North Asia

5 curated road trips

• Chuya HighwayRussia · 970 km · 5–8 daysRussia's most beautiful road descends from the Siberian plains into the Altai Republic's sacred mountains, past petroglyphs, turquoise rivers, Buddhist and shamanic shrines, and the permanent snow of the Chuya steppe, to the Mongolian border plateau where Central Asia begins.
• Lake Baikal CircuitRussia · 2,200 km · 10–14 daysThe world's deepest and oldest lake holds one-fifth of Earth's unfrozen fresh water, the circuit around its shores passes through taiga wilderness, shamanic sacred sites on Olkhon Island, the Buryat Buddhist capital of Ulan-Ude, and in winter, a road on the ice itself.
• Road of BonesRussia · 2,032 km · 10–16 daysBuilt by Gulag prisoners between 1932 and 1953 through the most extreme landscape on Earth, the Kolyma Highway from Magadan to Yakutsk passes through permafrost wilderness, gold-mining ghost towns, and the Pole of Cold at Oymyakon, where temperatures have reached −71°C.
• Kamchatka Volcano RoadRussia · 800 km · 7–10 daysRussia's most spectacular peninsula, a chain of 29 active volcanoes above the Pacific where the roads end and wilderness begins. The circuit from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky delivers steaming calderas, geysers, and brown bears fishing salmon streams in plain sight from the roadside.
• The Great Siberian RoadRussia · 3,800 km · 14–21 daysThe road that nobody drives but everybody dreams about, the eastern segment of Russia's Federal Highway from Chita to the Pacific at Vladivostok traverses the Amur taiga, the Chinese border, and Russia's extraordinary Far East, ending at the city where Russia finally meets the sea.