Deep in central Vietnam a river runs through a cave so large it holds its own jungle, and daylight falls through a hole in the roof to reach the trees. That’s where we start.
From there we go up, through the reefs and the atolls, into the fog, across the deserts and the big rivers, over the ice, past the top of Everest and out to the point where the air runs out.
Moss & Fog has been collecting the most beautiful places on Earth since 2009, and this is the short list: twenty-seven places, three to a chapter. We haven’t been to most of them, and neither has almost anyone else. You can book some of them for next spring, and one has been sealed under water since 2015.
Below
Chapter I · Underground
Some of the largest rooms on Earth have no windows.
Hang Sơn Đoòng
Quảng Trị Province, Vietnam
38.5 million m³the largest known cave passage, by volume
A man named Hồ Khanh found the entrance in 1990 while looking for agarwood in the jungle. He heard a river roaring inside, felt the wind coming out of it, went home and forgot where it was. It took him until 2008 to find it again. British cavers followed him in the next year and came out with numbers nobody had seen before. The passage runs more than five kilometers, 200 meters high and 150 wide, with about twice the cross section of the next largest cave passage anywhere.
Twice along the way the ceiling has fallen in, and where the sun gets through, a forest has grown up inside the cave. Only 1,000 people a year are allowed to walk it, and when we last looked the list was full through 2027. We have been in love with this place for a long time.
The Cave of the Crystals
Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico
−300 mbelow the surface, inside a mine
In April 2000, miners drilling a new tunnel broke into a room filled with beams of selenite. The largest measures 11.4 meters, about the length of a city bus, and weighs an estimated 12 tonnes. The air inside ran to 58°C at nearly total humidity, and without protection a person could last about ten minutes.
The crystals took roughly half a million years to get that big, at one of the slowest growth rates ever measured. By October 2015 the mine had flooded the cavern again. The room is back under the warm, mineral water that built it.
Waitomo
North Island, New Zealand
30 threadshung by a single glowworm, each one a fishing line
Māori knew this cave for about a century before Tane Tinorau showed surveyors the way in, in 1884. Within five years he and his wife Huti were taking paying visitors through by canoe, and their descendants still work here today.
The ceiling looks like a night sky. It’s a ceiling of larvae of Arachnocampa luminosa, found only in New Zealand, each one glowing blue-green above as many as 30 sticky silk lines that it lowers to catch midges. The boats go through in silence, under thousands of tiny predators pretending to be stars.
The Reef
Chapter II · −124 m to the surface
The richest neighborhoods on the planet are all underwater.
The Great Blue Hole
Lighthouse Reef, Belize
−124 mdown a circle 318 meters across
This was a cave, too. Stalactites only form in open air, and when Jacques Cousteau brought the Calypso here in 1971 his team pulled some from its submerged caves. So this perfect blue circle was once dry land, drowned when the ice ages ended and the seas came up.
Submersibles mapped it in 2018. Below about 91 meters they found a layer of hydrogen sulfide and, under it, dark water with no oxygen and nothing alive. The deep sea is usually more welcoming.
Raja Ampat
West Papua, Indonesia
75%of all known coral species, by one survey
These islands sit between the Indian and Pacific oceans, right where coral and fish larvae drift from one to the other. One survey counted 1,508 species of fish and 537 of coral, about three quarters of the corals known to science, in a single archipelago.
From the air it’s a scatter of green mushrooms in pale water. From underneath it’s as crowded as a city, and no reef anywhere has a better claim to the top of this list.
The Great Barrier Reef
Queensland, Australia
2,300 kmof coral, in more than 2,900 separate reefs
More than 2,900 reefs and 900 islands cover about 344,000 square kilometers of the Coral Sea, an area larger than Italy. It’s the largest structure made by living things, put up by tiny animals, one generation on top of the last.
Australia’s marine scientists surveyed 121 of those reefs this past year. Coral cover rose in the north and held roughly steady elsewhere, helped by a late monsoon that cooled the water. They still call it a system under pressure, and we’ll take them at their word.
Where the Land Runs Out
Chapter III · Sea level, give or take
A ring of sand, a lagoon, and then nothing for a thousand miles.
The Maldives
Indian Ocean
2.4 mthe highest natural ground in the entire country
English borrowed the word atoll from here. It comes from atholhu, in Dhivehi, the language of these islands, and it reached Charles Darwin by way of a French sailor. In 1842 Darwin worked out what an atoll is, the coral ring left behind after a volcano sinks back into the sea.
There are 1,192 islands in 26 atolls, and all that land together adds up to less than 300 square kilometers, spread over 90,000 square kilometers of ocean. It’s the lowest country in the world and one of the most improbable to look at. From the window of a seaplane the map stops making sense!
Aldabra
Outer Islands, Seychelles
100,000+giant tortoises on a single atoll
Arab sailors named this place for how harsh it was, and the harshness saved it. There’s no fresh water on the surface, the rock is razor-edged old coral, and nobody ever managed to farm it. So the world’s second-largest coral atoll still belongs to the largest population of giant tortoises anywhere, animals that weigh up to 350 kilos and get around the island very slowly.
One count puts tortoises ahead of people here by about 10,000 to one. Visitors are few and carefully managed, which makes this the rare entry better seen in pictures. Its more welcoming cousins are the granite beaches of the inner Seychelles.
The Underwater Waterfall
Le Morne, Mauritius
−4,000 mwhere the shelf falls away into the abyss
From a plane, a great white cataract appears to pour off the southwest corner of Mauritius and into the deep. No water is falling. Sand and silt are sliding down a slope toward a drop of about 4,000 meters, and the shades they leave behind fool the eye completely.
Above it stands Le Morne Brabant, a 556-meter block of basalt where people who escaped slavery hid in the caves near the summit. UNESCO listed it in 2008 as a symbol of their fight for freedom.
The Fog
Chapter IV · Up to 1,935 m
We named a publication after this chapter, and we regret nothing.
The Coast Redwoods
Northern California and southern Oregon
116.22 mHyperion, the tallest known living tree, measured this year
These trees drink the weather. Summer fog can give them 30 percent or more of their yearly water, caught in the canopy and taken in through the leaves, and the tallest trees thin out as the fog does.
They’re the closest of the twenty-seven to our home in Portland. Hyperion stands somewhere in Redwood National Park, but the area around it has been closed since 2022 after visitors trampled the ground bare, and going in can cost you $5,000 and six months in jail. The rest of the forest is open, about six hours down the road from us.
Yakushima
Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
10,000 mmof rain a year, in the wettest places
Japan’s wettest place is a round granite island with peaks reaching 1,935 meters, and every surface on it wears moss. Its forests gave Hayao Miyazaki the setting for Princess Mononoke, and you’ll recognize them the moment you see them.
Up the mountain stands Jōmon Sugi, a cedar 16 meters around. Estimates of its age run from 2,170 to 7,200 years, which is an unusually honest margin of error. Bring a good raincoat!
Zhangjiajie
Hunan Province, China
3,000+sandstone pillars, many taller than 200 meters
It looks like something a production designer dreamed up, and in a sense that’s how the world met it. The 1,080-meter Southern Sky Column was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in January 2010.
The towers are a lot older than the movie. They’re quartz sandstone, lifted and cut apart by water over hundreds of millions of years, and when the mist comes up between them it leaves only the tops. For a publication with our name, it’s close to a religious experience.
The Desert
Chapter V · Up to 3,656 m
Where it almost never rains.
The Namib
Namibia
325 mBig Daddy, the tallest dune at Sossusvlei
The orange dunes around Sossusvlei run past 300 meters. In the white clay pan of Deadvlei, camel thorn trees died 600 or 700 years ago and have never rotted, because there is nothing here to rot them.
Less than ten millimeters of rain falls in a year, but fog rolls in off the Atlantic, and a small beetle has learned to climb a dune at dawn, tip its body into the breeze at 45 degrees and let the fog bead on its back and run down to its mouth. The fog follows us everywhere.
The Atacama
Northern Chile
15 mmof rain a year, and some stations have never recorded any
This is the driest desert outside the poles, a bare red and white country between two mountain ranges that block the moisture from both sides. Periods of up to four years have gone by without rain.
Then, in the right year, the southern edge breaks into flower. More than 200 species come up out of the dirt, most of them found nowhere else, and Chileans call it the desierto florido. It happened again in 2026.
Salar de Uyuni
Potosí, Bolivia
10,582 km²of salt, level to within a meter
The largest salt flat in the world sits at 3,656 meters, the bed of a prehistoric lake, and its surface varies by less than a meter from one end to the other. It’s so flat that satellites use it to calibrate their instruments. We have written about salt at some length, and this is still the most astonishing thing it does.
When a thin sheet of rain settles on it, the horizon goes away. Sky above and sky below, and a truck somewhere in the middle, driving through the clouds.
The Great Waters
Chapter VI · Up to 1,000 m
Rivers doing the last thing you’d expect.
Iguazu Falls
Argentina and Brazil
275separate falls, in a line 2.7 kilometers long
The name comes from the Guaraní for big water, and that undersells it. About 275 separate drops run along a great curve more than twice as wide as Niagara, falling as far as 82 meters, and the national border goes straight down the middle of the Devil’s Throat.
Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have taken one look and exclaimed, “Poor Niagara!” We can’t prove it. We’d like it to be true.
The Okavango Delta
Botswana
0drops of it that ever reach the sea
Most rivers end in an ocean, and this one ends in the Kalahari. Rain falls in the Angolan highlands in January and February, travels 1,200 kilometers in about a month, and then spreads across a green fan in the middle of a desert, taking four more months to get there.
Nearly all of it evaporates or gets drunk. In the meantime it makes one of the great animal gatherings on Earth, and in 2014 it became the 1,000th site on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Caño Cristales
Serranía de la Macarena, Colombia
320visitors allowed in a day
From about June to November, the riverbed of this small clear stream turns red. A water plant found in only a handful of rivers in the region grows across the rocks and blazes crimson and pink in the sun, with greens filling in the rest.
The rules are strict. You may not wear sunscreen or insect repellent in the water, single-use plastics are banned, and the 2026 season opened on June 12 with a daily cap. We can’t think of a better reason to get a sunburn.
The Ice
Chapter VII · Sea level to 3,000 m
Most of the fresh water on Earth, holding very still.
Vatnajökull
Southeast Iceland
3,000 km³of ice, up to 950 meters thick
We’ve covered Iceland more than any other country, and we aren’t sorry. Vatnajökull is its largest ice cap, a single white lid over volcanoes, valleys and the highest peak in the country.
The caves in its edges are the blue you’ll find in the middle of a gas flame, ribbed and glassy, and the meltwater rivers coming off it braid across the black sand in patterns that look painted from the air.
Scoresby Sund
East Greenland
350 kmfrom the sea to the far end of the fjords
This is likely the largest fjord system in the world, about 38,000 square kilometers, a good deal bigger than the Hawaiian islands. Huge icebergs drift through it past walls of striped rock, and narwhal, musk oxen and the occasional polar bear go about their business.
One small town guards the mouth, and it is among the hardest places on Earth to reach.
Antarctica
The bottom of the world
−89.2°Cthe coldest air temperature ever measured on the ground
About 70 percent of the fresh water on Earth is frozen here, on the coldest, driest, windiest continent, and the one with the highest average elevation. The interior plateau stands around 3,000 meters. Blue ice and bare dry valleys sit out in the open, and Mount Erebus erupts about ten times a day.
It also holds the best idea on this list. Under a treaty signed in 1959, 29 countries govern a whole continent where military activity and mining are forbidden. It’s the only place we know of where we got it right in advance.
The Heights
Chapter VIII · Up to 8,848.86 m
The tops of things.
Torres del Paine
Patagonia, Chile
2,500 mthree granite towers, straight up off the steppe
Three towers of pale granite rise off the Patagonian steppe, with dark sedimentary caps on the peaks beside them, like someone left the lid on. Molten rock pushed in under those older layers in the Miocene, then ice carved away everything around it. The weather in Patagonia is famous, and when the morning light gets through it, the granite goes the color of a peach.
It’s one of the few entries here you can reach on foot with a backpack, and you should.
The Tepuis
Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil
979 mAngel Falls, the tallest waterfall on Earth
The Pemon people call these flat-topped mountains the houses of the gods. They rise up to a kilometer straight out of the jungle, cut off for so long that their summits evolved their own plants and animals. A report on Mount Roraima inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World.
Off the side of Auyán-tepui falls Körepakupai Vená, known to most maps as Angel Falls, after the American pilot Jimmie Angel, who crash-landed his plane on the summit in 1937. It drops 979 meters. Check current travel advice before you plan this one, and start dreaming about it now.
Everest
Nepal and China
8,848.86 mthe highest ground on the planet
Nepal and China agreed on that figure in 2020, and the mountain is still rising. It has three names, Sagarmāthā in Nepali, Chomolungma in Tibetan and the one a British surveyor picked.
Here is our favorite fact in the whole piece. The rock at the summit is marine limestone from the Ordovician, more than 440 million years old, and it has fossils in it.
The highest ground on Earth is old sea floor.
The Sky
Chapter IX · 100 km and beyond
Nothing left to stand on.
The Morning Glory
Burketown, Queensland, Australia
1,000 kmof a single rolling cloud
A few mornings each spring, a cloud up to 1,000 kilometers long comes rolling in off the Gulf of Carpentaria, sometimes only 100 meters above the ground. It’s the only place on Earth where this can be predicted, and glider pilots travel to Burketown from around the world to surf it.
Local forecasting is excellent. When the pub’s fridges frost over and the corners of the café tables curl up, get up early.
The Aurora
Above the Arctic and Antarctic
100 kmup, where oxygen starts to glow green
The sun throws off a steady wind of particles. When the energy they build up in our magnetic field lets go, it pours down the field lines and strikes the upper air. Oxygen glows green at around 100 kilometers and red above 200, and nitrogen fills in the blues and pinks. You can see it from a lot of places, and you should see it from somewhere.
The Edge
Straight up
100 kmthe conventional line where space begins
The line is more of a legal convenience than a physical place, and the air thins out gradually for a long way past it. From orbit it shows up as a thin blue band along the curve of the world, and that band holds everything you have just read about.
On a twelve-inch desk globe, the distance from the crystals of Naica to the edge of space would measure less than the thickness of two dimes. That’s the whole treasury. Go look!
All twenty-seven at a glance
| Place | Where | Can you go? |
|---|---|---|
| Hang Sơn Đoòng | Quảng Trị Province, Vietnam | By permit. Booked through 2027 |
| The Cave of the Crystals | Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico | Sealed |
| Waitomo | North Island, New Zealand | Open |
| The Great Blue Hole | Lighthouse Reef, Belize | Open |
| Raja Ampat | West Papua, Indonesia | Open |
| The Great Barrier Reef | Queensland, Australia | Open |
| The Maldives | Indian Ocean | Open |
| Aldabra | Outer Islands, Seychelles | Restricted |
| The Underwater Waterfall | Le Morne, Mauritius | Open |
| The Coast Redwoods | Northern California and southern Oregon | Open. Hyperion’s grove is closed |
| Yakushima | Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan | Open |
| Zhangjiajie | Hunan Province, China | Open |
| The Namib | Namibia | Open |
| The Atacama | Northern Chile | Open. Blooms in wet years |
| Salar de Uyuni | Potosí, Bolivia | Open. Mirror in the wet season |
| Iguazu Falls | Argentina and Brazil | Open |
| The Okavango Delta | Botswana | Open |
| Caño Cristales | Serranía de la Macarena, Colombia | Seasonal, about June to December |
| Vatnajökull | Southeast Iceland | Open. Caves with a guide |
| Scoresby Sund | East Greenland | By ship, in summer |
| Antarctica | The bottom of the world | By expedition |
| Torres del Paine | Patagonia, Chile | Open |
| The Tepuis | Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil | Check current travel advice |
| Everest | Nepal and China | Base camp by trek. Summit by permit |
| The Morning Glory | Burketown, Queensland, Australia | Late September to early November |
| The Aurora | Above the Arctic and Antarctic | Winter, at high latitudes |
| The Edge | Straight up | Not yet |
