Where is the most incredible place you have ever been?

Sunday Herald, The, May 16, 2004 by Compiled by Peter Ross

REDMOND O'HANLON, TRAVEL WRITER "The very best place I have ever been is a little cottage called Hannigarth on Unst in the north of Shetland. It was just incredibly beautiful and remote, one of the last cottages on the island, facing out into the Norwegian Sea. My family were with me at first, but then they went home and I was staying on for a couple of months. When they left, I became unbearably lonely. In the end, I found myself going upstairs to sniff the children's pillows. After that, I went into the village shop to see the postmistress, who is an unofficial local psychiatrist and has heard it all before. I told her all about it and burst into tears. You go in there ostensibly for a can of beans and end up spilling the personal beans."

Trawler: A Journey Through The North Atlantic is published by Hamish Hamilton

CAROL SMILLIE, PRESENTER OF HOLIDAY "The most incredible is probably a little uninhabited island off Tahiti. It had that sort of classic picture postcard look that doesn't actually exist very much - white sand, piercing aquamarine sea, and the palm trees that bend over so much they touch the water. We were staying in Bora Bora, but went on a day trip to the island to swim with sharks. I was pregnant with my first child at the time but they weren't any more likely to bite me.

STEVE MCCURRY, PHOTOGRAPHER "I've been travelling almost continuously since 1978. There are few places in the world that I haven't travelled to, but Eastern Tibet is special, particularly the regions Amdo and Kham. I first visited in 1989 and I've made half a dozen trips since. I have a fascination with the East, with Asia, with Buddhism. I also love mountains and there's no greater mountain range than the Himalayas. The landscape is awe-inspiring. There's no real tourism infrastructure; the roads are simple, the hotels are few and far between; you pretty much have the place to yourself. I've always found it very soothing; maybe I was Tibetan in a previous life."

SUE ARMSTRONG, AUTHOR "Lying snug in my sleeping bag on the still- warm desert sand under a huge canopy of stars, I thought to myself: 'If this is work, give me lots of it!' Recently arrived in Southern Africa as a journalist, I'd flown to Damaraland, in northern Namibia, to report on the controversial scheme to de-horn black rhinos to save them from ivory poachers. Damaraland is on the mountainous fringes of the Namib Desert - a landscape of delicate rainbow colours, clothed in fine grass and dotted with thorn trees visited by chattering flocks of love-birds. We travelled the rocky terrain in bone-jolting trucks in search of desert rhinos. One day I followed a Bushman tracker who could read a rhino's movements in a crushed leaf or footprint I could not even see. At night we listened to the haunting songs of the trackers round the fire. It was the start of a long love affair with this magical land. When my time comes I want my ashes scattered in Namibia."

PATRICK FRENCH, TRAVEL WRITER "I met a Tibetan exile in a London bar. He had just got a British passport, and was able to go home for the first time. His family were nomads, from the grasslands of northern Tibet. He suggested I drop by. The grassland was a wave, rising to green velvet hills and a wild, limitless sky, a place of wind and snow where no crops could grow, a flowerland of soft thistles and streams and swarms of butterflies. It was only a three day detour to Golog, by bus and tractor-trailer, to see my London friend, who was surprised at my arrival. The nomads' encampment was at once the most alien and the most welcoming place I had ever been. I was a curiosity, but the hospitality was instinctive. I was invited into a tent and offered boiled bones and dried cheese. Each morning, the patriarch would make an incense offering at the Tibetan Buddhist altar, and each evening, galloping horsemen in sheepskin robes trimmed with leopard fur, would twist down from their saddles, feet still in the stirrups, and snatch silk scarves from the ground."

Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French will be published in Harper Perennial paperback in June

BARBARA CLARK, HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS, VISITSCOTLAND "I've lived in Edinburgh for 20 years, and for me there is nothing better that walking down the High Street during the Edinburgh Festival. You suddenly realise that people from all over the world genuinely love the city you have made your home. There are few places in the world where you can meet so many people from so many cultures, go from tragedy to comedy in an afternoon, and see a city live and breathe colour and vibrancy."

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH, NOVELIST "For much of 1980 I lived in Swaziland, a small kingdom in southern Africa. I used to drive up to the Lebombo Mountains, from which one might look down to Mozambique and the Indian Ocean. There was a small town there, Siteki, which seemed to have been forgotten, but which still had an old colonial hotel. This hotel had a dining room in which each table was carefully laid with white linen and silver. I never saw anybody else eating there. The whole town had the feel of having been left over from somewhere in the Fifties. One had the impression at any moment one might encounter the shade of a former district commissioner on his way to an evening of bridge. On the road along the ridge of the mountains, I discovered a deserted farmhouse. Behind, the land dropped down sharply to the lowveld below, and one could look out for miles, over a landscape of shimmering heat, of browns and reds, to hills made blue by distance. I sought out the farmer who owned the house, and he walked with me round the property, he with his gun under his arm. What made this place so special? High air, Africa distilled, as Isak Dinesen would have it; a sense of loss; a sense of being missed by the world."