Lonely Planet founder names his 50 all-time top travel destinations

Fifty years. Is it really 50 years since my wife, Maureen, and I published the first Lonely Planet guidebook?

But there we were, in The Sydney Morning Herald back in October 1973, proudly showing off that first book.

Since then, Lonely Planet has published way more than 100 million books, covering pretty much every country on Earth, plus websites, digital guides, travel apps, TV program and editions in other languages.

Travellers may think of Lonely Planet in English – and then be slightly amazed that it’s Australian through and through, not British or American – but the guidebooks are just as familiar in a host of other languages.

It’s now more than 10 years since Maureen and I departed Lonely Planet, the company is still going strong, but it’s now US-owned and by a company whose creator has a great travel claim to fame: he was on US Airways Flight 1549 when it landed in New York’s Hudson River.

What did he do once he’d got back to dry land? He got a taxi to the airport and took the next flight. Now there’s a traveller.

Leaving Lonely Planet hasn’t extinguished my own travel addiction, so here are my 50 travel favourites – divided into 10 diverse categories – including opera-related travel (Maureen’s travel addiction) from the past 50 years.

Five utterly weird destinations

Pyongyang, North Korea

This is a city where you can never believe anything you see. In North Korea you’re followed everywhere by a minder, but little “escapes” are always possible, like a half-hour wander around Department Store No.1 or No.2 (think a North Korean Myer versus a North Korean David Jones). But the highlight is the Mass Games inside an MCG-sized stadium packed with tens of thousands of card-flipping “spectators”.

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

A challenger to the North Korean capital for weirdness, the capital of Turkmenistan is full of endless white marble buildings, most of them empty, which line equally empty highways. This is also home to the world’s largest indoor Ferris wheel and the 12-metre gold-statue of the “Turkmenbashi”, his arms outstretched to welcome the rising sun. No wonder his part of the world has been referred to as “Absurdistan”.

Dubai, UAE
Logic does not apply here: let’s build another The World or The Palm on reclaimed land, barely above sea level, and then turn up the air-conditioning to 11 so we speed up global warming and sink that real estate beneath rising sea levels. I’m ashamed to say I joined the madness, strapping on skis at the indoor ski slope where snow is just what you need when it’s 40 degrees outdoors. Nevertheless, appealing wooden open ferries, known as “abras” still shuttle across The Creek for the equivalent of 50 cents.

Chernobyl, Ukraine
Everything at the site of the world’s most famous peacetime nuclear disaster is frozen in time from that dramatic day in 1986 when Reactor 4 went rogue. The school rooms, the gym, the theatre, the kindergartens, the restaurants, the supermarket – especially the supermarket – are all more interesting than the nuclear site itself.

Ravenna, Italy
Ravenna is not weird at all, it’s just very strange that such a wonderful place is not a victim of overtourism. Its mosaic-adorned churches feature a sensory overload, many of them are 1500 years old yet look as if they were created yesterday. Add a comfortable hotel, a cold sundowner beer, good pasta and cheap gelati and rental bicycles from the train station to pedal to the less central sites. What’s not to love?

Five complete surprises

Afghanistan

I was there in the hippie trail days in 1972, and I was fortunate to go back in 2006, when things were reasonably quiet, and it was just as wonderful the second time around with the amazing Minaret of Jam, the astonishing ruins of Balkh, the beautiful lakes of Band-i-Amir and sadly the empty alcoves where the great Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood. If only peace could return to this battered nation it would be a fantastic tourist trek again.

Chad, Africa
Want to join me on a trip to Chad, an intrepid friend asked? Think Saharan mountain ranges, wonderful rock art, extinct volcanoes, beautiful gorges and oases, the odd camel train and the piece de resistance, the Tank Fields. In 1987 Gaddafi’s Libyan army invaded Chad with Russian tanks and were met head on by a fleet of Toyota Hiluxes toting anti-tank missiles. The end result? Toyotas won, Soviet tanks lost, and the former are still sitting out in the desert, not rusting away.

Aeolian Islands, Italy
Why didn’t I know about the scattered Aeolian Islands, volcanic Stromboli the best known, just north of Sicily? They’re small enough to explore on foot or by bicycle, they’ve got great history and back stories, beautiful beaches, ferries run around them regularly and lots of islanders made their way to Australia ensuring there are plenty of Down Under connections.

Congo DRC
I’m referring to Democratic Republic of Congo, the big bad Congo, unlike the not so bad Congo Brazzaville next door. Somehow big bad places generate wonderful books and from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness onwards, the Congo has spawned a library of great reading. Plus the amazing Congo River is navigable all the way from Kisangani to Kinshasa, gorillas are in the Virunga National Park and then there’s the noisy, hot, fiery splashing lava of the Nyiragongo Volcano.

The islands continent

Who knew Australia has 8222 islands, way more than even the Caribbean? I wrote a book, Tony Wheeler’s Islands of Australia, which provided a wonderful excuse to visit some of the many islands I’d not yet been to. My favourite? Dirk Hartog Island in Western Australia, the state where, incidentally, you’ll find the biggest number of islands, not Queensland with the Great Barrier Reef.

Five “I’m not going there” places

Colombia
Back on the Latin American tourist trail, Colombia’s got a bustling high altitude capital in Bogota, great scuba diving at Taganga just outside Santa Marta, and Cartagena on the Caribbean coast is prettier than a postcard. But for me Ciudad Perdida – “lost city” in Spanish – was absolutely worth the three-day trek through steaming jungle to reach a competitor to Machu Picchu in the ancient city stakes.

Pakistan
I passed through Pakistan in 1972 and Maureen and I visited again with an aid group after the devastating Kashmir earthquake in 2005. In 2012, we travelled up the spectacular Karakoram Highway which effectively crosses the Himalaya en route to Kashgar. I always come away musing how this would be a popular tourist destination – if it wasn’t for politics, a bad neighbourhood and a host of other problems.

Transylvania, Romania

Wait, isn’t that Count Vlad’s stamping ground, where you shouldn’t stay out after midnight and always have some garlic handy? It recently enjoyed golden publicity due to King Charles’s enthusiasm for the place. Just like Charles, I was delighted by how the villages and farms were almost medieval, dating back to an era before “enclosures acts” fenced off individual fields.

Bangladesh
Incredible population density, disasters, rising sea levels. Dhaka is a capital which may totally exhaust you, but certainly won’t bore you and the world’s largest fleet of cycle rickshaws is ready to haul you around. A river trip on a rocket paddle steamer is still on my bucket list, but sadly, my most recent trip to Bangladesh was to a Rohingya refugee camp.

Iran
Here’s another country which would be wonderful if only they could get rid of their awful government. I’ve always had a good time in Iran, most recently when I drove across the country on my Silk Road trek. And ancient capitals don’t come much more ancient than Persepolis, even if Alexander the Great tried to destroy it.

Five great journeys

Across the hippie trail of Asia
I travelled east across Asia along the hippie trail in 1972. In 2017, I did it the other way following the Silk Road from Bangkok, through South-East Asia, spent a long time in China, visited four of the five ex-Soviet ’stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), crossed Iran, traversed Turkey and then dropped in on eight European countries before diving under the channel to England.

Melbourne to London, by train
We’re supposed to be taking trains rather than flying so recently I travelled for 45 days from Melbourne to London, a trip which included eight different train trips. The high-speed KTX zipped me from Seoul to Busan in Korea, from where the Queen Beetle Ferry powered across the Korea Strait to Japan. A shinkansen “bullet train” raced me across Japan to Yokohama then, after a cruise ship across the Pacific, it was an early morning journey from Vancouver to Seattle before Amtrak rumbled me 24 hours south to San Francisco. A compact sleeper, an observation car, and surprisingly good meals as the scenery shuffled by, this may have been my slowest train trip, but it was the most fun. After flying to Europe it was Turin to Milan on Italy’s high-speed Frecciarossa (Red Arrow), Swiss Rail from Lugano to Zurich, the high-speed TGV Lyria on to Paris and finally Eurostar to one of Europe’s most beautiful train stations, London’s St Pancras.

Route 66, US

In the mid-’90s, with our children in the back, we got our kicks on Route 66. Twice: eastbound through the southern states San Francisco to Boston and then, next school holidays, westbound back through the northern states. Of course we didn’t follow Route 66 all the way, as that historic highway has long been superseded, but there were still enough stretches on “The Mother Road” to make it feel authentic.

An air-cruise over Australia
Eight of us (English, American and Australian) hopped in Kirkhope Aviation’s Beechcraft King Air from Melbourne’s Moorabbin Airport and multi-stopped across northern Australia to places like Mount Borradaile and places you can only reach by air like the Berkeley River Lodge in the Kimberley. We saw crocodiles, swam with the whale sharks off Exmouth, admired wonderful Indigenous cave art and raised our glasses to sunset over Uluru, but for our overseas friends, Coober Pedy, “the opal capital of the world”, was the absolute highlight.

The Aranui, South Pacific

I’m no great cruise ship enthusiast but last year I finally did a cruise on The Aranui which had been too long on my bucket list. Although if your vessel is half freighter and drops off or picks up cargo at every stop on its French Polynesian circuit does that really count as a cruise?

Five great experiences

Great walks
I’ve made any number of Himalayan excursions but it’s hard to beat Australia’s most popular long distance walk, the Tasmanian Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair Overland Track. And in Europe, the multi-country Circuit of Mont Blanc, any number of great walks in England including the Cotswold Way, but for many walkers (including me) the Corsican GR20 has to be a contender for Europe’s Number One Walk status.

Great wildlife
Africa’s “Big Five” are hard to beat although having an elephant nose around your Masai Mara campsite in Kenya at night is not an experience I want to repeat. That slurp-slurp-slurp noise? It’s drinking the dishwashing water the cook hadn’t emptied. Add dragons on Komodo, grizzly bears in Alaska, baby turtles emerging from the sand on Heron Island on the Barrier Reef, Tasmanian Devils devouring a wallaby carcass, observed from a hide in north-west Tasmania.

Great islands
The South Pacific’s our backyard and although Fiji may attract the big Australian numbers and offers everything from backpacker escapes to Turtle Island luxury, I’ve really enjoyed less-touristed places. The Solomon Islands is where you can borrow a kayak from Fat Boys and paddle over to Kennedy Island where JFK struggled to the beach from PT-109. Or Vanuatu where you can scuba dive on the President Coolidge, one of the world’s most interesting shipwrecks, then head south to the amazing Mount Yasur volcano.

Great ruins
Why are ruins so much more evocative than places which are pristine? It’s hard to pick the number one in Asia – Bagan in Myanmar? Angkor Wat in Cambodia? Borobudur in Indonesia? In the Roman and Greek world it’s worth noting that the best ruins are not in their home countries, so head to the outer reaches of the empires for the most excitement. Sagalassos is a favourite in Turkey and Leptis Magna in Libya may be the best Roman ruins of them all.

Great rides
Lonely Planet once entered 16 riders (writers, editors, book designers, cartographers and me) relay-style in the four-month Cairo to Cape Town Tour d’Afrique. And in England you can’t beat joining the signature bike ride of the London bicycle club, The Fridays. Turn up at midnight at Sloane Square in Chelsea and pedal south to Brighton on the coast, arriving at dawn in time for breakfast on the pier. I got back to London on the train before Maureen woke up.

Five places I keep returning to

Singapore
When we spent 1974 researching the first edition of South-East Asia on a Shoestring it was Singapore where we sat down in an old Chinese hotel to put together that pioneering book. It’s gone now, but those colonial-era hotels gave you a remarkably clean room for a couple of dollars a night (forget about hot water and get used to a squat toilet). Since then our regular Singapore visits are never complete without the signature Singapore dish, Hainanese chicken rice, followed by a South Indian thali the next night.

Nepal

This was the highpoint of the hippie trail in 1972, the trip that led to the first Lonely Planet guide. A long winding bus route up from the Indian plains finally dropped down into the Kathmandu valley, the lights of Kathmandu like an enticing Shangri-La. We’ve been back many times over the years, usually to go trekking: the three-week Annapurna Circuit, the historic trek up to the Everest Base Camp and the visit to Mustang (Lo Manthang) and even a Helambu Circuit children’s trek with half a dozen Australian kids.

Kolkata, India
What is it that attracts people back to Kolkata? It’s certainly not India’s most comfortable metropolis, but there’s something about that chaotic Bengali capital which people find positively addictive. Staying at Fairlawns, the colonial era hang-out which insists that the Raj era never ended, is certainly one of the attractions.

New York, US

We’ve had many great New York experiences, all the important galleries and museums, lots of Broadway and off-Broadway theatre, great comedy clubs, we’ve even sailed out of New York past the Statue of Liberty en route to Europe and once I walked the entire length of Manhattan, following Broadway for 24 kilometres from Battery Park to the Broadway Bridge to the Bronx.

Antarctica
Our first visit was a standard Antarctic Peninsula excursion out of Ushuaia in Argentina, a perfect trip in a small enough (30-passenger) ship to get up close to the frozen continent. Then I had to go back to see South Georgia, a mountain range rising out of the Antarctic Ocean with incredible numbers of wildlife, particularly penguins.

Five favourite hotels

Cheap digs
Sadly, some shoestring stays are long gone, like the dollar-a-night losmen of Bali and Indonesia. Your room featured nothing more than a bed, the chair and a table were outside facing the garden courtyard. The bathroom featured a mandi, a large open water tank with what looked like a plastic saucepan perched on the edge. When you wanted a shower you scooped water out with the saucepan and emptied it over your head. It was cold water, of course, but the climate was tropical, it felt fine.

… and some pricier ones
The Peninsula in Hong Kong, Raffles in Singapore, the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok, the positively wonderful Imperial in New Delhi. I’d be happy to stay in any of them again. Not The Ritz, in London, however. I never need to stay there again.

Amari Airport Hotel, Bangkok
Once trips to interesting places like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia or Myanmar (when it was Burma) all required a stop in Bangkok, often in both directions. A stay at the Amari, at the old Don Muang Bangkok Airport, was a prelude to something exciting or a chance to muse about a great trip. From here you could check straight in, get a starboard-side boarding pass for the Himalayan views to Kathmandu and then return to the hotel for a terrific buffet breakfast.

Poppies at Kuta Beach, Bali, Indonesia
Step through the entrance gate, away in the heart of chaotic Kuta into that lush garden and suddenly the Kuta noise and confusion is a light year away. Poppies is far from the most expensive or flash hotel in Bali, I’ve tried those – the Amandari, the Four Seasons Sayan and Jimbaran Bay, the Como Shambhala – and they’ve all been delightful. But so too is Poppies.

A night in Australia
Forget Melbourne and Sydney, despite their checklists of fine hostelries I’m heading to Western Australia to get away from it all at the Kimberley Coastal Camp, just a short helicopter flight from the Mitchell Falls. You certainly can’t drive there.

Five of the greatest opera sites

Opera on the Amazon
The Teatro Amazonas, which featured in the Herzog film Fitzcarraldo, hosted Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 2005. The heat and humidity of Manaus proved challenging for the audience, never mind the performers, but the entire town turned out to look at the “Ring Nuts” who had come from across the world.

Verona, Italy
One of the great opera festivals, the performances take place in the 2000-year-old arena. The “blue and silver” Aida was stunning, despite a shower briefly stopping the show. The centurions remained on stage, taking phones from under their tunics and scrolling messages while the string players dashed for cover.

St Petersburg, Russia
The beautiful Mariinsky Theatre is renowned for the quality of the performances but Eugene Onegin was memorable for the cat which upstaged the tenor, putting his all into Lensky’s beautiful aria. The singer couldn’t see the cat, but the audience was engrossed as it strutted across the stage then leapt onto one of the boxes and proceeded to “cat walk” along the edge. Finally, someone grabbed it and held it until the aria finished. The poor tenor was mystified when the audience applauded for the cat, which its captor held aloft.

Bayreuth, Germany

Built to Wagner’s own design specifically for The Ring, the acoustics are magnificent. Wagner was the first to insist that the lights be dimmed for the performance and the size and scale of the theatre is perfect for showcasing his operas. Unfortunately for the audience, it is also the most uncomfortable theatre in the world, though for a Wagner fan it is a once in a lifetime pilgrimage.

Summer in England
It means it’s time to head to the country for garden operas like Glyndebourne or Garsington. Closer to central London there’s imaginative opera at the friendly Opera Holland Park, but I always try to visit West Green Opera, 75 kilometres west of London in a beautiful Hampshire garden.

Five more I couldn’t leave out

Ireland
On Maureen’s home island, we’ve travelled from the Aran Islands (The Banshees of Inisherin was only half-filmed there and Father Ted’s Craggy Island is purely fictional, but the islands are wonderful) to Belfast’s Fair City where we’ve even seen Van Morrison perform Cyprus Avenue on Cyprus Avenue.

Albania
Poor Albania. At least the Romanians had the satisfaction of standing their evil dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife in front of a firing squad. But Albania’s nutty Enver Hoxha died before he could be tossed out. Albania has Roman ruins, fine beaches, wonderful countryside and at the capital Tirana, you can fly into Mother Teresa International Airport.

Cuba
Why is it that places America really dislikes really like American cars? A visit to Cuba is just not possible without a ride in a Chevy convertible at some time. Despite the efforts of Fidel and his successors to impoverish the country, Havana is still a wonderful city, the restaurants are surprisingly good and the bars are terrific.

Outer Space
I’ve never had any ambition to buy a seat on a space trip, but I have been to Baikonur in Kazakhstan to see a Soyuz depart for the International Space Station. Every Russian space launch from Sputnik 1 onwards has taken place there and I went to see a “tourist” (a rich computer game inventor of course) head skywards.

Tibet
When I finally got to Tibet it was on foot after a one-week trek through western Nepal to the border. It was followed by walking a circuit of holy Mount Kailash, an effort that, according to Tibetans, wipes out all the sins of your lifetime. Although only this lifetime, further effort is required if you want to sort out other lifetimes.

Five places still on my bucket list

Paraguay and Uruguay
I still want to travel from Asuncion east to the Iguazu Falls where Paraguay converges with Brazil and Argentina. Then I’ll head south to Montevideo, like a smaller more manageable Buenos Aires, I’m told. From there I’ll visit the beaches along the Atlantic Coast before backtracking to Fray Bentos. Finally, I’ll take a ferry across the River Plate to Buenos Aires.

Algeria
This is the only North Africa destination I’ve not visited, having been to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco. If I have time, there are Sahara dunes and the Atlas Mountains in the south, but along the Mediterranean coast are great Roman ruins and the historic casbah of the capital Algiers.

Nigeria
My parents lived in Kano in Nigeria in my father’s airline days, and it feels like a major omission from my travel CV that I’ve never visited the largest, in terms of population, country in Africa.

Yemen
I can claim I’ve been to Yemen because I’ve visited Socotra, “the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean”, although the island’s unique life is vegetable rather than animal. But I’ve still not been to the real Yemen, in particular Sana’a with its spectacular mud architecture. Who knows when Yemen will become peaceful enough to allow a visit?

Orkney Islands, UK
Anytime I’m in London and have a week free I could hop up to the windswept Orkney Islands just north of John O’Groats, the northern end of Scotland. There I would check out Britain’s northernmost cathedral and highest sea cliffs, plus the Old Man of Hoy, a 140-metre sea stack, and Skara Brae, the finest Neolithic settlement site in Western Europe.