Britain's best 25 - and why you should keep them a secret, by Richard Morrison
The world's best 25 - the pyramids fine, but Vegas? Next it will be Dollywood, says Matthew Parris
Tell us your favourite travel experience - and win all 25 books in the Rough Guides series
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They are the undisputed wonders of the world. The Great Wall of China. The Taj Mahal. The temples of Angkor Wat. The pyramids of. . . Las Vegas. The world’s most extraordinary monument to the fake and the kitsch has been included on a new list of the wonders of the world. The 25-strong list does include the other Pyramids, those at Giza, the only one of the original seven man-made wonders of the ancient world that survives. But it also provides some surprises and features nine natural phenomena, such as Uluru in the Australian Outback, the Himalayas and Victoria Falls.

The list, one of 25 new guides compiled by Rough Guides to celebrate 25 years of publishing, suggests the most jaw-dropping sights to be experienced by travellers.

Once the divide between travel and tourism was clear. The adventurous rich and a handful of the truly hardy travelled to far-flung places. The rest of us were tourists. Only fairly recently has travelling become a mass industry, serviced by cheap flights and books that suggest how to enjoy a full experience in a country; from seeing the famous sights or watching a local football game, to discovering the local music or locating the best fish market. So there are wonders on this list that cannot simply be snapped from the steps of a tour bus. These include “drifting down the Amazon” and exploring the Sahara at the slow pace of a camel train.

Everyone will have their own quibbles with the list – is Las Vegas a greater experience than New York? Does paddling a canoe through Belize’s Barrier Reef surpass an exploration of the Great Barrier Reef? The joy of travel is that we all have our own private lists of what we have done and where we still yearn to go.

Mark Ellingham wrote his first Rough Guide, to Greece, from a housing association flat in southeast London after bumming around the Aegean for a few months. The guide was “rough in every sense”, but 25 years on the publishing operation is extremely slick. There have been 350 Rough Guides, including a large number of nontravel reference books, and Ellingham’s office, with books and papers littered across the floor, is now in the headquarters of Penguin, which bought the brand after he and his co-founders sold out. He continues to run Rough Guides with Martin Dunford, who contributed to the first book and wrote several others.

Ellingham says that he is “horribly aware of the contradictions” of encouraging people to travel widely at a time of mounting concern about global warming. But he argues that travel plays a crucial role in the economies of developing countries and until an aviation fuel is discovered that doesn’t produce carbon emissions his mission is to encourage people to travel responsibly. This means taking fewer trips and staying longer and not indulging in what he calls “binge flights”: last-minute weekend trips overseas taken on a whim. Rough Guides also promote a “climate neutral” carbon offset scheme.

Of course the best way to curb your travel emissions is to stay closer to home, and so a list has been produced of the 25 “ultimate experiences” in Britain and Ireland, ranging from punting on the Cam to sipping a pint in Dublin; from trundling along the West Highland Railway to visiting Holkham, “the best beach in Britain”.

The Pembrokeshire Coast Path is on the list, which is hardly surprising given that Ellingham stays in the same hotel on that stretch of coast every year and lists it in his private top-five list of “ultimate travel experiences” anywhere in the world. The rest of the list: the coast town of Galle in Sri Lanka, the Mani in the Peloponnese in Greece, Fez in Morocco and Barcelona. His fellow Rough Guides boss, Martin Dunford, lists his top five as: New York, Exmoor, Naples, the Ardennes and Studenica in the hills of central Serbia. How do those tally with your own list of favourite travel memories? Let the debate begin.

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