“Lonely Planet”‘s ultimate travellers’ bucket list – how many of them have you visited?
This week, the “Lonely Planet” organisation issued a list of its top tourist destinations around the world. The top 20 were as follows:
- Temples of Angkor, Cambodia
- Great Barrier Reef, Australia
- Machu Picchu, Peru
- Great Wall of China, China
- Taj Mahal, India
- Grand Canyon National Park, USA
- Colosseum, Italy
- Iguazu Falls, Brazil-Argentina
- Alhambra, Spain
- Aya Sofya, Turkey
- Fez Medina, Morocco
- Twelve Apostles, Australia
- Petra, Jordan
- Tikal, Guatemala
- British Museum, England
- Sagrada Familia, Spain
- Fiordland National Park, New Zealand
- Santorini, Greece
- Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
- Museum of Old & New Art, Australia
I have been so fortunate in my opportunities to travel, so I have been to every location in the top 10 and to 16 of the top 20. You can find a guide to these 20 destinations here and read some of my travel reports here.
What has really saddened me recently is how many tourist locations are now targeted by terrorists or the scene of insurgences. As we have broadened our travel destinations over the last decade and a half, we have visited a number of countries where there has been violence before (Egypt), during (Nepal) or after (Syria) our time there.
This week, we have seen the murderous explosion in Bangkok (Thailand) which we visited just two years ago and the brutal beheading of an antiquities curator in Palmyra (Syria) which we visited four years ago.
It seems that nowhere in the world is truly safe, but many of the poorest countries on earth rely very much on earnings from tourism, so we have to keep travelling and hope that engagement will be good for us and for those we meet.