They've travelled all over the globe but if they could return to just one special place which would it be? Carl Wilkinson asked 15 of the world's top travel writers to choose their all-time favourite destination

Colin Thubron

Khotan, China

What appeals to me about revisiting Khotan is that it's like jumping back in time, like going back to the still heart sitting at the centre of Asia. It's a little-known oasis city in the middle of north-west China with the Taklimakan Desert to its north. The Taklimakan is the deadliest desert on earth - its name means 'once you go in you never come out'.

You have to be rather determined to get to Khotan. There's no railway. You have to take a bus from Kashgar, which is several hundred miles to the north-west. It's been closed to foreigners until fairly recently and I first went a couple of years ago. It has a great history. It was on the 2,000-year-old southern Silk Road between China and the West so it has a feel of ancientness about it. You can wander off into the desert on a day's camel ride and find ruins and the tombs of holy men sitting in this very strange and very dead desert. They still manufacture hand-spun silk in the old-fashioned way. You can wander about the rivers that come down from the Tibetan plateau and find jade in them.

The city appeals to me because it escapes any strong sense of belonging to a particular nation or even to a particular period of history. It belongs to a world when national boundaries and identities didn't really exist, when people identified themselves more by religion or city or clan. That's part of its appeal.

What I think you gain from visiting it is a sense of proportion. The urgency of the modern is not present. You gain a sense of quietude. It's a multicultural city in that it's a little bit Chinese, a little bit Indian and it's Islamic. The effect is of a multi-layered city which is so ethnically diverse that you feel like you're meeting the world there.

· Colin Thubron is an award-winning travel writer and novelist. His most recent novel, To The Last City (Chatto), tells of a group of travellers in Peru

Jan Morris

Trieste, Italy

I determined long ago that I would spend much of my afterlife haunting my favourite foreign city.

I first set eyes on Trieste at the end of the Second World War when the British Army took me there, and the feelings I had about it then are precisely the feelings I have about it now, more than 60 years later. They are feelings not of nostalgia exactly, but of what the Welsh call hiraeth - a longing for something, but I'm not sure what ...

I was 19 when I first saw the place, and for one of my sensibility the timing was perfect. Trieste was in limbo. It was like a sort of nowhere. Once it had been the prime sea outlet of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of the great ports of the world. By the time I got there it was a backwater, wistfully uncertain of itself, unsure even of what nationality it was going to be when the muddle of war resolved itself.

I loved this. I loved the great blue empty bay of Trieste, with the little castle of Miramare on its peninsula and the harsh limestone mountains of the Karst region all around. I loved its ethnic confusions, where Slavs, Latins and Teutons mingled, its pompous imperial architecture and its anomalous Viennese cafe culture, down there at the head of the Adriatic. I loved its literary associations - James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Richard Burton. I even liked the fact that it was a disputed city, with Marshal Tito's hostile Yugoslavian armies always watchful on those hills.

Most of all I liked its sweet melancholy, and that's still what I like the most. Today's Trieste is not really melancholy at all - it's often very lively, in fact. In my own mind, though, as I loiter on the waterfront, or sit in one of those Franz Josef-era cafes, or catch an evening at the opera, or wander along pathways of the Karst, or just look out across the water at Miramare, where Archduke Ferdinand spent his last happy days - in my mind this kind city seems to bask in its own tristesse, as I do myself.

For the truth is that I love Trieste because I see myself in it. It is separate, on its own, bittersweet, a bit enigmatic, neither quite one thing nor another - in short, my kind of town!

· Jan Morris has published numerous travel books. Her latest, Hav, a guide to the fictional city she first invented 20 years ago in her book Last Letters from Hav, will be published in June by Faber

Michael Palin

Pongo de Mainique, Peru

The stretch of the Urubamba River north of Machu Picchu is difficult to get to but it is amazing. Rafting north, towards the Amazon, you navigate a series of rapids which take you into the most wonderful, magical place I've been in all my travels: the Pongo De Mainique (Pongo meaning a ravine or gorge). It's about a half a mile long and lies at the transition point between the Andes and the Amazon plain.

At the end of the gorge, almost as though they were created by a designer, stand two great blocks of granite, on either side of the river. Once you go through them you're in a different world and there is this extraordinary transition into the Amazon basin as the clay and the sandstone turn the river red.

The Pongo itself is very calm and the canyon is probably only about a hundred feet deep. The sides are sleek black basalt and because it rains so much there, on the edge of the Amazon jungle, the water streams down the sides, making the rocks shine like black marble.

After the noise of the rapids, the serenity of the place makes it a sort of lost world. I felt as though I could live there very happily for the rest of my life on a little bit of beach, eating the local fruit. Giant black butterflies flutter about and fantastic yellow-necked vultures fly overhead. It really is like being in an antediluvian paradise. My travels are motivated by the desire to see new places. But I want to go there again simply to remind myself that it was real.

· Michael Palin's travel series for the BBC have taken him around the world in 80 days, from pole to pole and across the Sahara. His most recent expedition was to the Himalayas

Tim Morre

Asbyrgi, Iceland

I'm not quite sure why abandoned industrial structures should lure me so magnetically, and would rather not confess my unedifying fascination with violent natural catastrophe. Yet no place on earth satisfies these twin passions more rewardingly than the canyon known as Asbyrgi, in Iceland's lonely north-east.

Viking settlers attributed the mighty, sheer-sided horseshoe-shaped depression they discovered near the coast to the stamping hoof of Odin's charger. Barely less abrupt and profound was the geological calamity now considered responsible: 8,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption beneath Europe's largest glacier, far away in the south, unleashed a stupendous torrent of meltwater that stripped away bedrock as it roared northwards, ultimately cleaving out a vast canyon, crowned by a waterfall of Niagara-belittling potency that was a kilometre wide and 100 metres high. All this, it is believed, occurred in a single day. As the angriest flood to have coincided with man's tenancy on Earth receded, the river it created shifted tack.

Today, all that remains at Asbyrgi is an apologetic trickle spattering onto the jagged, shed-sized boulders tossed nonchalantly over the precipice in those shattering 24 hours and left stacked up in the former waterfall's plunge pool. Perhaps it is this that gives the scene its poignantly forsaken, post-industrial quality - no gentle, age-smoothed decline and fall, just the sense of a plug suddenly pulled on some fearsome process.

Silence isn't hard to come by in Iceland, but there's something different about the silence in Asbyrgi. The towering walls of rock have kept the steadily battering Arctic winds at bay, in the process allowing a jolly little forest to colonise the canyon floor. Strolling among the shoulder-high birch trees and conifers it's difficult to imagine that this place of bird-twittering calm was ever home to such a ferocious scene. Though trying to get to sleep in a poxy Glastonbury dome-tent at Asbyrgi's campsite during a thunderstorm makes it easier.

· Tim Moore is the current Travel Writer of the Year. His most recent book is Spanish Steps (Vintage) about following the Pilgrim's Way to Santiago de Compostela with a recalcitrant donkey

William Dalrymple

Delhi, India

I first went to Delhi as a backpacker in the early Eighties. The city is woven in and out of all my books. I just find it endlessly fascinating. What I love about it is the layering of the city - as in Rome or Cairo you get this feeling of living on successive periods of history, and it crops up in the most weird places. Old Mogul tombs sit on roundabouts, and get in the way on the golf course. People just can't avoid the sheer accumulated rubbish of the ages. Each layer adds to the last. You still find old colonels from the Thirties walking around, bumping into modern software processors, and on the same street Sufis are reciting poems from the 14th century.

There are new suburbs with huge skyscrapers coming out of nowhere in land that was billowing with winter wheat four years ago.

I plan to continue living in Delhi. It has an impossible climate for four months of the year during which I come back to Europe. It's pretty perfect the rest of the year. In Delhi everything is much slower than in London, I get much more reading done, much more writing. It's a quieter life - anyone will tell you that Delhi is not one of the world's liveliest of cities for nightlife - but there's any number of compensations for that. I can get a flight to the beach on weekends. Rather than going to some damp cottage in Wiltshire you can be sitting in a palace in Rajasthan.

· William Dalrymple is a travel writer, historian and TV presenter. His new book, The Last Mughal (Harper Press) will be published later this year

Alan Whicker

Venice, Italy

My ideal place, rather predictably, would be Venice. I finished the Second World War there when I was about 21. I'd had two years of fighting, but as I had been late into the army, I was late out. So to keep me happily occupied I was made editor of the British Eighth Army newspaper, Union Jack.

It was the perfect job. I had a vast Italianate office, Venice was uncrowded - the only people there were the Venetians, which doesn't happen these days - and everyone was thrilled to still be alive. Venice was blossoming: Harry's Bar was the place to be; the girls were gorgeous; Venice was lovely and undamaged.

I stayed nearly a year and had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to austere London where the lights went out and there was petrol and food rationing and terrible weather.

I've been back to Venice many times since. I was there in March last year in the freezing cold. Instead of tourists, there were crocodiles of Italian schoolchildren marching through the alleyways chanting and brushing you aside. I stayed at the Gritti Palace on the Grand Canal, but I have rented an apartment in the past too. I like the idea of renting, but the problem with Venice is that it is such a rabbit warren it takes you days to find out how to get back to your apartment. It's a triumph when you finally recognise somewhere. I thought I knew Venice but suddenly you're in the middle of that kaleidoscope of people and places and little bridges and little canals, and you don't know where the hell you are - especially after a party at one in the morning when there aren't many people about. I'm not a great walker normally but in Venice you have to walk and its perfect.

· Alan Whicker has worked as a foreign correspondent around the world and presented around 300 editions of Whicker's World on TV. His book about his war-time experiences and his return to the areas he first visited as a young soldier, Whicker's War (HarperCollins), is out now

Jenny Diski

South Georgia, Antarctica

I'd go back to South Georgia and Antarctica like a shot because it's so beautiful and empty. I was there in 1999. I went on a Russian oceanographic boat. It had not been fixed up as a cruise ship so was quite basic. There were only about 60 travellers and all the crew were Russian, so it had a strange otherworldliness. It did have a sauna, though, which is good when you've been on a very cold beach. And it had a bar where the barman made Manhattans with ice from passing glaciers.

We went to various places around the Antarctic continent peninsula, but it was South Georgia I really loved. It's a thousand miles from the tip of South America and in the middle of nowhere. It's part of the Falkland Islands and used to be a great whaling station. Now it's the most beautiful, desolate place with rusted old equipment and half-sunk boats the rust has eaten away. And there's a museum run by a nice Englishman with a red face and a thick jumper.

I have been back to some places twice and it's never as good the second time. But I would love to do another cruise or be left on South Georgia to stew a bit.

· Jenny Diski is a novelist and travel writer. Her latest travel book, On Trying to Keep Still (Little, Brown), is to be published in April

Alexander Frater

Ilha de Mozambique

Hidden away among the mudbanks and mangroves of the Mozambique Channel lies a small tropical island containing an exquisite 16th-century European city. I chanced upon it during the civil war, turning up with a TV crew and finding that the abandoned capital of Portugal's African empire, a miniaturised version of old Lisbon, was now home to 10,000 refugees. Squeezed into decaying, once-grand houses (every time it rained, another fell down) subsisting on shellfish and seaweed, they treated us courteously, showing us around the extraordinary government buildings with their grand audience chambers and state apartments. Then - being country people governed by the inflexible rules of country hospitality - they threw a welcome party.

Beside a crumbling pink palace fires were lit for men to warm their drums. Ululating women with clay-daubed faces began to shuffle and stomp. Gradually everyone joined in, all the hungry and dispossessed jubilantly dancing with us until, shortly before daybreak, [rebel] Renamo militia turned up and chased us foreigners away.

I often think of going back. I hear there's a certain dhow captain at Pemba on the mainland who, if paid in dollars ...

· Alexander Frater is author of the bestselling Beyond the Blue Horizon. His most recent book, Tales from the Torrid Zone (Picador) tells of his childhood on Vanuatu and his travels in the Pacific

Kira Salak

Waw an Namus volcano, Libya

I first saw the Waw an Namus volcano in November 2004. It was only discovered in the 20th century and it's not really on the usual tourist route. It is 300 miles from civilisation, way out in the middle of the desert, so it is quite an adventure just getting there.

The desert in this part of Libya is spectacular. You get a real sense of the infinite. It's very flat to start with. Then, as you keep going, there are mountain ranges with the most spectacular rock formations and really high dunes. It's a geologist's paradise.

It is so unexpected to see this black volcano rising from the beige sands of the Sahara. You can walk to the top and then down into the crater where there is a massive lake surrounded by palm trees. It's spectacular.

There's nowhere like it; the stars are so bright. It gets really cold at night, but it's such an incredible experience. I'm always looking for what is remote and unfamiliar. That volcano typifies for me what is astounding and unique in the world.

· Kira Salak is a travel writer. Her most recent book, The Cruellest Journey (Bantam), is about a 600-mile canoe trip down the River Niger to Timbuktu.

William Sutcliffe

Hunza Valley, Pakistan

The first glimpse you get of the Hunza Valley is incredible. The town sits right below this vast, white mountain, Mount Rakaposhi, and the valley is beautiful, with poplar trees. The area is famous for its dried apricots and as you go into the valley you get a weird optical illusion. At first sight it seems like everything is orange. As you get closer you realise that every square inch of every rock around the town has got a hard apricot on it, drying in the sun. I've only been there once but I remember it as somewhere very magical. Hunza was self-governing in a sort of medieval way, ruled by a leader known as the Mir who lived in a palace at the top of the valley. It was not until the Seventies when they built the Karakoram Highway through Hunza, linking it to China, that it opened up. This valley, which ought to be a dead end, actually has a well-built, two-lane tar road running through it built by China and Pakistan for military purposes.

The journey north from Hunza on the Karakoram Highway is spectacular. It takes you up over the westernmost part of the Himalayas. The peaks are incredibly jagged. Most tourists end up on the roof of the bus, looking at the scenery.

· William Sutcliffe is a novelist and travel writer. He wrote the bestselling backpacker satire Are You Experienced? His latest novel is Bad Influence (Penguin)

Geoff Dyer

Black Rock Desert, Nevada, Usa

I first went to the Black Rock Desert in 1993. There was this endless expanse of flat white nothingness. It was the emptiest landscape I had ever seen. There was nothing there but distance. I assumed I would never set foot there again but between 1999 and 2005 I returned five times, to the annual Burning Man festival, to a temporary city of 25,000 people. Every time I went back to Black Rock City - always to be greeted with the words: 'Welcome home' - my eyes would blur with tears. I doubt I'll go to Burning Man again but I would like to return to the Black Rock Desert when it is empty, when there is no sign that something miraculous happens here; no sign that I or anyone else has ever been there, has ever existed or ever will exist.

· Geoff Dyer's idiosyncratic travel book, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It was published in 2003. His latest book, on photography, is The Ongoing Moment (Little, Brown)

Eric Newby

Turkey

My first visit to Turkey was to Istanbul, then a crazy, frightening-looking place. It's changed a great deal since. I first went in 1956 on the way to the Hindu Kush with my friend Hugh Carless who was in the Diplomatic Service. We arrived in Istanbul late in the evening and there were campfires burning all around so it was an incredibly romantic situation.

I enjoyed Turkey. It's a wonderful country and its population was very nice. Southern Turkey was an absolute ruin-fancier's heaven. The Observer provided me with a Land Rover and I toured the country putting together a guidebook for the newspaper. I didn't find Turkey particularly difficult to travel in - no more than anywhere else really. Why did I go? Well, because it was there, as someone once said.

· Eric Newby was travel editor of The Observer from 1963-1973. He is perhaps best known for his most famous book A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is regarded as a classic of the genre

Nicholas Shakespeare

Franklin River, Tasmania

The Franklin River is one of the last wilderness areas on earth and until you've walked earth that other Homo sapiens haven't trodden, you don't know what you're missing. I spent six days drifting downstream past ancient huon pines that were alive when Christ was crucified.

There is a rhythm between complete calm where the river is carrying you along - when cliff faces, trees and the sky are reflected in the water - and the rapids, when your life flashes past you. It was an extraordinary experience. I would love to go back and do the full 12-day trip from the source in the Cheyne

Mountains down to where the Franklin comes out into Macquarie Harbour.

One of the highlights was when we came to the Kuti Kina cave. It was the farthest south man got during the last Ice Age and it's where the Aboriginals holed up for 8,000 years. Going down this river offers the possibility that you will see species thought to have vanished. While we were there a German tourist about 50 miles east of us had taken two photographs of what he claimed was a Tasmanian tiger. If the images are real it will have been the first time one has been spotted since 1936.

The novelist James McQueen said of the Franklin that 'for me it is the epitome of all the lost forests, all the submerged lakes, all the tamed rivers, all the extinguished species'. That really sums it up for me. It's a wilderness that stands for all wildernesses.

· During the research for his acclaimed biography of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare travelled everywhere Chatwin had been. His most recent book is In Tasmania (Vintage)

Rory Maclean

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

I think Bamiyan is so poignant because of what has been lost. I've only been once - two-and-half years ago. I was quite lucky to get through with the 'Pax Americana'; the Americans had just taken Afghanistan and there was a hiatus during which the trail had been opened for the first time in a generation. The Iranians closed it in 1979 with their revolution and then when the Russians went into Afghanistan it stayed closed, so it was really only three years ago that the original route reopened. It would be crazy to go into Afghanistan by land now.

I arrived in Bamiyan at sunset. Flaxen light was spilling down along a lentil-red valley, glancing off the sheer sandstone cliffs. It was an amazingly beautiful sight.

The mountain face is peppered by gunshot, the arches and painted ceilings all destroyed, the frescoes all blackened by smoke, but at sunset something quite magical happens. Because of the way the sun falls when it's setting it doesn't light the inside of the alcoves where the Buddhas once stood so you get this trompe l'oeil - a trick of the light which creates an impression that something is still there.

The paradox is that we know the Buddhas have been destroyed and it's a terrible loss but really they were quite ugly. They are almost more beautiful now, since their destruction, than they were before. And at dusk when the shadows are deepest, there's this trick of the light which seems to trace something much more refined and ethereal in their place.

I would go back to see this again. There is something very spiritual and moving about the Bamiyan valley. To sit on the top of the Buddha cliff surrounded by spectral peaks beyond the sandstone cliffs - with the occasional Apache helicopter to bring you back down to earth - is incredible. It gives me a sense of hope.

· Rory Maclean is a travel writer and radio presenter. His sixth book, Magic Bus, (Viking) is to be published in March

Hilary Bradt

Peninsula Valdes, Patagonia, Argentina

Once you have seen an elephant seal in full burble, you know you have to come back! This small, windswept peninsula has not only elephant seals, but fur seals, right whales and killer whales; and penguins a few kilometres to the south.

What I remember most is how hard it was to get there in 1974, when our budget was $10 a day for two people. We spent five or so hours trying to hitchhike in a dust storm before giving up and hiring a car. We could afford the basic hire but not the mileage surcharge so drove part of the 150km in reverse. By driving 10km forward, and then 10km in reverse the mileometer didn't change - highly dishonest and I'm not proud of this. We got our just desserts when we reversed into a huge hole and had to be lifted out by helpful locals who then kindly waited to see us safely on our way - unfortunately the wrong way since we couldn't explain that we were driving backwards.

If I went back, I would contribute more to Argentina's economy, and spend a few days revisiting Punta Norte and its wonderful elephant seals which, to me, look and behave like rugby players. I never saw the famous killer whales last time, so I would be sure to include those and the huge colony of Magellanic Penguins at Punto Tombo to the south.

· During 1973-4, Hilary Bradt travelled through South America with her then husband, George. The trip spawned the Bradt Travel Guides series, which now publishes over 100 titles