THE MOST BREATHTAKING ROUTES IN THE WORLD, 1st PART

Ideal places to drive with your motorhome, why not?

Snails Pass (Los Caracoles), Chile and Argentina share more than 8.000 km of border, most of them drawn on the imposing peaks of the Andes. With over 40 border crossings between the two countries spread over the mountains, the most spectacular and important one is Paso de los Libertadores, also known as the Paso del Cristo Redentor, in particular, the stretch that locals call it, rightly, Los Caracoles (Snails Pass)

Iroha-zaka winding road is a main access to connect central Nikko and Oku-Nikko. You will use the Second Iroha-zaka to go up, and will use the First Iroha-zaka to come down. Each corner has a letter of ancient Japanese alphabet, and you will see it in alphabetical order. The alphabetical order starts from I-ro-ha, while modern alphabet starts from a-i-u.

Storseisundet Bridge (Norwegian: Storseisundetbrua) is the longest of the eight bridges that make up the Atlanterhavsveien ("The Atlantic Road"), the road connection from the mainland Romsdal peninsula to the island of Averøya in Møre og Romsdal  county,   Norway.

Storseisundet Bridge is a cantilever bridge that is 260 metres (850 ft) long and with a maximum clearance to the sea of 23 metres (75 ft). It was opened on 7 July 1989, and it was a toll road until June 1999.

The Jebel Hafeet Mountain Road extends for 7.3 mi (11.7 km) up the mountain, rising 4,000 ft (1,219 m). With 21 corners and three lanes (two climbing and one descending), the immaculate road was called the greatest driving road in the world by Edmunds.com. The road scales the mountain and ends at a parking lot with only a hotel and a palace belonging to the country's rulers. Part of the climax of the Bollywood film RACE was shot on the Jabel Hafeet mountain.

Monument Valley provides perhaps the most enduring and definitive images of the American West. The Isolated red mesas and buttes surrounded by empty, sandy desert have been filmed and photographed countless times over the years for movies, adverts and holiday brochures. Because of this, the area may seem quite familiar, even on first visit, but it is soon evident that the natural colours really are as bright and deep as those in all the pictures. The Valley is not a valley in the conventional sense, but rather a wide flat, sometimes desolate landscape, interrupted by the crumbling formations rising hundreds of feet into the air, the last remnants of the sandstone layers that once covered the entire region.

 The Dalton Highway was built in 1974 to transport materials to oilfields on the North Slope, the Dalton Highway slices through northern Alaska, paralleling the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Livengood to Prudhoe Bay. The BLM manages public land on both sides of the highway from the Yukon River to Mile 301. The state manages the land from there to Prudhoe Bay. The Dalton Highway is a gravel road that can be very rough, dusty or slippery, depending on weather. If stopping, pull as far to the right as you safely can. Do not block the gates on pipeline access roads. Off-highway vehicle use is prohibited within five miles of the highway.

The Millau Bridge is in southern France and crosses the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains. It was designed by the British architect Lord Foster and at 300m (984 feet) it is the highest road bridge in the world, weighing 36,000 tonnes. The central pillar is higher than the famous French icon, the Eiffel Tower. The Bridge opened in December 2004 and is possibly one of the most breath taking bridges ever built.

The Tateyama-Kurobé Alpine Route is a 37-km (23 mile) course through the so called Japan Alps that runs from Toyama City to the town of Ōmachi, near Matsumoto. Connecting Toyama Prefecture with Nagano, the course was first opened in 1971, and involves trains, buses, cable-cars, and gondolas spanning nearly 2,000 m (6,562 ft) of vertical differentiation.

To know more about unique routes, see this website from time to time on the section "ROUTES OF THE WORLD".