Think Oman, and you think desert. But what we found was mile after mile of barren, spiky rubble, cliffs of jutting sharp rocks, unrelieved by a single piece of vegetation or water. We drove for hours across what felt like the surface of the moon. We saw goats foraging but couldn't work out what they could possibly be eating.
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
Off Cape Horn there are but two kinds of weather, neither one of them a pleasant kind.
In two and a half years' trekking across central Asia, I'd become attuned to the late autumn conditions when the hazards of winter can blow in under the cover of darkness.
It is said the boundless steppes of Asia gave flight to tales of heroes and heroines because the conditions there are so harsh.
The desert is a capricious lady, and sometimes she drives men crazy.
Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America, and the media's all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes.
Siberia is so big, it’s almost more an idea than a place
