Best of the travel blogs: October 2014

En Route: Yolyn Am by Truck and Foot

He read there was a gorge in the Gobi where there was ice year-round. Yolyn Am, or Vulture's Mouth, it was called. Ice in the desert, he thought. He would go there. Dalanzadgad, the Gobi town nearest Yolyn Am, was grey and bleak. It was mid-day, and he saw only a handful of dusty people walking along. A drunken man, naked to his waist, staggered down the centre of the street, stopped a car and yelled obscenities into its windshield. nowheremag.com

Il Sanlorenzo: Rome's finest fish restaurant

In spite of the countless fish dishes, Rome's not much of a fish city. It wasn't until the mid-20th century, with refrigeration and deep freezing, that fish caught in the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas made their way to restaurant tables. Before that, salt cod from northern Europe, salted anchovies and Tiber perch dominated. The latter has now completely disappeared from the Roman diet and that's probably a good thing. parlafood.com

The Essaouira Murex

Essaouira is a city of whitewashed walls and blue-painted shutters. On some doors, where the paint is scuffed down to the bare wood, you can see the history of the door: one decade painted ultramarine, the next, azure, and then maybe majorelle or cerulean; but it's blue all the way through, and the effect of all this blue and white, against a blue sea and blue sky, is of an enchanted sky fortress, disconnected from Earth. But the blue paint is more connected to the sea than the sky, as is all of Essaouira's history. notesfromtheroad.com

Published in the October 2014 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)