The Best Road Trips in the World

243km, Torquay to Allansford. Allow four days. Built between 1919 and 1932 by returned servicemen, largely by hand, the Great Ocean Road is a war memorial that happens to be a road. Three thousand men cut it into the cliffs with picks and explosives. It is dedicated to those who did not come back. Drive it east to west. Australia keeps left, which puts you in the ocean-side lane the whole way, and means you can pull into the lookouts without crossing traffic. The first stretch through Lorne and Apollo Bay is all switchbacks and eucalypts leaning over the tarmac. Then the road turns inland through the Otways - cool, wet, prehistoric-feeling rainforest - before rejoining the coast at Princetown for the limestone stacks. The Twelve Apostles were never twelve, and there are fewer now than when somebody thought of the name. Go at dawn. The coaches arrive at ten.

Roughly 750km, Cape Town to Gqeberha. Allow a week. The N2 does the work; the detours make the trip. The classic run is Cape Town east along the coast - Hermanus, Mossel Bay, Wilderness, Knysna, Plettenberg Bay, Tsitsikamma - with the Indian Ocean on one side and the Outeniqua mountains on the other. The core stretch between Mossel Bay and Storms River is only about 200km, which is why people who "did the Garden Route in three days" tend to have seen a lot of dual carriageway. Turn inland at least once. Route 62 through the Little Karoo takes you to Oudtshoorn, the Cango Caves and a landscape that looks nothing like the coast forty minutes away. Prince Alfred's Pass, gravel and unhurried, drops you back down into Knysna through the forest. It takes three hours to cover 70km. This is fine. The Bloukrans Bridge, at 216 metres, hosts the world's highest commercial bridge bungee. You are under no obligation.

1,322km, a full loop. Allow ten days. Route 1 circles the island and has only been fully paved since 2019, which tells you something about how recently this became a holiday rather than an expedition. Go counter-clockwise from Reykjavík and you front-load the south coast: black sand at Reynisfjara, the glacier lagoon at Jökulsárlón, icebergs washing up on Diamond Beach in the morning light. The east fjords are where most people run out of time, and they are the best part. The road narrows, the traffic thins, and Seyðisfjörður appears at the bottom of a valley with its blue church and its rainbow street. The north brings Mývatn, sulphur, and Dettifoss doing something violent to a canyon. Weather closes roads without much notice.

516 miles, a loop from Inverness. Allow five days. A marketing campaign that became a pilgrimage. Since 2015 the NC500 has been rather too well discovered, and in August the single-track sections can feel like a queue with scenery. Go in May or late September and it returns to what it was: Applecross, Torridon, Assynt, and a coastline that does not look like the rest of Britain. The Bealach na Bà is the reason to come. Twelve miles of hairpins climbing to 626 metres, built in 1822 for cattle, with passing places and a gradient that will find out anything wrong with your clutch. Caravans are advised against it, and they should listen.

8.3km. Allow a day, then several more. The shortest route here and the most theatrical. Atlanterhavsvegen strings eight bridges across a chain of skerries between Kristiansund and Molde, over open water, with nothing on either side. Storseisundet - the one in every photograph - curves and rises so that from the approach the road appears to stop mid-air. Go in autumn when the storms come in and waves break across the tarmac. There are laybys built for watching this. The road opened in 1989 and was hit by twelve hurricanes during construction, which is either a warning or a recommendation. Build it into a longer run through Romsdal and the fjords. Eight kilometres is not a holiday.

90km, Bascov to Cârțișoara. Allow two days. Ceaușescu ordered a road built over the Făgăraș mountains in 1970 in case the Soviets invaded. It took four years, six million kilos of dynamite and a number of lives that was never officially confirmed. What survives is 90km of hairpins climbing to Bâlea Lake at 2,034 metres, then dropping through a tunnel - at 884 metres, Romania's longest - into Transylvania. It is closed by snow for most of the year. The high section usually opens at the start of July and shuts by the end of October. Check before committing. At the southern end, Poenari Castle sits at the top of 1,480 steps. It has a stronger claim to Vlad Țepeș than Bran, which gets the coach parties and the gift shop.

1,240km, Puerto Montt to Villa O'Higgins. Allow two weeks. Ruta 7 runs south through Patagonia and stops, because there is nowhere further to go. Much of it is still gravel. Three ferry crossings are unavoidable and none of them care about your schedule. Fuel stations are a planning exercise rather than a convenience. What you get: Parque Pumalín, temperate rainforest of alerce trees a thousand years old; the hanging glacier at Queulat, a slab of ice suspended between two cliffs with waterfalls falling out of it; and the marble caves at Lago General Carrera, reached by boat from Puerto Río Tranquilo, where the water has cut the rock into blue-lit chambers. Book the ferries. Then build in the days you will lose anyway.

27km, Peso da Régua to Pinhão. Allow two days. Frequently named the finest driving road in the world, which is a strange claim for something that takes half an hour. But the N222 follows the Douro upstream through the oldest demarcated wine region on earth, past terraced vineyards cut into schist by hand over three centuries and now protected by UNESCO. Take it slowly, in low afternoon light, when the terraces stack up in ridges and the river goes copper. Stop at Pinhão station to look at the azulejo panels - twenty-four tiled scenes of the harvest, installed in 1937, still the best-decorated railway platform in Europe. Then cross the river and come back on the N323 for the view from the other side.