Travel Lists & Visited Countries Maps

Much of a perfect spring Sunday morning here on the farm was spent posting a chronological list of our travels to the web site Passportstamp.com (here's how we did). It's another one of those sites, like Douwe Osinga's Visited Countries project, that allows you to compile a map of your travels. Here's our PassportStamp map, followed by our Douwe Osinga map:

Close enough to the same that I'm wondering why I spent multiple hours on a gorgeous morning painstakingly clerking in every trip all the way back to my first drive to Canada in 1980 (Or maybe it was 1979).

But I know why, really. It was in the spirit of competition. See, you'll be ranked among the other site members, stacked up against the competition, sized up and told where you stand. And our results weren't bad:

105 countries visited, ranking 109th overall. Our most-visited countries are the predictable European ones, and many are because they were transit stops on the way elsewhere. The top ten: Germany 11 visits, Finland 9, Austria & France 8, Thailand 7, Italy, Russia, Switzerland & the UK 6, and China 5.

The trouble is the arbitrary rules.

There's the question of what constitutes a country. If you add Hong Kong and Macau to China, which makes sense, we'd be up to nine visits to China - but we'd be off two on the overall list of places visited. Ahh, but I'd make that up by a few tricks, like busting the U.K. into separate places called England, Scotland, Wales and Ulster, and come out ahead.

How about countries you've visited that no longer exist? Czechoslovakia was a real country and we were in it. We'd pick up the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (DDR, East Germany) this way. And the gold mine is Yugoslavia, and then Serbia & Montenegro, that busted down into all its smaller entities (and do you count scantly-recognized Kosovo?). And then there's the whole Soviet Union thing.

Another problem is transit stops, and my memory. Thailand would probably easily be the most visited of all countries if we counted transit stops, like in 1995 when we flew BKK - SGN - BKK - RGN - BKK, for example. Mirja and I remember (fondly, in retrospect) the out-of-the-way downstairs gates that led to buses that led to flights to less-visited regional destinations at the old Don Maung airport in Bangkok, but I just don't remember all the specific times we transited BKK. So I didn't count them. (Austria is a similar case, because of Austrian airlines connections to smaller Eastern European countries.)

Further, is a transit stop in the airport enough to count as a country visit? Some will argue that an overnight stay is necessary. So, there'll always be quibbles over the rules. In fact PassportStamp has a forum dedicated to just that debate. They've settled on 246 countries.

And I'm okay with my 109 ranking as a starting place. Got some climbing to go, though. Move up nine places and you're published among the top 100 travelers. And it looks like the person ranked at number 100 this morning has 107 countries - only two more than me. Hmmm.

Thanks to The Wandering Aramean blog for putting me onto PassportStamp.com with this article. (On the arbitrary rules thing, for example, Sean at the Wandering Aramean wants Gozo separated from Malta. See what I mean?)

Seth points out another place to make your own map, TravBuddy.com. And then there's MostTraveledPeople.com, which lists 872 places and requires actual research. For example, I can't tell you offhand all of the oblasts through which we passed on the Trans-Siberian railroad. Have to get back to them on that.

(There are photos from nearly all our 105 countries on EarthPhotos.com. A good starting place is the Countries index page.)