Jonathan Worthington
Jonathan's Travels Places I've been. Photos I've taken.

Visiting Every Country

I've been asked at least once if I intend to visit every country in the world. Many people seem to think I've been to a lot - which in some senses I have, compared to their own travel experience. This page tracks the countries that I have not yet been to; as you've likely noticed, it's a rather long page. In fact, last time I calculated the percentage of countries that I had visited (October, 2009) it was just 16% of them.

How many countries are there?

Depends who you ask, and it's often rather political too. 195, in December 2008, seemed to be the currently widely accepted number. However, it's a moving target. Had I done this list a year ago I'd not have listed Kosovo as a country, and in the coming years I may have to add a couple more (South Ossetia and Abkhazia, maybe?) Also, many people consider things as countries that by international definitions aren't. At the time of writing, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and not four countries; they are part of one - the United Kingdom. But many people in those countries would give me funny looks for saying so. :-)

Do I want to visit all of them, anyway?

If I'm likely to take a bullet during the process, then no, not really. And I don't really think I'm anywhere close to having the coverage of the world to start asking, "so what's left?" I travel because I enjoy travelling. If that, in some decades time, leads me to having visited every country in the world, that'll be just great. But it's certainly not a specific target, and I maintain this page mostly to show people how far I am off having done so and also to remind myself of how many countries there are in the world that I know absolutely nothing about, and thus should read up on a bit.

Is countries visited meaningful anyway?

In terms of "how much of the surface of the world have I seen", it's mostly useless. Russia is around 38.8 million times the size of Vatican City (look up the areas and calculate it yourself if you don't believe me; while you're at it, also note that Vatican City has approximately 2.3 popes per square kilometer).

Given that countries to tend to be groupings of peoples with at least something besides the chunk of land that they live on in common (such as language and culture), however, they do give some kind of idea of exposure to different mindsets, languages and so forth. If I visit a country and pay attention to things there, I'm likely picking up stuff that I can then use to generalize about it more generally than the bits that I have seen.

Thus number of countries visited isn't really that useful, but it's probably going too far to say it's completely meaningless too.

UN Countries

My starting point for a list of countries is the list of members of the United Nations, which is most of the countries of the world, but with some political quirks. If a country is marked "Unassessed" it means I don't know enough about it yet to know whether a visit is possible/safe. On the other hand, "Unscheduled" means that I currently don't see any problem with visiting that country, from what I know of it, but it's not on my "hit-list"of places to go to soon either. If I have a trip planned to a country, it'll be marked as so. Those that I haven't got any explicit plans for yet, but that are on my "hit-list", are marked as "Hope to visit soon" - but soon means "within 5 or maybe even 10 years" rather than "really soon". Note that countries I've already visited are excluded from this list.

Non-UN Countries

Some countries that I've yet to visit are not in the UN.

All photography and text Copyright © 2004-2009 Jonathan Worthington.