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Revealed: this is officially the best road trip in the world

A new ranking of the world’s greatest road trips analyses factors including road length, sunlight hours, national parks and more

Beril Naz Hassan
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Beril Naz Hassan
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The wind in your hair, your favourite playlist blaring through the speakers and a scenic view... is there anything more liberating and peaceful than a road trip? 

If making like Jack Kerouac and heading out on a four-wheeled adventure sounds ideal to you, then you'll want to keep on reading. CarMats.co.uk has studied the world’s most iconic highway destinations and created a list of the best road trips across the globe. To create the ranking, they looked at each destination’s average temperature in summer, rainfall per year, sunlight hours, light pollution and national parks. They also considered how many days it takes to drive the length of the road.

They concluded that the best road trip in the world was (drumroll please)... the Savannah Way! Stretching between Queensland and Western Australia, this scenic road has a whopping 15 national parks en route, a daily cost of £39 to rent a car, and an average summer temperature of 25.4C. You could easily spend a month making your way along the 3700-kilometre drive.

Second on the list was the Grand Circle in the southwest of the US, offering travellers views of valleys, canyons, and ten national parks. The 1500-kilometre journey is expected to take between two to three weeks. 

In third place was arguably the world’s most famous road trip, Route 66, which stretches from Chicago to Santa Monica in the US. Though the original Route 66 was decertified in 1985, many people still make the iconic journey from Illinois to the West.

Here are the top ten greatest road trips in the world: 

  1. The Savannah Way, Australia
  2. The Grand Circle, United States
  3. Route 66, United States
  4. The Atlas Mountains, Morocco
  5. The Sahara Loop, Morocco to Mauritania
  6. Coastal Road Trip, Morocco 
  7. The Carretera Austral, Chile
  8. The Danube, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria
  9. Trans-Kalahari Highway, Botswana to Namibia
  10. Transpantaneira, Brazil

Did you read about the best European destinations for solo women travellers?

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