INTRODUCTION Desert escapes
I feel at home in the natural world but will always lean towards extreme landscapes, those places where nature makes you sit up and notice and that feel just a little bit more intense. And so I prefer my sand in a raw red desert than on a pristine white beach. A sunny beach is eager to please, but the desert challenges you to take it on. It’s a forbidding landscape but one that is sublime in its solitude, starry skies, stillness and space. My first taste of the desert was intoxicating. I was in Australia’s Northern Territory where the hot air felt like a slap and the red earth looked like a firestorm. Having spent most of my life up until that moment on the northeast coast of Scotland, it was a sensation that felt utterly out of my then-small world. That sensation, and the desert, have tugged at me ever since. The desert can be brutal, and without suitable shelter it will devour you. Building a shelter in an extreme landscape with limited resources is demanding, and yet, there’s something about the challenge of a desert that inspires creativity. In the following pages you’ll journey round deserts from the Gobi in Mongolia
to the Atacama in Chile and discover accommodation as diverse as the landscapes. Some take their cues from their cultural environment, such as terracotta domes inspired by the traditional homes of the indigenous Himba of Namibia. Others take their inspiration from the surrounding flora-the exterior of a contemporary cabin that utilises the design of a tough endemic plant, for example. Many are concerned with making as gentle a footprint on the earth as is possible-such as light-touch tented villas that can be removed without a trace. And then there are those that evoke nostalgia for the past or the hope for a bright future, from renovated mid-century Airstreams to glass pods that look as if they’ve just touched down on a new planet. While these escapes are far from simply places to lay your head and each is worth the trip alone, all are in locations that demand to be explored. In each of the following escapes, curious travellers will find opportunities to forge a deeper connection with their surroundings, whether by camel trekking over dunes, observing desert-adapted wildlife, or simply watching the sun dip below a sandstone arch. 5