How Many?
As soon as you get into classification, things get messy.
A simple question — but surprisingly difficult to answer. Why? Ask yourself two things: what is a country, and what counts as a visit?
Imagine you’ve been to England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. How many countries is that? The answer is one — they’re all part of the United Kingdom, a country recognised by the United Nations. Yet some would argue they’re separate: Scotland and Wales have their own parliaments, even if they don’t issue passports. And what about the Channel Islands? They mint their own currency and their official language is French — but as dependencies of the English Crown they aren’t independent.
So is a country simply an area that is an independent state? A dictionary gives two definitions:
- An area of land distinguished by its political autonomy.
- A territory distinguished by its people, culture, language, geography and so on.
As a traveller I lean towards the second. Surely that’s the whole point of going — to experience a place. If you say you’ve “been to Russia” but saw only Moscow, think of all the culture and geography you missed.
I could invent my own definition — say, a territory with enough political autonomy to issue and manage its own currency — but that would be my call, and few would agree. So instead I lean on two recognised lists:
United Nations
The list most people reach for. But for a traveller it has awkward gaps: Vatican City, Palestine, Taiwan and New Caledonia aren’t UN members, for various reasons.
UN member states →Travellers’ Century Club
A long-standing club for people who’ve reached more than a hundred countries and territories. Its list fixes many of the UN anomalies and sits closer to the cultural definition I prefer — Siberia, for one, counts as distinct from European Russia.
The TCC list →The Club’s list isn’t perfect either. Some entries are almost impossible to reach — Diego Garcia, for one — and you could reasonably argue that a place like Tasmania isn’t truly distinct.
As a student I visited Yugoslavia several times. It has since split into Slovenia, Croatia and others. The places I saw now lie inside those new countries — so have I visited them? Two rules keep me honest:
- The list I measure against is whatever counts as a country at the time the question is asked.
- A country counts as visited if the ground I stood on lies within its present-day borders — whatever that territory was called when I was there.
Now the harder half. Three cases from my own travels:
- You land in Dubai, change planes, and never leave the airport. Have you visited Dubai?
- In your couchette overnight, border guards wake you as the train enters a country — and again as it leaves. Have you visited it?
- On the Zambezi, the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, I had my passport stamped for Zambia on the bank so I could canoe the river — but went no further. Have I visited Zambia?
The Travellers’ Century Club counts a visit as simply touching the territory — even changing aircraft counts. I find that hard to accept. My own rule: I must have got off the transport, left the port or airport, and actually experienced the place. That currently puts my count three territories below what the Club’s rule would allow.
The Home Page gives my answer to “how many countries have you visited?”, counted by the criteria above. You may disagree with them —
So now you know how many countries I’ve visited. But why travel at all?