A drive down Bolivia's infamous "Death Road" takes travellers into a world where two resources have provoked fascination, misunderstanding and controversy for centuries: coca and gold.
The temperature had dropped below 20 as the sun set on Coldfoot, Alaska. I'd left the little inn at Coldfoot Camp to search the night for dancing lights.
By Brendan Sainsbury 11 May 2021
Outside the window the frigid tundra stretched away to meet the horizon; vast, treeless and unnerving. I was the sole passenger on North America s most northerly bus service, the Dalton Highway Express, as it bumped its way along Alaska s notorious haul road towards the ominously named settlement of Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean. The only other traveller, a laconic Canadian, had disembarked several hours previously at a desolate truck stop called Coldfoot. Since then, the driver and I had been motoring north past the road s last campground, its last outhouse and its last tree (a forlorn looking spruce with a do not cut sign). It was as if I was experiencing an extreme form of social distancing before Covid-19 made it de rigueur.