Face it. We're list-obsessed - from groceries to house chores to must-do-once-in-a-lifetime trips. And that's where we come in.
Enticing coffee-table books arrive on our desks every month, from Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips to Unforgettable Canada: 100 Destinations to the bestseller 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which has spawned a regional version, not to mention a handy destination-of-the-day calendar. Or check out 43things.com, where 1.3 million souls from California to Saudi Arabia share their life goals online - and where travel figures right up there after the category for "fun." (Most common travel goal? To go on a road trip with no predetermined destination.) "People's lives are full of dreams that they're deferring, and stuff they wish they weren't really doing," says Josh Petersen, chief executive officer of 43things.com. By making a list - "going public with goals" in the case of his Seattle-based site - it makes sailing the Dalmatian coast that much more achievable.
So how did we narrow our list down to 10? Well, we're choosy. And we do our homework. We polled a few dozen real travellers - world travellers - about their top 10 must-see lists, from travel company head honchos to Globe and Mail foreign correspondents to full-time adventurers to the people who inspired us to travel. People who says things like, "Happy to contribute, but I'm exploring the Marquesas Islands by freighter next month, so let us know when this article will run." Our panelists' passports are heavily stamped; most have visited dozens, if not a hundred-plus countries. (Yes, the Vatican City counts. No, while the front row of a Bruce Springsteen concert may be an unforgettable destination, it's not a country).
Altogether, our panelists suggested hundreds of destinations. A lot of votes came in for the classic must-sees: India's Taj Mahal in the eerie light of dawn, the lost city of Machu Picchu in Peru, the stunning Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan, carved out of red rock. There were fisticuffs over narrowing down the best city to stroll through once: Paris, Hong Kong, Marrakesh, Mumbai? And what should make the cut: China's Great Wall or Xi'an, home to the terra cotta warriors? Will it be the Nepalese trail to Mount Everest or the Spanish Camino de Santiago?
What inspired us most about the lists, however, were the offbeat destinations, the places that made us think: Hmm, now we want to go there too. These are destinations you have to explore - not just see. There was less overlap, but much passion in describing these road-earned memories, from exploring a forest in Cameroon filled with butterflies the size of kites to roaming a Mongolian desert without boundaries.
So, here, in random order, are 10 destinations to consider for your dream list - places that teach us about our world. Places you have to see before you die.
KARAN SMITH, TRAVEL EDITOR
1. MONGOLIA, GOBI DESERT I fell in love with Mongolia as I camped in a tent under the stars in the Gobi Desert, after a day of talking to nomads and travelling by jeep on desert trails.
Mongolia, more than any other country on Earth, is a land of physical freedom and limitless space. This is a nation of nomads, a land of wide-open taiga and endless green hills, a country of no fences and no boundaries and almost no roads.
Here is the thing to do in Mongolia: You hire a jeep (one of the rugged Russian-made vehicles that seem to be the main form of transportation here), you chart a direction and you head off across the grassland or the desert, following some invisible trail that only your driver will comprehend.
At night, you'll bunk down in a traditional ger, a circular tent of felt and wood, and watch the sunset splash across the hills. The wind will sweep down from the north as you sip tea and debate the merits of Genghis Khan. Before dawn, as you sleep, your host will stoke the stove with fresh firewood, chasing away the nighttime chill.
The next day, you can ride horses, visit the herdsmen, study the shaggy camels, gaze at the eagles in the sky and hike to one of the tiny Buddhist shrines in the hills. There's nothing really like it.
Geoffrey York
2. THE PHILIPPINES, TAAL VOLCANO Some destinations are more about the quest than the arrival, so don't take an easy route to the lip of the Taal volcano. Wedge yourself among farm workers in a noisy jeep for the ride south of Manila, out of the city's diesel haze and into the lush abundance of the countryside.
Jump out as the jeep slows in a village overlooking the great Taal crater, and haggle with one of the motorcyclists who loiter near the top of the road. Price agreed, clamber into a jury-rigged sidecar that seems welded together from kitchen plumbing and careen down a steep set of switchbacks, alternating between fear of traffic misadventure and a wide-eyed wonder at the landscape glimpsed between the foliage: A vast lake at the bottom of the crater, with another volcanic cone rising from its centre. The cone is so precipitous that the threat of mudslides prevent tourists from climbing to the summit on rainy days. A fisherman's boat will skim you across the lake, and tourists who lack athleticism may want to hire one of the horses tethered on the other side. Otherwise, there's no need for a guide; all trails lead to the summit. It's a long hike, and your only reward is a view of yet another small lake at the bottom of the volcano you've just climbed, but it makes you feel like an explorer in a faraway land.
Graeme Smith
3. ECUADOR, OTAVALO MARKET If the under-glass order, calm and silence of great museums are your idea of an exciting cultural experience, do your best to avoid the Saturday market in Otavalo, Ecuador.
If you like your culture loud, crowded, in brilliant colour and in your face, make your way upcountry from Quito to the mountain town of Otavalo. Rise with the sun like the locals, who come from far and wide, and climb to the edge of town where raucous commerce in livestock will be taking place in the shadow of the mountains. Animals bleat, bawl, bray and squirm and everyone drives a hard bargain and wears a colourful hat and poncho.
Then hasten back to town for the artisans' outdoor market; a tsunami of colourful, hand-woven fabrics sold by of squat, photogenic women wearing strata of skirts. You can wander around breakfasting on corn on the cob (or roast guinea pig), be serenaded by Andean pipe bands, catch a cockfight, have a curse placed or lifted, haggle over armadillo-shell guitars or just let it all wash over you like the pulpy home-brewed beer the marketers start swilling in the afternoon when it all winds down.
Anthony Jenkins
4. EL SALVADOR, THE WESTERN COAST El Salvador is the smallest Central American country, with more than its share of pristine beaches, craggy mountains and lush forests. Tourists are few and locals are unwaveringly friendly, putting to rest any unease about being in a country where civil war ended a mere 15 years ago.
One of the highlights is cycling along coastline-hugging roads and stopping to explore the small villages and sandy beaches en route. In La Libertad - a beach town 30 kilometres south of El Salvador's capital, San Salvador - begins a spectacular stretch of twisting road that allows access to beautiful and secluded beaches with warm waters and some of the best surf breaks in the world. Go inland to visit one of the country's numerous high-altitude coffee plantations credited with protecting watersheds and wildlife, or explore El Imposible National Park for a look at steaming volcanoes. Besides friendly people and natural beauty, the food is good, the prices are cheap and the weather is mild - just be sure to visit during the dry season (November to April).
Julie Angus
5. JAPAN, HIMEJI-JO My wife and I first became aware of White Heron Castle from a postcard photo we spotted during our budget-priced honeymoon to Japan in 1970. We knew immediately we had to see it and rushed off to buy a train ticket to the city of Himeji, 55 kms west of Osaka.
We weren't disappointed. After decades of world travels, I still think of Himeji-jo as the world's most impressive castle and perhaps its most beautiful building. With its graceful gables and turrets and its shimmering white-plastered walls accentuated by the black tiles of its multiple curving roofs, it is a study in elegant symmetry. But it was also designed to be an impregnable fortress in a time of civil wars. Its maze of outbuildings was arranged to disorient invaders while gunfire, arrows and boiling water rained down on them from slits in the upper walls. The castle survived American bombing of the surrounding city in 1945 and was featured in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. UNESCO, which recognized it as a World Heritage Site in 1993, calls it the "the finest surviving example of early-17th-century Japanese castle architecture."
Douglas McArthur
6. ITALY, OSTIA ANTICA It has always been a mystery to me why Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient seaport, is not stuffed with tourists. Ostia is almost as well preserved as Pompeii and is far easier to get to. It is a 30-minute rail trip from downtown Rome. Yet even on weekends, at the height of the tourist season, the place is uncrowded. Finding a shady spot under an umbrella pine for a picnic is never a challenge. Ostia offers the perfect respite from the chaos and savage summer heat of Rome.
We have been visiting Ostia for years. We climb the remarkably intact amphitheatre, chuckle at the public toilets - using the loo was clearly a social moment - and wander the streets of a wealthy city that had a population of 75,000 at its peak. The shop owners' mosaics, depicting fish, naval paraphernalia and the like, offer a fascinating glimpse into early forms of advertising. Remnants of bathhouses, a synagogue, taverns and a firefighting service make exploring a treat.
Now, Ostia is working its magic on our girls, aged 7 and 11. Arianna, the elder of the two, had an awakening there a few months ago. She had been reading The Thieves of Ostia, by Caroline Lawrence. It's a whodunit starring a young girl, named Flavia, who with her friends tries to discover who is bumping off the city's dogs. Their adventure takes them to the necropolis, the harbour and other parts of the city. The book contains a map and we spent a hour trying to find Flavia's house. We located the ruins of a villa with a courtyard fountain that could have been hers.
Arianna was thrilled. Flavia's life, with her walk to school, chores, birthday parties, encounters and adventures, was not so different from her own, she realized. To her, the dead city had come alive.
Eric Reguly
7. CAMEROON, KORUP RAIN FOREST I picked up a park guide in the village of Mundemba, close to the entrance to the Korup National Forest in southwestern Cameroon, and in half an hour I was in a primary rain forest, deeper, older and more exotic than the "jungle" along the Lobé River through which the country's pygmies move so easily. It was steamy hot, and everything dripped with moisture. There were butterflies overhead as large as kites, dipping and swooping in cobalt, turquoise, scarlet and garish green.
Some of the trees were immense. Hollow one out and you could easily park a compact car in there, with room left over for a baby carriage, a mower and a doghouse. They towered overhead, festooned with parasite vines, stretching through the junk growth of the underlayer.
In fact, this may well be the oldest forest on Earth, having missed serial glaciations. It has existed here, in much the same form, for 65 million years, since the days of the dinosaurs. Korup forest, 125,000 hectares of it, was designated a National Park of Cameroon in 1986 and is contiguous with Nigeria's Cross River National Park and thus protects a significant portion of West African rain forest. Because it is so ancient, it has a diversity of plant and animal species - almost a quarter of every living thing in Africa exists in this small place.
Marq de Villiers
8.THE UNITED STATES, MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK For 20 minutes you wind up a steep two-lane blacktop to the tops of 2,200-to-2,500-metre mesas. The views of the plains and silhouettes of other giant rock formations in the distance are spectacular. But the attractions here are closer. In almost every canyon carved into this high country, there is an architectural remnant of one of North America's greatest and most enigmatic native cultures. For 700 years, until a long period of drought in the late 1200s drove them away from the southwest corner of what is now Colorado, Ancestral Puebloans farmed these mesa tops and built elaborate stone communities in cliff-face, apse-shaped depressions.
There are about 600 cliff dwellings, many multi-storey and amazingly intricate, in the park, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The larger communities, such as Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace, were raised around 1100 when an estimated 6,000 natives lived in Mesa Verde's canyons.
This was a golden age for the Puebloans, a time when native art and technology flourished and networks of culture and trade extended west to the Pacific coast and south to the great Mayan and Aztec cities in Mexico and Central America.
Laszlo Buhasz
9. GREENLAND, ILULLISAT The magic moment came as we stood gazing out over the Jakobshavn Isbrae - a river of floes and icebergs that wends south from the Greenland Ice Sheet into Davis Strait. This morning, having anchored off Ilullisat in a 100-passenger ship operated by Adventure Canada, we had left the M/S Explorer to go cruising in 10-person inflatable boats among the largest icebergs in the world. Some of these, 12 or 15 metres high, loomed over us like corrugated apartment blocks, while others assumed the fantastical shapes of futuristic sculptures.
Later, gliding into Ilullisat (also called Jakobshavn), home to 4,000 people and 6,000 sled dogs, we delighted in the colourfully painted houses scattered over the rocky, rolling hills, the bright reds, greens and yellows a whoop of joy against the treeless tundra. About 15 of us hiked three kilometres through town, and then along a winding boardwalk, eventually to scramble, in groups of three or four, over a nine-metre-high ridge. In the decade that ended in 2003, according to glaciologists, the ice river before us more than doubled in speed to flow at a rate of almost 13 kilometres per year.
But as I stood marvelling at this white, slow-motion phenomenon, struck dumb at the size of it, I found myself thinking not of global warming but of the Titanic, which sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg spawned here. And as, for the first time, I grasped the magnitude of the natural forces that had made this possible, I could do nothing but shake my head in humility and amazement.
Ken McGoogan
10. ETHIOPIA, ROCK CHURCHES There is little in the Ethiopian village of Roha-Lalibela to catch the eye. Peasant farmers, equipped with sickles and hoes, eke out a tough life among stones and dust.
Edge carefully across a granite plateau at the village boundary, however, and you notice a trench that snakes across its surface. It is the first glimpse of Africa's most-compelling religious site, a complex of monolithic, rock-hewn churches of astonishing heft that have been in continuous use since the 13th century. Outraged by the 1187 capture of Jerusalem by Kurdish warrior Saladin, Ethiopia's King Lalibela commissioned the churches as a pilgrimage centre for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians.
Wary of Muslim incursions to the east, he ordered them built below ground, to be invisible from a distance. Eleven churches, chapels and shrines, hand-chiselled from solid granite, are connected by passageways and tunnels. Deep trenches, riddled with chambers containing mummified monks and pilgrims, separate the edifices from the surrounding rock. Sculpted windows and traceries lace the interiors; faded paintings are just visible in the gloom. Once the complex was complete, King Lalibela abdicated the throne and retired to a cave, where he lived out the rest of his life, surviving on roots and vegetables.
Colin Barraclough
MEET OUR PANEL:
- Colin Angus has travelled to 38 countries. His latest book is Beyond the Horizon.
- Julie Angus, an adventurer and writer, lives on Vancouver Island.
- Colin Barraclough, a former Middle East reporter, now lives in Buenos Aires and focuses on adventure and travel writing.
- Laszlo Buhasz, The Globe's Assistant Travel Editor, has been to 38 countries.
- Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, author of Down to This, is drawn to caves and volcanoes in his journeys.
- George Butterfield, an Order of Canada recipient, co-founded Butterfield & Robinson.
- Marq De Villiers's latest book is Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold.
- Patrick Dineen, editor of Travelweek, has visited 75 countries and is drawn to sporting events in strange lands.
- Janet Forman, a writer based in New York and Los Angeles, has visited more than 70 countries.
- Laurie Gough, author of Kiss the Sunset Pig, confesses she voted for Springsteen.
- Norman Howe, an ex-lawyer, is a co-owner of Horizon Travel.
- Wallace Immen, a writer for The Globe, has checked off 74 countries on his life list.
- Barb and Ron Kroll, publishers of www.KrollTravel.com, have visited more than 100 countries.
- Deanna MacDonald, an art historian living in Madagascar, has visited 52 countries.
- Douglas McArthur has visited 100-plus countries and is dreaming of seeing Lhasa.
- Clint McLean is a Toronto-based photographer working on an exhibition about salt harvesting.
- Ken McGoogan, author of Lady Franklin's Revenge and Fatal Passage, favours travel to the North.
- Stephanie Nolen, The Globe's correspondent based in Johannesburg, counts Botswana's Okavonga Delta as a must-see.
- Clark Norton, a travel writer based in Narrowsburg, NY, has been to 102 countries.
- Anthony Jenkins,The Globe's editorial cartoonist, has visited 77 countries and is not sure which will be 78.
- Paul Koring, The Globe's Washington correspondent, says Prague, before freedom and McDonald's, would have made his top 10.
- Bruce Poon Tip, the founder of G.A.P Adventures, has been to 107 countries.
- Eric Reguly, The Globe's correspondent in Rome, puts Rossport, Ont., and, yes, Rome, on his list.
- Mark Schatzker, a Toronto-based travel writer, says nothing beats watching a Mongolian family slaughter a sheep for dinner.
- Jason Schoonover, whose latest book is Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives, splits his time between Saskatoon and Bangkok.
- Graeme Smith, The Globe's correspondent based in Kandahar, heads to the sand dunes of Morocco in his spare time.
- Fred Smith, an inveterate world traveller based in Whitehorse, has been on countless road trips, as his daughter can attest.
- Les Stroud is the star of OLN's Suvivorman and has eaten roasted leech in his travels.
- Chris Turner, the author of The Geography of Hope, has visited 26 countries, not counting Texas.
- Alison Wearing, author of Honeymoon in Purdah, lives in Tepoztlan, Mexico.
- Geoffrey York, The Globe's foreign correspondent in Beijing, has visited 110 countries.