Lencois Maranhenses – A desert with lagoons

Located in the State of Maranhao, on the north shore of Brazil, the Lenois Maranhenses National Park is an area of about 300 square kms of blinding white dunes and deep blue lagoons, forming one of the most beautiful and unique places in the world. The dunes invade the continent over 50km from the cost, creating a landscape that reminds a white bed sheet. Lenois Maranhenses looks like an archetypal desert. In fact it isn’t a desert. Lying just outside the Amazon basin, it is subject to a regular rain season.

Glacier Grey
The Southern Patagonian Icefield of Chile and Argentina hosts several spectacular glaciers—including Grey Glacier located in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. This glacier, which in 1996 had a measured total area of 270 square kilometers and a length of 28 kilometers (104 square miles in area, 17 miles long), begins in the Patagonian Andes Mountains to the west and terminates in three distinct lobes into Grey Lake.

Taklamakan Desert
Taklamakan is one of the largest sandy deserts in the world, is a paradigmatic cold desert climate. Given its relative proximity with the cold to frigid air masses in Siberia, extreme lows are recorded in wintertime, sometimes well below -20 degrees C. During the 2008 Chinese winter storms episode, the Taklamakan was reported to be covered for the first time in its entirety with a thin layer of snow reaching 4 centimetres, with a temperature of -26.1 degrees C in some observatories.

The Stone Wave
The Wave is located on the Colorado Plateau, near the Utah and Arizona border. The area is a gallery of gruesomely twisted sandstone, resembling deformed pillars, cones, mushrooms and other odd creations. Deposits of iron claim some of the responsibility for the unique blending of color twisted in the rock, creating a dramatic rainbow of pastel yellows, pinks and reds. The Wave is made of Jurassic-age Navajo Sandstone that is approximately 190 million years old. Scientists who study The Wave say that the old sand dunes turned into hard compacted rock over the ages.

Cano Cristales – The Five Colors River
The National Natural Park, in the south end of the department of Meta, Colombia, has an area of 650.000 square kilometres where they will be able to see fascinating waterfalls of all the sizes, mighty rivers, cachiveras, streams and natural meadows. The river has this pigmentation because the stones are covered with the moss and the algae. Yellow, blue, green, black and red, they are his five colors, which explain for the presence of algae of different colors. The red color owes to a plant named Macarenia clavigera.

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