What are your top 10 travel destinations?
I built the list backwards this time. Ten reasons first. The destination is only the address where each one lives.
The blog reframes travel from a checklist of places to visit into a purposeful journey of self-discovery, perspective, and personal growth.
Ten Reasons, and the Places That Answer Them
In response to today’s WordPress daily writing prompt: What are your top 10 travel destinations?
I have never been able to answer this question honestly, and I think I finally know why.
Ask me for ten destinations and I will give you a list I do not entirely believe. Places I have seen photographed well. Places that would make the list look respectable.
But that is not how anyone actually wants to travel. Nobody wakes up wanting a country. They wake up wanting a feeling, and then they go looking for the place most likely to supply it.
So here is my list, built the other way around. Ten reasons first. The destination is only the address where I think each one lives.
1. To be made small
Ladakh, India
There is a particular kind of relief in being outscaled, and most of us never get it. Our lives are built to human proportions. Rooms, screens, corridors, all of it sized to us.
Ladakh is not sized to us. Brown mountains with no softness in them, air so thin it slows your walking, and a sky that seems to start much further away than skies are supposed to. People come back saying it made them feel small, and they say it like it was a gift. I think it is.
2. To see what time does to stone
Petra, Jordan
We talk about old buildings. We rarely stand in front of something that makes the word old feel inadequate.
The Nabataeans carved Petra directly into sandstone cliffs more than two thousand years ago, and you approach it through a narrow gorge that opens without warning onto a facade cut into rock. I want to know what my sense of urgency feels like standing in front of that. I suspect it shrinks. I would like it to.
3. To be illiterate for a week
Kyoto, Japan
This one sounds strange until you have felt it.
There is something clarifying about being somewhere you cannot read. The signs stop shouting at you. The advertisements lose their grip. You are reduced to watching, which is the thing travel is supposed to teach and rarely does, because at home we are always half reading something.
Kyoto, because I would rather be illiterate somewhere beautiful.
4. To eat sitting on a plastic stool
Hanoi, Vietnam
The best food I have eaten has almost never been in a restaurant.
Hanoi has perfected the low plastic stool on a busy pavement, a single dish made by someone who has made only that dish for thirty years, and no menu to speak of. There is no performance in it. You sit down, you are handed something, you eat it, you leave. I want more meals like that and fewer meals I have to photograph.
5. To stand inside weather instead of watching it
Meghalaya, India
We have made weather into something that happens on the other side of glass.
Meghalaya gets rain that has to be experienced rather than described, some of the heaviest on earth, and the people there have spent generations training tree roots across rivers into bridges that grow stronger with age instead of weaker. I would like to stand on one of those in the middle of a downpour and remember that I am an outdoor animal who has been living indoors.
6. To walk a city until my legs quit
Lisbon, Portugal
Some cities are for seeing. A few are for walking, and they are not the same list.
Lisbon is built on hills and paved in small stones, which means it punishes you gently all day and then puts a view at the top of every climb. I want the version of a city you only get on foot: the wrong turns, the street you would never have chosen, the exhaustion at the end that feels earned rather than spent.
7. To be uncomfortable on purpose
Patagonia, Chile and Argentina
Comfort is the thing I optimise for all year, and I am not sure it has made me better.
Patagonia has wind that does not negotiate and weather that changes its mind four times before lunch. Nothing about it is convenient. That is precisely the appeal. I would like one trip a decade that I cannot control, so I can find out what is still in me when the conditions stop cooperating.
8. To be genuinely unreachable
The Andaman Islands, India
Not on holiday. Not away from my desk. Unreachable.
Most of us have not been out of contact for a full day in years, and we have quietly forgotten what our own thoughts sound like without interruption. I want a stretch of days on an island where the signal simply is not there, so the silence is not a discipline I have to maintain. Let the geography do it for me.
9. To see a place that does not hide its dying
Varanasi, India
This is the one I hesitate to put on a list like this, and the one I am most certain about.
We have arranged our lives so that death happens elsewhere, behind doors, handled by professionals. Varanasi has never done that. Life and death share the same riverfront steps in full public view, and people have been coming there to die on purpose for a very long time.
I do not want to visit it as a spectacle. I want to see, once, a place where mortality is ordinary rather than hidden, and find out what that does to how I live afterwards.
10. To go back and find out whether it was the place or the age I was
Fort Kochi, Kerala, India
Every one of us has a place we remember as extraordinary, and no way of knowing whether it actually was.
The nets still swing over the water at Fort Kochi. The spice godowns still smell like the inside of a cupboard from a hundred years ago. The lanes are still narrow and still shaded. It is entirely possible that none of it is as remarkable as I remember, and that what I am actually missing is being younger there.
I want to go back and find out. That is the trip I am least likely to take and most likely to need.
What the list gave away
I did not plan the ending. But reading them back, every reason on this list falls into one of two piles.
Half of them are asking to be made smaller. Outscaled by a mountain, outlasted by carved stone, outmatched by weather, out of reach of a signal.
The other half are asking to be woken up. To eat without performing. To walk until something hurts. To see a place that is honest about dying. To find out whether a memory holds.
So apparently I do not want ten destinations at all. I want to be humbled and I want to be woken up, and I have been quietly hoping that geography can do both.
It probably cannot, entirely. But it is a good place to start, and it beats a list of ten countries I chose because they photograph well.
Over to you: Try it the other way round. Do not tell me where you want to go. Tell me what you are hoping the place will do to you, and then name it. I suspect your list will surprise you as much as mine surprised me.
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In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 04 August 2026
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