Australia
Step through a collapsed roof into tubes hollowed by a vanished river of fire.
A staircase drops through a collapsed roof where fig roots reach towards cool basalt. Beyond the daylight, a broad lava tube carries the shape of a flow that drained away about 190,000 years ago.
Undara Volcanic National Park safeguards one of Australia’s most extensive lava-tube systems, formed when the surface of a long lava flow cooled while molten rock continued beneath it. Visitors enter selected tubes only with authorised guides, both for safety and to protect their geology and wildlife. Accommodation is above ground at the nearby experience, including restored railway carriages and cabins; the caves themselves remain geological spaces, not bedrooms.
Solo
Book a guided tube tour and stay for a savannah wildlife walk, using the lodge as a social base.
Couple
Pair the cool underground chambers with a railway-carriage stay and an evening in the open savannah.
Family
Choose the operator's age-appropriate guided tube tour, then look for savannah wildlife from the formed resort trails.
Friends
A longer guided tube circuit and wildlife tour gives a group more depth than a quick cave photo stop.
Bush breakfast at Ringers’ Camp, with toast, bacon and eggs and billy tea beside the savannah.
Bangers and mash made with Georgetown sausages at Fettler’s Iron Pot Bistro.

Valle de la Luna
Chile
Copper light skims salt ridges and sculpted clay at the edge of the Atacama.

Ilha de MarajĂł
Brazil
The police here ride buffalo, because the flooded ground defeats anything with wheels.

Churchill
Canada
Polar bears walk into town so often it runs a 24-hour bear hotline.

Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve
Costa Rica
Mist so thick it beads on your eyelashes, orchids breathing in the canopy above.

Purnululu (Bungle Bungles)
Australia
Living black crust stripes orange sandstone domes across a Kimberley range.

Wilpena Pound
Australia
Quartzite ridges fold around Ikara's immense interior valley in the Flinders Ranges.

Queenstown
Australia
A century of smelting skinned Queenstown's hills; rainforest now creeps back at the edges.

Silverton
Australia
Mad Max roads vanish into Mundi Mundi plain beyond corrugated-iron galleries and a former silver town.