10th March 2021. This is the anniversary of my arrival back in the UK after just over a year of travel. I came back for a few weeks, partly to attend a weekend co-counselling residential, a medical appointment and dental review. Only the medical happened.
As time has gone on, I have been itching to get back on my journey and I began to look at ways in which I could do this, albeit as part of a lockdown. I started to do some of the planning for the future parts of the journey, so I researched places to stay and I scoured Google Maps to look at the areas I am considering. For more information on my route click here.
As time went on (and perhaps as I became more and more frustrated), I started looking at Airbnbs in countries I have no intention of visiting (not on this trip at any rate!). So, for example, I checked out a farm in Tanzania, the possibilities of staying in Nuuk, Greenland, and a house in the most isolated town I could find in Russia.
I shared a few of my explorations on Google Maps with some of my ESL students, who loved seeing countries they could only imagine or, perhaps, intend to visit themselves one day, when the relaxation of rules and accumulation of money permits. Eventually though, it occurred to me that this was all rather messy and ad hoc and that I wanted to find a way of making this part of my daily life. I know from my gambling days that I function better when I am in some sort of routine and so building a daily travel space meant time for me to find out about places and enjoy some of the culture and scenery that each country can give us.
Method.
I decided to use a random number generator to pick out numbers from 1 to 234 which is the number of countries and dependent territories listed on the worldometers.info website, less the UK. I was aware that this would mean that my journey would be skewed to very small places, as there are a lot of dependent territories where very few people live. Also it meant giving one day to China (the biggest country by population) and Tokelau the smallest, but I reckoned that would be okay for a first attempt at this. I also decided to focus on one city in the biggest 20 countries by population. As Sheffield is roughly the 6th largest in the UK, I chose the 6th largest in these countries. That led to me exploring well-known places like Stuttgart in Germany and Philadelphia in the US, as well as less well known ones such as Bahir Dah in Ethiopia (the 12th largest country in the world).
It will take me the biggest part of a year to complete this and hopefully I will be travelling for real by then, but if not I will find a way to do things differently next time.
So now I have my list of countries – and I look forward to seeing what is on my list for the day (and the next) and planning the ways in which I can explore.
How to explore in these difficult times!
I mentioned some of my ideas above, including Google Earth; but did you know that there is a young woman with a YouTube channel who makes vlogs exactly like this? Her name is Camilla, and she is working through all the countries from Z to A. Here is an example of her art, reporting Google Earth in Tuvalu, one of the least visited countries in the world.
Another ‘YouTuber’ who I occasionally look at (and who is famous for visiting almost every country in the world) is Drew Binsky and I am particularly in awe of his ability and willingness to include the more dangerous countries, sometimes more than once. Indeed, this is one of the things that most worries me about travelling and I like to keep an eye on the ‘index of danger’ site – but I am aware that it only talks about whole countries and that there are peaceful and not so peaceful parts to nearly all the countries in the world. Also things can change over time… it wasn’t so long ago that the Balkans were a no-go area for travellers and now they are once again a tourist hub. For a serious take on some of the more developing countries the New Internationalist magazine, online edition, has a country of the month spotlight and it can be interesting to look back on some of these. Of course the reports go out of date fairly quickly, so I normally just check if there are any for the last year or two.
There are a variety of travel blogs and vlogs, including those that look at food and those that look at music. It was the music videos that started me off on this quest and I am still quite taken by the range of music around the world. Here was one I found on Ethiopian Jazz and a youtube video of folk music from Kazakhstan. Another useful tool is the Radio Garden website, where you can spin the globe and listen to radio stations from around the world. This has helped me with my language learning (Portuguese) and made me think that being stuck on one of the most isolated islands in the world, St. Helena, and having to listen to one of the two radio stations there must be soul destroying.
As a place to stay?
In some cases, I am interested in hearing of people’s thoughts on living in the country full-time, especially if it is a country I am thinking of perhaps settling in myself. At the moment my number one choice is Portugal, but I am also curious about people’s take on cheaper countries to live in, such as Bulgaria or the Philippines.
Being an ESL teacher with the website Cambly has helped in this respect as a lot of the tutors there are emigrants or digital nomads and live in places as diverse as Russia and Ecuador. I used the programme myself to talk to tutors in Portuguese (you need permission to do this) and one of my teachers was living in Romania. I will post more about Cambly in the future, but learning another language does put you in touch with others from around the world, in my case Portuguese-speaking nations, and by using sites such as Italki and HelloTalk, I have been able to chat and message people from Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique and of course Portugal.
A final thing I do is to check on the gambling situation in the countries I “visit” and see what help there might be for people with the problem in some of the poorer countries of the world. This was particularly pertinent when I drew Macau (another Portuguese-speaking territory) out. The country is known as the gambling capital of Asia – and it was good to see that at least some help was available to people there.
All in all, I am enjoying travelling around the world like this and wonder how I can continue this when my 234 days are over… but maybe by then I will be travelling outside of the UK for real and won’t need to do this. And what I have learnt over this period has been really useful for helping me decide on where I want to go (too many countries) and what I might expect when I am there. So why not consider a global tour yourself. If you subscribe to this blog you will get a country of the month to have a look at. The subscribe sign-up form is on the first page of this blog.
