The five places that made me: Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet

AFGHANISTAN

The "hippie trail" from London via K-K-K-Kathmandu brought me to Australia. Landfall at Exmouth, on Western Australia's North West Cape, was off a tatty sailing boat from Indonesia. Today that would get you an onward ticket straight to Nauru, but we were a friendlier place in the '70s. Nevertheless Afghanistan was the trail highlight and I keep getting reminded what an amazing country it is and how with a little bit of peace and security it could be right back on the bucket lists. The recently released Aussie movie Jirga was my latest return ticket.

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

As the world's poster child for what a dystopian disaster zone should look like, the Motor City hardly seems a place to remember with affection. My early teenage years there were wonderful, I loved my American high school, Boy Scout camps in the Michigan wilderness were great, my father took me to baseball (Tigers) and gridiron football (Lions) games and any kid would love those chrome-plated turnpike cruisers. Years later I followed Route 66 in a '59 Caddy, no brakes to speak of but a cigarette lighter for every seat, all six of them.

CONGO, DRC

I've enjoyed every one of the 27 African countries I've visited. They've been entertaining, colourful, exciting, friendly and, in Congo DRC's case, somewhat confronting. Any country with Democratic in its name (it's the Democratic Republic of Congo) by definition isn't. The wide, brown, winding Congo River is fantastic, the lava bubbling Nyiragongo Volcano is every child's idea of what a volcano should look like and the Virunga National Park's gorillas are every bit as hulking as the ones in Rwanda or Uganda. But you haven't really been to Congo DRC until you get arrested. I was.

AEOLIAN ISLANDS

Who doesn't love Italy? Earlier this year I scored Federico Fellini's favourite suite in the Grand Hotel Rimini (Room 315), but even better was a cruise around the Aeolian Islands on a boat with friends. We all know volcanic Stromboli, Salina was the location for that much-loved film Il Postino and so many islanders have an Australian connection that every other waiter seems to have served an apprenticeship on Lygon Street. Every island has its own unique attractions and charm yet somehow all eight of them seem curiously under-touristed.