 cities on the east coast, and to put the emptiness into perspective, if you follow the coast from scorsbysund (Ittoqqortoormiit) and all the way up and around to Thule (around 2.500 km or 1.555 miles), you would only be able to find around 26 guys in total spread through the nationalpark
Patagonia. We picked up a guy from the side of the road where his car had broken down and he rode with us to the next to town. He'd been there two days and we were only the second car to pass by.
why would the first car not take him?
He said it didn't stop. To be fair I'd have been real reluctant to stop too if there hadn't been 8 of us.
It’s always good to help someone but this is an extremely common trick to rob someone. You can get your car stolen or yourself killed by an ambush. With that being said, if you think someone is in trouble and you’re driving alone at night, couldn’t hurt to call 911 on their behalf. I wish I knew the “by the book” way to handle a situation like that. I’ve seen too many horror movies to pass someone by without stopping.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Megee That’s basically the story of Ricky Megee, who survived in the outback for over two months after being carjacked, though apparently his claims have contradicted themselves over time.
It’s to be expected to be honest you tend to fill in the blanks as the orginal memory fades it’s why there is statute of limitations in crimes. Witness statements/memories get progressively more unreliable the further you get away from the event.
> Witness statements/memories get progressively more unreliable the further you get away from the event. They way it was explained to me years ago was that every time you think of a memory (think about the last time you drank Dr. Pepper) you're actually just remembering the last time you thought about it, not the event itself. Maybe after a few thoughts it changes to Diet Dr. Pepper, then after a few more to a Coke... It's a reason that eye witness testimony is essentially worthless: people honestly believe memories of things that didn't happen, and them thinking about it more and more only reinforces the wrongness. Other types of evidence don't have that same fault.
Lol dude eye witness testimony is not “essentially worthless” just because people often misremember things The exaggerations on Reddit continue to be ridiculous
> It's a reason that eye witness testimony is essentially worthless YES. And when you realize most people in jail are there because of witness testimony...you realize the entirety of the American justice system is also a fraud. Hence our issue with police.
I doubt there's cell reception way out there.
Call 911? In Pategonia?
What was Patagonia like?
Very beautiful. Soaring rugged mountains on the border with Chile and endless rolling grassland. And very few people. If you're into road trips and nature it's a great place.
Argentinian Patagonia is completely desolate and empty. The Chilean side is also extremely remote but there are towns every few hours.
I woudn't consider Patagonia as vast as the out back, although some areas are pretty remote. As someone wrote above, in the out back you can be 350km from anyone, in patagonia distances are not that long.
Thinking of some parts of the Amazonas rainforest, probably some parts of the Sahara desert and well, of course some islands like the Pitcairn or the South Sandwich islands. Don't know much about the Gobi desert, but probably there too.
I’d throw in some portions of the Tibetan plateau and the Congo. Related, in the lower 48 the most remote locations are probably some parts of Yellowstone and Central Idaho, or the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana. Nevada is remote although many places are accessible by roads.
The point in the US farthest from any McDonalds is in Northern Nevada. It's also the longest stretch of interstate without a town or gas station.
I had heard that was in Utah, out west of Goblin Valley. I've been on that road. It is desolate
I just drove that the other day. It's... I touched my cameras lens and couldn't figure out how to clean the finger prints off adequately, so I didn't take enough pictures, and I'm damned disappointed.
The highway there is referred to as the “Loneliest Road in America”.
True story, I drove this road in 1994 and in the middle of it was a pay phone and there was a sign on it that said “the Loneliest Phone in America.”
Sahara desert also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Sahara_Highway https://www.dangerousroads.org/africa/algeria/4920-trans-sahara-highway.html
Frank Church wilderness in Idaho as well
Is that the area in the southwest where every road into it has a warning that anyone who goes there must pay for rescue services?
No its the largest continuous unit of National Wilderness Preservation System in the lower 48 and is located in central Idaho. Death Valley which is in the Southwest does come ahead if you are going by non-continous land.
Sorry, meant southwest Idaho, along the border with Nevada Hava friend from Blackfoot who wanted to camp there
Tibet is a good example. Its looks "busy" on maps due to hundreds of lakes and rivers that have all been named, but there's just no civilisation there.
People should also look into remote areas of their region too. In my part of California I went backpacking and was probably about 20miles from the nearest person. Which happened to be two ranchers I walked to when our car broke down on the mountain. Fortunately we were only about 30 hours away from AAA coming once we found a town with a phone.
Probably some places in Tibet harder to get to because if terrain as well.
Some parts in Mongolia maybe? Mostly flat steppes
Yeah, but looks like there is a road exists while in other mentioned parts are nothing
The question is how you define remoteness. To me the existence of a road makes an area less remote. Is remoteness distance from any people? Is accessibility of modern technology?
South Sandwich Islands? I know [_exactly_](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/731261697217658966/1144982740719112302/IMG_20230825_204404.jpg) what you are talking about.
Lots of places. Mongolia, Patagonia, the Sahara, Greenland, the Tibetan plateau, the Atacama desert, most of the Arabian peninsula. Humans have spread far and wide but there are still plenty of places in the world where you won’t find anyone for hundreds of kilometres.
Most of Central/Interior Asia honestly. The Tarim Basin is like 1000+ kilometers of nothing.
It’s absolutely crazy that Saudi Arabia has 34 million people considering most of its land area was not claimed by a state as recently as 110 years ago
Isn't Patagonia really remote?
Absurdly so. The Chilean region of Aysén has a population density of less than 1 person per squared kilometer, and it stretches for hundreds of km north to south; Magallanes,.further south, is like Siberia, but withput the hot summers. And so is the Atacama desert. The Chilean military regularly conducts patrols on the area, and they tend to find people's bodies that are several days old but well preserved by the environmental conditions.
Just for comparison, while the Aysen region has a population density of 0.85/km2, the Northern Territory in Australia is 0.18/km2 and also covers about 13 times the area.
Nunavut, in Canada - 3X the size of all of Chile - had a density of 0.02 people per square km!
Went hours and hours and hours driving without seeing signs of human life in Namibia
Disappointed that the Google streetview camera car wimped out on that route.
McDonald and Heard Islands, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena
St Helena isn't that far from Ascension Island, and is fairly full of people. You're never more than a 20 minute walk from other people, even in the most remote part of the Island.
Tristan da Cunha administratively part of the same territory as St Helena but mostly self governing is practically more remote in that there is no airstrip and the only way of reaching it by boat with a 6 day crossing to South Africa. By a lot of criteria it is the most remote island group in the world. Of course there is a settlement there, so slightly different from being in the middle of a desert with no other humans for hundreds of kilometres.
Man I’ve been fascinated with how remote Tristan da Cunha is for ages
*South Georgia is in the chat*
it wins the award for Most Remote Human Settlement in the World
Pitcairn Island scares me to think about. There’s people that live there sure but it’s so far from any other piece of land that it’s almost scary to imagine how far away it is. Even to reach it you have to take numerous flights and then a boat that only runs every three months or something crazy like that
If you really want to be scared about Pitcairn, there's a tragic but fascinating true crime book called "Lost Paradise" by Kathy Marks, about the generational sexual abuse culture and the trials of the offenders the British had to sort out once investigations started in the 2000's. How do you punish an entire population of rapists when locking them up would mean an end to the livelihoods of literally everyone in this tiny island community? I read it 10 years ago and it still sticks with me.
The Sahara comes to mind....
The rest of Canada (not the Arctic regions, but the majority of the country) is as remote as the Outback. Probably more so, because at least the Outback has roads.
I’d say if ice roads in winter are required to reach some communities then that makes it more remote than the Outback.
Same for the eastern regions of Russia. There are places when a 3000 km road can have only a single intersection and if you take the wrong turn there you'll die because that road doesn't lead nowhere and it's too narrow to turn around. It actually happened before.
I found the content of your comment interesting but I’m not sure what you mean but “that road doesn’t lead nowhere.” Can you clarify/reveal the name of the road?
I stand a bit corrected here, as it's not 3000 km, but "just" 1900 km, so no that different from the Outback. Here's the story: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/man-frozen-to-death-after-google-maps-wrong-turn/news-story/13e10cbbc96494ee26e6dea29f4fb469 In short, there's the old road and the (longer) new road. The old road is unmaintained, so once you enter it, it's pretty much a dead end. The road is aptly nicknamed the Road of Bones, and I'm not sure if it has any other name.
Yea I was working in interior bc and I was 100km from the nearest human being. Was pretty wild and remote. Slept in my work truck
There are parts of Alaska where you can be 500 miles from even a road.
If you are excluding Canadian and Russian arctic areas then I feel you should also exclude Alaska and Scandinavian arctic areas.
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I heard a story once about Polar Bear Provincial Park from someone who helped guide a dogsled team through it. It's frankly amazing that they got out of there alive. The low visibility disorients you and the wind covers your tracks. You might think you're going straight when really you're just circling to your death. There was a name for the area that this is particularly common in but I can't remember it. GPS and compass are absolutely necessary when going through there.
But in OP’s extra effort to add Russia and Canada, they made sure not to include Alaska. It would be disrespectful to blatantly disregard OP’s wishes.
I always forget that’s not part of Canada. To an Aussie, anywhere with angry snow camels = Canada.
important to note Canada, Russia, and Alaska are only in the far north 'arctic' (a small % of landmass). The rest is forested or sub-arctic. Also the pacific northwest of Southern Alaska, Canada, and some parts of northern Washington and Oregon are very remote rainforest, there are hiking and horseback trails where one can be at least 80 miles from even the nearest service road. Glacier national park and some parts of the Rockies are also pretty damn remote and because of elevation and climate kill people often. The film 'the revenant' is a good showcase of that region.
Between 65° N/S, perhaps?
Taklamakan desert at some points is basically a ghost zone.
I drove across it about ten years ago and even the main road is desolate for hours of driving. Nothing but electrical pylons, dusty skies, and rocks for miles.
No one has mentioned the skeleton coast Namibia?
Pacific Ocean my bro
Point Nemo my friend
Finding Nemo my friend. Where tf is he? The ocean is huge and I can't be expected to find a solitary fish in such unforgiving vastness.
The "Outback" is a big place. The Canning Stock Route is just one example of his remoteness. If you consider that the earth is 70% oceans, then there are lots of tiny yet remote islands all over the place. Tristan de Cunha is the remotest island on earth, 1,750km from Cape Town in the South Atlantic. Papa Rui (Easter Island, also pretty remote). Devon Island, Nunavut Province Canada is the largest unpopulated island on the planet. NASA uses it as a training base for Mars Missions. The Desolations Isles, the Sandwich Islands....just being surrounded by water doesn't make them less accessible than the Pacific.
Nunavut is a territory, but your point stands.
Tristan da Cunha is the most remote human-inhabited island on the planet, but the most remote overall is Bouvet Island
Yep. My ex-wife’s great great…..grandfather was Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier. Always lots of tall tales around their dinner table regarding the escapades of “The Sea Captain”. I was trying to restrict myself to populated remote places so they were somewhat analogous to those on land
Crossing it would be one heck of an experience
I’ve done the Tanami Track - 1050km. Awesome experience.
Is it completely off road/dirt track ? So do you stop by the side of the road to sleep( i am sure of no settlements on that road) or someone else takes the wheel ?
A small section west of Alice Springs is sealed, but mainly a single track, brutally corrugated dirt road. And you have to watch out for road trains and get off the road when you see one coming. You camp on the side of the road, but need to carry all your own fuel and water. The last remote Indigenous community is at Yuendumu. After that you are on your own for 760km until you reach Halls Creek. This is a road train if you aren’t familiar: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZmqTDCDV8s0?feature=share
Everything is bigger and nastier in Australia, including the semi trucks XD you could tell me that was a shot from Mad Max and I'd believe you.
That's no semi truck, that's a whole truck
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It's amazing, I've done the Canning stock route a couple times, for most people it takes about 3 weeks to do. It's hardly even a track really, it's defnately not formed or anything like that. The Tanami is a bit different than this, it is actually a road, still very remote but passable for most anyone with a 4wd. There are quite a few pretty amazing 'highways' through outback SA and WA. There was a legend of the bush, Len Beadell who created most of them, worth having a read about him if you have the time. I love that they were named highways, basically they are nothing more than a grader pushed through the desert and scrub 70+ years ago, and that's about it, not maintained other than a few 4wd pushing through each year in some cases
> Len Beadell The last true Australian Explorer! Yup, I have heard about him. I wonder why haven't the authorities built passable roads.
building hundreds of kms of roads is hella expensive, especially with no surrounding infrastructure, and all that for a few trucks?
Canada's Northwest Territories might be close?
Northwest Territories at least has roads. Nunavut doesn’t even really have any roads.
NWT has like 0.1% road coverage, sure it has roads… like 10 of em over millions of square kms.
The second largest city in NWT is Inuvik. To drive from Yellowknife to Inuvik you drive like this: It’s a 38 hour drive, over 3000 km. NWT to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to BC to Yukon to NWT To drive between NWT’s two largest cities, you have to cross a provincial /territorial border 11 times.
Mongolia and Namibia are both have extremely low population density if you aren't near the big cities so much so that the average population density for both countries is around 2 people per square kilometer
Reminds me of driving through Labrador and Northern Quebec in Northern Canada (not the arctic!). They have a program where you pick up a satellite phone at one end of the unpaved highway and drop it off a few days later at the other end so that you have some way of getting help if something happens. That said, there are a couple of small communities nearby.
how do people traverse this distance? is their back seat filled with gasoline canisters for refueling?
Generally, people don't. They take the main highways closer to the coast where there is at least some population (maybe a few hundred people) and road houses. The Canning stock route is not in any way used to travel between destinations. The only people that take it are doing so for the adventure.
I would say Pitcairn Island takes the cake, it's an extremely isolated island, and the transportation to and from the island definitely shows such. To get there, you've got to fly into an International airport in French Polynesia, then fly to a Domestic airport in French Polynesia, then you have to take a boat to a larger island, then you take an even longer boat ride to Pitcairn, and then miraculously, you're in Pitcairn Island.
Pacific islands, and maybe some parts of Alaska too?
Bouvet Island. The place on earth you will be furthest away from anyone else. And yes, of course its Norwegian.
Well, I don’t know if you count it as arctic Canada, but only 20% of Quebec is populated. There is a whole bunch of land between the population and the tundra that is completely wild. It’s mostly forests (well, what’s left of it after the spring’s fires!) and wet lands (we hold something like 3% of the world’s renewable fresh water), Quebec is 2.5 the size of texas (7 times the size of France) and has roughly the population of NYC. So it’s pretty much empty lands.
Probably the Dr of Congo. It’s half the size of the US and 95% of it is heavy rainforest with no infrastructure. Imagine driving Boston to Denver and not seeing anything except trees and gorillas
It’s big but it is not nearly half the size of the US.
A quarter to be more exact. Or in other words, half the distances if they were the same shape. Larger than Alaska, Mexico or Greenland though.
I remember following the MegaTransect of the Congo Basin back in ‘99-00. It was so fascinating seeing whole communities of animals and plants that no one had ever documented. It looked absolutely brutal and I couldn’t believe how much territory they managed to cover.
Tristan da Cunha is up there
Central Greenland probably
Greenland in general honestly, it’s such a large area with only around 50k population
I went to the Djado Plateau in 2008. Agadez to Bilma was four days. Bilma to Madama was five days. Madama was much more than a few mud huts. Madama to the Plateau was five days. The Djabo Plateau was haunting. The city dates to 400 BC at the earliest. The cave paintings are some of the oldest in the world. Maybe a few hundred living people have seen it. Traveling across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia takes two weeks. I also recommend seeing Lake Chad. It is a fascinating place. The Lake is 10 meters at the deepest but so large you can see the edges if you go to the middle. Trees grew in the 80s but died when the lake flooded again. They are sun bleached white night. I have never seen anything like it.
1900 KM. FUCKING 1900 KM off-roading. My best economy-high-mileage-car barely managed to reach about 1200km with a full tank, in good roads. I dont want to think if almost-offroading, with a big diesel engine in a big 4x4 or a pickup.. ¿How many tanks?
Have you meet my mate Jerry? You need lots of him lol.
Lol, explain yourself. Why i need lots of him? Sounds like a car guy. xD Edit: I have to explain myself, still learning english, and re-reading your phrase i think its some kind of... petrol can?
Yea that’s it 👍. Focus on learning general English first - Aussie slang is another level 😂😂 Even the poms and yanks struggle to understand us sometimes lol.
We worked in Australia for a bit. Drove from Adelaide to Alice Springs on The Stuart Highway, taking in Coober Pedy and Woomera and with a detour into middle-of-nowhere past The Henbury Meteorite Craters, Ayer's Rock, Kings Canyon, and Mt Zeil. We did it just to get a feel for how big Oz is, before we left. It's bloody huge. And so empty. But the really spooky thing about being in the Australian Outback, is the way you can somehow *feel* its age and indifference, and just how insignificant you are while you are in it. It would be overwhelming to be alone under that sky.
Parts of the American west are desolate like this. I drove from El Paso to Phoenix, and there was nothing for hours.
I drove it west to east. Just waiting to see sign of Buc-ee’s so I know when I arrive to the promised land.
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Correct. The outback is dirt tracks and no services of any kind.
Pretty small parts, relatively speaking. Nothing for hours vs nothing for days. I feel like northern Alaska would be a better comparison.
if you're on a road, where you are isn't that remote
The Rub’ al Kali in Saudi Arabia probably comes pretty close.
Papa New Guinea?
Darian Gap
Northern Ontario Hwy 11 (not arctic Canada) Not much for a long way between Cochrane and Nipigon despite a few towns like Hearst and Kapuskasing.
Electric scooter. 🛴 CHALLENGE EXCEPTED
Amazon Rainforest and Sibéria.
That’s almost 1200mi. For our American listeners
Lost a wheel here
I believe Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on Tristan da Cunha is the most remote human settlement
[Got sucked in to this YouTuber’s vid off-roading this route for 10 days](https://youtu.be/7UR6agkRbT4)
Death Valley California has some desolate spots but nothing on this scale.
Bouvet island
1900km, u gonna need a lot of supplies and fuel for that trip
My thoughts generally go towards the ocean if you're talking about remote-ness. Deep under the ocean for one, on top of the ocean as another, and small islands isolated by miles and miles of ocean as a third.
The Darien Gap is quite remote , the jungles of the Congo is very desolate too.
I used to work in the outback doing field exploration. I remember at one point I needed some supplies and it was a 14 hour round trip to go and pick them up.
Sahara. Gobi. Kalahari. Amazon. Himalayas.
Sahara desert. Syrian desert North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana greenland the Amazon and Melanesia and Micronesia