How many countries is enough countries?

I must acknowledge that I will never see as much of the world as I want to. No one will.

Some years back—my son was around eight at the time—he and I were walking through the streets of Montréal having an argument.

He was happy to be in a new country—to this day he keeps count of how many countries he’s been to (14). He likes to brag about the number to his classmates. He wants to visit as many as possible. More countries than his age. More countries than me. A trip isn’t a trip for him unless it’s to a new place (unless it’s Greece… he’s always happy to go back to Greece).

And, throughout the years, despite my best efforts to instill in him some deeper appreciation for the value of travel to foreign lands, I’m afraid at the age of 12 he still continues to see travel as essentially a competitive endeavor.

But so, then, do many young people. Young like, in their 20s.

The race to visit every country

When I started researching for this post, I wanted to read and see and hear from those who had accomplished the bucket list of all travel bucket lists: visit every country in the world.

I got pretty deep into the rabbit hole.

From what I can tell, the trend may have started with author Chris Guillebeau, who finished visiting every country in the world in 2013, eleven years after setting the goal. Since there have been many, many more. Videographer Drew Binsky did it. Sal Lavallo did it.

According to a 2019 Condé Nast piece:

In the past decade, the business of country-counting has boomed thanks to the internet, which made it easier to get visas and notoriety. Suddenly, ticking off countries was no longer limited to hard-core travelers or those with money to burn: people realized that publicity and social media prowess could help finance their trip. The field became more crowded.

And, it became competitive, with various travelers aiming for world records. Yes, it turns out that the Guinness Book of World Records tracks this stuff. And in the age of easy video recording, GPS tracking, and social media, we can now verify.

For example, in 2014 a British filmmaker named Graham Hughes became the first person to visit every country without any air travel. In 2019, American Lexie Alford, 21 years old at the time, became the youngest person to visit every country. That year, Jessica Nabongo became the first African-American to visit every country.

The fastest time to visit every country as far as I can tell is held by a Brazilian man named Anderson Dias, who did it in 543 days, finishing just before COVID hit. Dias broke a record held by Taylor Demonbreun (554 days), who became a motivational speaker, who herself broke a record held by Cassie De Pecol (~575 days). De Pecol actually set two records at the time: fastest time and first woman.

But why?

In Montréal, I asked my son to think about this question of why we travel. What was the point of him having visited 8 countries instead of 7? What is it we are aiming to get out of this experience, beyond just another country added to our list?

If you start watching the YouTube videos of the people who have visited all the countries (or, in one case, a TEDx talk), you will of course hear these travelers impart all sorts of lessons learned:

Everyone dances.

Everyone eats.

Everyone wants to connect and be loved.

We are not so different, you and me. Humanity is one. We all have dignity.

Of course, I’m not sure they necessarily needed to visit Lesotho or Nauru (no offense to Lesotho or Nauru, I’m sure they are lovely) to come to these insights.

And meanwhile, the pursuit of the record itself, especially the records based on speed, makes me question whether those record-chasers ever stopped to look around for a moment and appreciate anything about anything, or if they were just focused on the goal itself.

In fact, as I was researching this post, I kept coming across disagreements about the goal itself. How many countries actually are there, and what even counts as a country? Plus, what does it even mean to have visited? Do you just step your foot in, or is there some deeper criteria?

The meta-questions

My favorite commentary on this comes from Johnny Ward.

Ward is clearly a marketing ace—he has a post with the very SEO-friendly title, How many countries in the world in 2022? Yet Ward doesn’t just answer the question—he covers in-depth the meta-questions necessary for a full accounting of it. And, specifically relevant for us, he does so for the purposes of travel.

So, in order to claim that you have visited every country in the world, you must first answer two other pressing questions: what is a country, and what does it mean to visit? Neither question is simple.

For example, most sites on the Interwebs will give you the shallow answer, which is to say they will rely on the official UN tally, 193, and then acknowledge two non-member states: the Vatican and Palestine, for a total of 195.

But, as Ward points out, the UN tally is colored by some pretty shady political considerations. For starters, they don’t include Taiwan. Now, Taiwan is clearly a country by any measure (China, go fuck yourself)—plus, as Ward says: “Taiwan is a brilliant place to visit, I’d massively recommend it.”

So, maybe the total is actually 196?

Not so fast, says Ward. There is also the question of Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008 and is recognized by 109 countries, but which still does not have UN membership. So: 197?

In a technical sense, Ward would argue that 197 is the correct number of countries in the world, if your goal is to technically visit all the countries. That number includes Palestine, Taiwan, Kosovo, and the Vatican.

But in a practical, and more meaningful sense, 197 is still fundamentally an incomplete measure.

Why? Because there are so many places to visit which, while not technically countries, would obviously deserve to be included on such an expansive life goal. Ward notes that Greenland, Antarctica, the British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Kurdistan might all be places that a truly accomplished world traveler would want to go, but which would not technically be required as none of them are countries.

But why aren’t they countries? It’s not because they don't have a distinct culture, or a unique sense of place, or even some measure of self-government—and it’s certainly not because they’re not worth visiting.

I’d argue that, in the most important ways in which it matters, the question of how widely traveled you want to be in your life really isn’t about countries at all.

Besides, we haven’t even gotten to the most obvious elephant in the room: The UK. Just imagine the discussion:

- You’re telling me you plan to visit every country in the world, but also treat Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and England as all one country?

- Yea, that’s what I’m saying.

- Sounds like bullshit.

The more you equate world travel to number of countries visited, the more you expose yourself as kind of pigheaded about the whole idea—by reducing travel to counting countries you diminish all the richness of why travel is so valuable an experience in the first place.

As Ward writes:

People like Chris Guillebeau, Lee Abbamonte, and Graham Hughes have all kinda done it too, and they were a big inspiration for me, but they count airport stopovers or stepping one foot over a border, not getting visas and getting stamped in, or flying in, staying in an airport hotel and flying out as their travels.

For me, I want to FEEL the country, and overlanding when I can so I can experience the place. Breaking records like ‘fastest person to visit every country’, in my opinion, is awful. It goes against all the beauty that travel should bring… Cassie De Pecol spent less than 24 hours in over 100 countries, for example, eeek.

Eeek indeed.

I don’t know what spending less than 24 hours in over 100 countries is supposed to get you, but it’s not much good.

My travel until now

In Montréal, I pressed my son to give me an answer.

I wanted him to search his young mind for something about the experience of travel that he liked other than merely the bragging rights it entailed with his elementary school peers back home.

“Anything,” I said. “Give me any answer.”

But he only shrugged his shoulders, apparently disinterested in the question.

I suggested some potential reasons: something about the value of seeing those new places, or experiencing new things, seeing other ways of living, trying new food, learning other languages?

He listened, but none of it was really resonating, and I was getting frustrated with his lack of engagement.

“If you don’t tell me one reason you like to travel other than just adding to the list of countries you’ve been to, then I’m not going to take you to any more countries.”

I had pulled parent rank—and he didn’t take it well.

And yet, at this point, I must admit that I wasn’t immune from this either.

I too used to count countries visited (I’m at somewhere north of 40), and, like my son, I was proud of watching the number tick up. I still have a passport, now expired, that is packed full of visas. It’s a treasured posession.

My own criteria for what counted as visiting was that I had to have spent at least one night there, and not in an airport. So I’ve never been to Iceland, even though I’ve transited through at least three times. And our epic detour to Sidney this Summer en route to New Zealand doesn’t mean I’ve actually visited Australia.

Trip Advisor still has this tool where you mark which cities you’ve been to in the world—according to my own travel map, Trip Advisor claims I’ve visited 22% of the world. But as you can see, some corners of the globe are heavily marked, while others remain completely blank:

The 22 percent number somehow feels both kinda spot on and woefully inadequate. I once spent three weeks traveling to almost every major city in Northern India — but have I really seen India? Do I know it? Do I have anything but the faintest grasp of that ridiculously diverse country of 1.4 billion people?

I’ve been to Italy four times, but never once south of Rome, and never to Sicily, which from everything I can tell is its own separate world. I’ve been to three countries in South America, for a total of about eight weeks on that continent—yet how much can I really say, when I still don’t speak fluent Spanish, when I have yet to go to Patagonia or Rio de Janeiro, and I’ve never even visited my cousins in Brazil?

Maybe the worst part is I’m 40 years old and I’ve still never been to Africa, a fact I’m both surprised at and embarrassed by.

Basically, I’ve dramatically over-indexed on Europe. I’ve been maybe 25 times? Enough to have lost count. There was one year I took three separate trips; and many of the places I’ve gone back to over and over. Spain four times, the Czech Republic five or six times, the UK probably 7 or 8 times.

But how accomplished a world traveler am I really if I’m leaving broad swathes of the globe completely unexplored, even if only for a few nights?

How is it I have yet to go to Singapore and spend a week doing nothing but eating street food? How is it I have yet to get to Thailand to climb those gorgeous sea cliffs? How is it I’ve never been kitesurfing in Tanzania (there’s a glorious white sand kiting beach right near Zanzibar)? How is it—really, how is it—that I’ve never gotten myself to the Torres del Paine?

My travel goals

I’ve heard it said that, in your youth, life is the process of adding: new places to go, things to do, and relationships to have. As you get older, however, the process reverses, and you must decide what things to take away. How to simplify.

I wrote about this last year:

And there are other life goals (the phrase is beginning to seem quaint), as I turn 40, that I think I am ready to give up. And others I’m not. Some countries still to visit, mountains still to climb, and others I’ll never see. Business enterprises to embark on, and others to cut loose. Languages to learn, or give up on learning. People to go see or give up on seeing.

So it is with my travel goals.

I must acknowledge that I will never see as much of the world as I want to. No one will. Not even Ward, Guillebeau, Hughes, or the others. Having traveled to all the countries buys you nothing: not wisdom, not understanding, not insight, just as having transited through Keflavik International Airport three times does not entitle me to say I’ve been to Iceland.

This is not to diminish the accomplishment of those who have set visiting all the countries as their goal. It’s a logistical and financial challenge, to be sure—the visa processes alone are enough to warn me off of it (in fact, juggling the various visa timelines seems to be the main key to unlocking the speed record).

It does get them something, however: bragging rights, an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, a massive YouTube following, fodder for a TEDx talk.

But those are all side effects. They are not the thing itself.

They do not explain why they chose to spend their limited time on this Earth getting to Lesotho or Nauru rather than staying somewhere else for longer, investing in a place, or truly learning about a people.

Many people say they love to travel—and most of these have some idea in their mind as to why, whether it’s seeing new places, or experiencing different cultures. And there is always that reliable Marcel Proust quote: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

In fact, when you are young and still in the process of adding, you might, instead of counting countries, use that Proust quote as a kind of guiding star: what travel experience will help you see with new eyes? What will give you a different perspective on the world?

In the Proustian sense, travel goals should really have nothing to do with crossing political boundaries, so many of which amount to random quirks of history, lines drawn by colonial powers, borders decided on by committees, or naturally formed by rivers and oceans, or by the victors in wars.

For my part, I can only say that are a small handful of places I still need to go before I die—places which, if I never make it, I will indeed find myself on my deathbed with regret in my heart. Buried deep within, there is still a bucket list.

I just try to keep it small.