1. Party city: Berlin

Right now, from Mexico City to St Petersburg (both touted as nightlife hotspots in their time), the clubland cognoscenti all look to one city, Berlin. Former East Berlin is completely unique: a truly international city with non-existent licensing laws and cheap living costs which, for the foreseeable future, will remain the unruly epicenter of cutting-edge club/electronic music culture. New clubs like 103 are opening all the time, and old favourites like Tacheles, a bizarre art-squat-bar-beach complex, continue to astound anyone who has grown up in dull old Britain. Last summer, Guardian Travel ended up in legendary techno club, Tresor. At a 24-hour live electro-jam. At 6pm on a Thursday afternoon. That is Berlin in a nutshell. Free local listings magazines like Fresh and Stadtkind will help you navigate, just remember the local ravers’ cautionary motto: “Don’t forget to go home.”

· Way to go: Flights through easyJet, Ryanair and British Airways

· Tony Naylor is the dance music critic for The Guide

2. Food: Istanbul

Having thrown off the languor of lost empire and gone through its ostentatious nouveau phase, Istanbul will this year re-establish herself as food capital of the Near East. Balkan grilled meats, Levantine mezze, Bulgarian cheeses, Mesopotamian desserts - foods from all over the ex-Empires’ provinces - have always featured on the city’s menus. But Istanbul is now confident enough to reinterpret its classics, and to research those lost. No-one does this better than Musa Dagdeviren at Ciya. In this family of three lively restaurants, village foods from all over Turkey, the Black Sea, Armenia and Kurdistan are brought bang up to date, and cooked fresh every day. Expect rare herbs like mallow and goosefoot, breads from pre-Biblical recipes and desserts made from tomato. Chefs from all over the world are taking notice of Istanbul’s virile food scene: Peter Gordon is consultant chef at Muzedechanga. Alan Yau is opening 1001 nights’ version of Hakkasan, and Jean-Georges Vongrichten is planning a blow-out New York-meets-the-New-York-of-the-Near-East extravaganza.

· Way to go: British Airways fly to Istanbul from £175.70 return.

· Kevin Gould is the Guardian’s Hungry Traveller columnist and author of the cookbook Dishy

3. Budget: Albania

Throughout the late 90s and early Noughties, the Balkan coast has been opening up for tourists. But nobody seems to have ventured beyond the increasingly pricey Croatia and Montenegro. Albania is a true, brilliantly cheap backpacker adventure … wildly undulating coastal roads, tiny fishing villages clinging to mountain bases, untouched forts and fresh local food and drink at every stop. But get there quick ... the last undiscovered coastline in Europe won’t remain so for long. Stay at one of the €24-a-night beach huts (lorencgjikurija@yahoo.com) by the water in the village of Dhermi, at the foot of the 1,000m-high Llogora Pass that marks the northern tip of the Riviera.

· Way to go: British Airways flies Gatwick-Tirana return from £139 return inc all taxes.

· Benji Lanyado is the budget travel columnist for the Guardian

4. Sport: Beijing

Before the Bird’s Nest was woven out of steel and concrete, the Workers’ Stadium was home to both the national side and local Super League outfit, Beijing Guoan. The venue, which will host many of the Olympic football events, is hewn out of the Communist bloc — neo-realistic statues to artisans stand outside in the car park and its design is one that puts practicality over aesthetics. After much re-education — not to mention threats of fines and bans — come the Olympics, Beijing’s notoriously profane football crowd should have dropped their favourite chants in favour of something more politically correct. Expect them to get behind domestic athletes on a scale that will make Atlanta’s jingoistic Go U-S-A pale into insignificance. There’s no greasy “mystery meat” burger joint at this stadium either, instead punters will tuck into fluffy bread rolls filled with sweet soy bean paste.

· Way to go: Flights through British Airways, Emirates and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

· Dominic Fitzsimmons is the managing editor for Time Out Beijing

5. Families: Egypt

Thirty years on and we’ve got Tutankhamen fever all over again. With Ancient Egypt on the KS2 curriculum and school trips descending on the O2’s King Tut exhibition faster than you can say “you’re a rotten mummy”, it’s only a matter of time before your offspring are begging to see the boy King’s remains – which went on public display for the first time in November – in situ.

· Way to go: Suitable for kids aged six plus, Responsible Travel‘s 13 day Egypt Family tour takes in Cairo, Aswan, Luxor and the Red Sea – with plenty of time for snorkeling and sandcastles. Transportation includes a sleeper train, felucca cruise, horse drawn carriage and – natch - a camel. Various departure dates throughout the 2008 school holidays - from £495 to £520, excluding flights.

· Abigail Flanagan is the travel editor of Mumsnet.com

6. Culture: Liverpool

2008 is going to be a really exciting year for Liverpool, not just because it’s the European Capital of Culture. The city has spent most of this year warming up; over 270 bands performed across the city during Liverpool Music Week, the Turner exhibition at the Tate attracted worldwide attention, and the opening of the Echo Arena will start drawing big name acts to the city. But ultimately it’s the people that make Liverpool great. Everyone’s a character, everyone has something to say.

· Gill Nightingale, from mega-club Cream

7 Green: Mozambique

After years of civil war and isolation, Mozambique is beginning to draw in tourists looking to explore its vast coastline and sparsely inhabited tropical islands. The excellent diving and growing number of ecotourism holidays are creating jobs and bringing income to communities living in areas of extreme poverty. Recommended places to stay include Guludo and Ibo Island.

· Way to go: Rainbow Tours can arrange a package with six nights in Guludo and Ibo Island with flights via Johannesburg for £2,745pp.

· Richard Hammond is the editor of Sawday’s Green Places to Stay

8. Emerging: Isfahan (or Esfahan), Iran

Isfahan’s mist-blue mosaics flash in the desert, and on more adventurous travellers’ itineraries. The city is the jewel of the Islamic world. On summer evenings families picnic along its riverbank, women loosening cumbersome chadors, offering a glimpse of red hem or tight denim. At its heart is the pale-domed Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, the most beautiful building on the planet. In no other man-made place have I felt a greater sense of serenity.

· Way to go: The Iranian embassy can be slow to issue travel visas. Agencies such as Links to Persia (020-7559 9600) can arrange a one-month visa for £168. BMI flies Heathrow-Tehran, but code shares the route with British Airways, from £468.70 rtn.

· Rory MacLean is author of Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India (Penguin)

9. Adventure: Lake District

Via ferrata have been popular in Europe for years, but have become the latest thing with British adventurers too. Meaning “iron roads”, they are a line of metal ladder, cables and steps driven into rock and were first constructed in the Great War as a way of controlling high ground in the Dolomites. Real climbers are a bit sniffy about them, but via ferrata allow hikers with a head for heights to experience the thrill of a big cliff without the danger. Now you can experience a via ferrata in the Lake District at Honister Slate Mine. All equipment is provided for the dramatic ascent up Fleetwith Pike and an insight into the lives of slate quarriers in the past.

· Ed Douglas is the author of Tenzing, published by National Geographic.

10. Music: Seattle

Sitting on the opposite coast from the more self-conscious hipster enclave of Brooklyn, and a few hours north of the music scene’s reigning monarch — Portland, Oregon — Seattle, the Grunge capital of the 90s, is now enjoying something of a resurgence. This is, after all, the city that spawned the magnificent Band of Horses — admittedly they’ve now upped sticks to South Carolina, but they have remained on Seattle label Sub Pop (once home to Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, now to the Shins, Iron & Wine, Wolf Parade, Flight of the Conchords). Two of the most exciting acts for 2008 hail from Seattle: the Cave Singers and Fleet Foxes (rumoured to have recently signed to Sub Pop). And waiting in the wings, there’s Throw Me the Statue, the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Scott Reitherman, offering a breed of ludicrously melodic synth-driven pop. Throw Me the Statue were one of many local acts to appear at Reverb, one of Seattle’s many festivals, from Bumbershoot to Georgetown via the not-so-far-away the Sasquatch Festival, which this year served up Arcade Fire, Bjork, and MIA. Elsewhere, you’ll find the original Ace Hotel, coffee to rival Portland’s, plenty of places to mooch, loads of record stores and the Gehry-designed, Hendrix-inspired Experience Music Project, a place to witness “creativity and innovation as expressed through American popular music and exemplified by rock n roll.”

· Way to go: British Airways flies Heathrow-Seattle from £428.40.

· Laura Barton writes the Queen of Noise column in the Guardian’s Friday Review

· This article was amended on Friday December 21 2007.