The phrase “looks like another planet” is overused. These four places earn it. Geological time, or a thousand years of human craft, or sometimes both, have produced landscapes so unlike the usual run of cities and beaches that the first hundred photographs don’t even register as places you could walk through.
None of these are unknown. All of them are at least an order of magnitude better in person than the photography suggests — partly because the human eye has dynamic range a camera doesn’t, partly because scale doesn’t transmit through a 1080-pixel rectangle. Four picks, each at a different scale of strangeness.
Cappadocia, Turkey
Volcanic tuff carved by wind and water into fairy chimneys, then carved further by Byzantine Christians into a network of cave cities, then hollowed deeper into 18-storey underground refuges. Standing in the Rose Valley at sunrise with a hundred hot air balloons coming up above the formations — this is the geological strangeness all-in-one shot.
Read the Cappadocia guideThe Dolomites, Italy
Pale rock spires rising vertically out of green alpine valleys, with the entire landscape glowing pink at sunset because of the specific mineral content of the dolomite stone. The vertical scale is wrong for European mountains — you keep expecting them to be smaller. The via ferrata routes feel genuinely like climbing a planet you’ve never been to.
Read the The Dolomites guideCosta Rica (cloud forest)
Walking through the Monteverde cloud forest at 6am when the mist is still in the canopy is the closest most of us will get to a Mesozoic landscape. The bromeliads, the bell birds calling somewhere in the fog, the ferns at human height. The biological density is the strangeness here, not the geology.
Read the Costa Rica (cloud forest) guideSamarkand, Uzbekistan
Architecture, not landscape, but earned. The Registan complex is three monumental Islamic madrassas facing each other across a square, every facade covered floor-to-roof in turquoise and blue tilework. The Shah-i-Zinda necropolis is a corridor of mausoleums in the same blue. The Bibi-Khanum mosque is collapsing slowly, half-restored, scaled for a vanished empire.
Read the Samarkand guide