Lonely Planet have just released their Ultimate Travelist – a hefty hardback book ranking the top 500 best sites on the planet.
The Temples of Angkor in Cambodia topped the list, with the Great Barrier Reef coming in a close second.
Registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, the “Hindu Heaven on Earth” is a complex of more than 1,000 temples, shrines and tombs.
Next on the list is the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland in northeastern Australia. It is the largest living thing on Earth and is even visible from outer space.
Lonely Planet’s third pick is Machu Picchu, the Incan citadel set high in the Andes Mountains in Peru. It’s the highest ranking sight to behold in the Americas. Also in the top 20 of the Lonely Planet travel list: Grand Canyon National Park in the US (6th), the Iguazu Falls on the Brazil-Argentina border (8), Tikal, the ruins of an ancient city found in a rainforest in Guatemala (14) and the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador (19).
To round out the top 5, the ultimate traveler will head back to Asia, first to see the Great Wall of China, built across the historical northern borders of China to protect the Chinese states and empires against raids and invasions, and then to the Taj Mahal, the marvelous white marble mausoleum located in the Indian city of Agra.
Africa and Europe are both poorly represented in the top 20 of Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Travelist. Only the medina in Fez (11) represents the former, while the Colosseum in Rome (7) and the Alhambra, a palace and fortress complex located in Granada, Spain (9), represent the latter.
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