9 places catalogued in this kind of landscape.
A near-perfect natural cone rising 120 m from the white floor of the Arizaro salt flat in the high Puna, so symmetrical it looks built.
A badlands of hoodoos, petrified logs and mushroom-capped rock in shale the colour of ash, with no trails and no signs.
A 90 km canyon in the steppe east of Almaty, whose Valley of Castles is a corridor of red sandstone towers eroded into turrets and arches.
The concrete skeletons of a 1905 gold-rush city at the edge of Death Valley: a three-storey bank, a railway depot and a house built of bottles.
A small town in a valley of red rock spires and canyons in southern Bolivia, where Butch Cassidy's last robbery took place and horses are still the way to see the country.
The lowest point in Africa, a lake ten times saltier than the sea, ringed by a blinding crust of salt and black lava at the bottom of the Afar rift.
The Eye of the Sahara: a 40 km bullseye of concentric rock rings in the Mauritanian desert, visible from orbit and almost invisible from the ground, which is exactly why hardly anyone goes.
The mud-brick remains of the medieval trade capital that funnelled Saharan gold to the Mediterranean, now a field of eroded walls outside Rissani that nobody guards.
Three mud-brick fortresses from the 4th century BC to the 7th century AD on a hill above the Kyzylkum desert, the largest of the Khorezm desert castles and still without a ticket office.