cool, thanks er.. madafaka.
my SQL looks like this now, and works a treat:
"SELECT DISTINCT Country, url_link FROM dest_search ORDER BY country"
knowing me there's probably still a better way!
Incidentally the url_link is the path to the detail page and I gather doing it this way allows the search engines to follow the links. at first I put just:
"SELECT DISTINCT Country FROM dest_search ORDER BY country"
but that gave me an error because it excluded the url_link data.
Cheers
M