I’m going to Norway next week, and I see from my guidebook that Oslo’s highlights include coffee at the Grand Cafe, eating ice cream in the city centre, waving a Norwegian flag, picking summer blueberries, going winter skiing, one of Grunerlokka’s cafes, and an impromptu dinner of shrimp.  Also listed is the Munch Museum, but only so you can cheat security there, Vigeland Park, and the ship museums of Bygdoy. No mention of the Royal Palace, Castle, National Folk Museum or many museums in the city centre.

I don’t know whether the push by editors to popularize their guidebooks sells more of their books, but to me I am getting a lot of useless information, and it is harder to decide what I want to see, or even whether I want to go to a place at all.  Surely if I want a good cafe I can consult the ‘Eating’ section. And I am not going to visit Oslo just so I can try an ice cream (they don’t even claim the ice cream is any good!).  A few years ago a couple of the better guidebooks reluctantly realized the value of giving highlights, but they are now losing sight of why people want highlights.

Heard some of the ‘History of the World in 100 Objects’ programmes on the radio? Well all 100 reside at the British Museum, and they are running their own series of more in-depth ‘H of W in 100 Os’ museum talks. I recently attended one, a free and exceptionally good presentation about the Mold Gold Cape – giving a breadth of understanding to the picture of people across Europe at the time, and how the cape fitted into this.  We then spent several hours wandering around the ‘H of W’ objects – there is far too much to take in in the whole BM in a day, so just focusing on the ‘H of W’ objects is an ideal way to get a glimpse of the treasures across all the BM’s galleries. There’s a special map that pinpoints the ‘H of W’ objects, and the BM is spreading the focus over several months by highlighting them in three batches – the first 30 were highlighted at the start of 2010, the next batch of 40 were added in May, and the final 30 will be covered in the autumn. Even just looking at 30 or so of these will take you several hours. Sadly for those that like to see all the good things in a museum, this is thoroughly impossible in the British Museum – the problem is the sheer quality of the collection.

There has been a proliferation of books listing the top places to see – ten years ago there were virtually none on the travel shelves of bookshops, while now there is likely to be a good selection, or, perhaps more accurately, a large selection.  We all love that feeling that something is best, combined with the desire to tick things off – the same mentality that makes some of us draw up ‘to do’ lists, perhaps even including some items we have already done just so we can tick them off, and feel good right from the start. One of the most popular is the 2003 publication of Patricia Schultz’s 1000 Places to See Before You Die – admittedly sometimes dubbed 1000 Hotels and Restaurants to See Before You Die. 20% of the places are in the USA, and none, for example, are in Libya, but it still sits on the shelf and is regularly consulted.

Thousands of miles long, the narrow strip of land that makes up Chile is one of the most diverse countries in the world. The most stable and wealthy of the South American democracies, the north has the dramatic moonscapes of the Atacama desert, with huge salt lakes, the world’s highest geyser field, and the clearest skies on earth, making it a natural home of several of the world’s finest observatories.  There are huge petroglyphs on the mountainsides, abandoned nitrate mining towns and the huge still working copper mines  of Chuquicamata.

The centre of the capital has the pristine volcanic peaks of the Lake District, south of the capital and the main coastal sites of the recent earthquake. The south has the dramatic peaks and glaciers of Torres del Paine National Park. Once you have covered the mainland, if you have any time left a five hour flight takes you to one of the most remote places on earth – Easter Island – home to the mysterious giant stone heads, one of the classic mysteries of archaeology.

There are 140 countries you ought to see – half of which you must see – before you die.  That’s a heck of a lot of travelling you need to cram in.  Admittedly the Vatican City can probably be fitted into a day, or at most two days, but Egypt is going to take at least a fortnight, and China could take months!   If you are like me, then always assume that you may never come back to a place – true, you may have had a great time, but it will never be as great the second time, and it is better to see what you can, make sure you take in the highlights, and do not rely on a hypothetical repeat visit.

At Christmas we decided to go to a country with a large and lush highland area full of history – its own Camelot, known as Gonder, the Blue Nile Falls, the beautiful Simien Mountains National Park, arguably the finest scenery in Africa. The North has the ancient civilization at Axum, a microcosm of Egypt, while a short way east are the fantastic underground churches of Lalibela, which form one of the most astounding sites I have ever seen.

Heading towards Eritrea and Djibouti, there is wild and inhospitable desert where the ‘missing link’ hominid Lucy was discovered, and an area known as the Danakil Depression, the hottest place on the planet, where the earth is literally tearing itself apart, in due course splitting Africa in two. Having never been fully colonized, but with history and myths going back to the Queen of Sheba, Ethiopia has some poor areas, but is a far cry from the dreadful images shown on the world’s news stations in the 1980s. An ideal destination for those who want all round good sightseeing and scenery, while experiencing something of real Africa.