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In 2021, I embarked on a journey unlike any other. In the dark, depressing, depths of winter, and during our second lock-down I decided I would compensate for the lack of travel in my life by virtually visiting every country in the world. This was spurred on by an evening of watching Youtube drone videos and guessing the destination with our neighbours. We call it the “drone game.”
It didn’t take long for this kernel of an idea to snowball into a commitment to write a short blog post about a different country each day. The rules were simple. I listed every country recognised by the UN, then wrote about one country each day until I had written about all 195. Starting in January with Afghanistan and ending in August with Zimbabwe. How hard could it be?
A frozen, locked-down Copenhagen, where this project started
I didn’t have a set plan of what I’d cover, but often countries took me in completely unexpected directions. For example, in Libya, I ended up obsessing over the tale of a Danish train nefariously acquired by Colonel Gadaffi. In Sudan, I became a detective in my search to get to the bottom of the fate of a social club visited by Michael Palin in the 1980s and ended up talking to a past member, Ruth.
I learned about the discipline required to write every day for 195 days. For the first time in my life, I genuinely found my voice as a writer. I also learned an uncountable number of facts about our world.
What follows is my attempt to distil everything I learned on this virtual journey over the past year.
The world is changing way faster than I could ever imagine
So much has changed in the past year since I started this journey. Afghanistan, the first country I wrote about has seen perhaps the most dramatic change this year with the withdrawal of American troops, and the sweeping rise of the Taliban. The videos and pictures of Afghan’s desperately leaving the country will haunt me for the rest of my life. Back last January, these events would have seemed like an absurd impossibility.
In the past year, so many governments have changed. There were at least 51 elections in the time I was writing. Civil war broke out, a president was murdered, and there was an attempted assassination of another. My own country lost its beloved, yet somewhat gaffe-prone elder statesman, Prince Phillip.
On a personal level, I tragically and unexpectedly lost an uncle who was in the prime of his life and in the centre of many other people’s lives. For me, this has really reinforced that however stable our lives may seem, life can be upended without any notice and we need to make the most of now.
We explored new ways of working out at home…
Including winter bathing
The world is way more complicated than I can comprehend
Maybe this isn’t surprising, but it’s something I constantly forget. Time and time again, I find myself realising it’s always more complicated than I ever give it credit for. It might be obvious that an hour is simply not enough to get under the surface of a country. Maybe this was why I generally found it easier and sometimes more enjoyable to write about a country I already have a little knowledge of.
Even the definition of what constitutes a country is complex. I’ve written about 195 countries on this journey, but this is by no means the most complete list of countries on the world.
Why should a country be defined by UN recognition? What about Taiwan, Transnistria or Somaliland. Don’t these countries and their citizens deserve some kind of recognition? Also, aren’t these places all the more interesting due to their stories and their existence as dotted lines on a map.
I’ve ended this project with a desire to explore and write about all of these states with limited recognition, or overseas territories like The Falklands or Reunion.
They all have their own stories to tell.
Blog writing was accompanied by beer…
A big highlight of 2021 was getting my vaccination
I learned how to write
Writing is tough. For my whole life, I’ve always struggled to write. Call it writer’s block or procrastination, but I’d rewrite sentences a thousand times. I’d agonise over whether I was choosing the right word. Making progress was slow-going and tough. If I can claim anything from this project, is it’s that I’ve become a more confident, comfortable writer. By getting into the habit of writing something for others to read every day, I’ve loosened my writing muscles. It’s so much easier for me to write.
Along the way I identified two common mistakes that I’d slip into.
The first I call the Google Paradox. Google is an incredible means of exposing the world’s information, but in practice I found search engines often do the absolute opposite, limiting what we’re exposed to and showing everyone the same limited information.
As a writer, I learned Google is not my friend. Searching for interesting facts about a country will always find pages with almost identical, uninteresting, and often inaccurate rubbish. None of these facts are interesting because they’re often commonly known things. This really didn’t help when it’s 11 pm and I had under an hour to write an article! Eventually, I learned that reading about a country with no particular aim in mind was the best way of unearthing interesting stories.
The second mistake I kept making was rising expectations. If you’ve read any of the posts you’ll notice that some are short, while others are much longer and elaborate. I had a constant battle with rising expectations for myself. Posts would get longer, more detailed and intricate and then I’d need to remind myself of why I was writing in the first place. I wasn’t even planning for this to be read by anyone other than me. I went through this cycle so many times.
Despite my yo-yoing self-expectations, I enjoyed developing the discipline of writing each day. The exercise of daily writing took me back to my school days. I relearned, that by forcing myself to be disciplined and do the same thing every day, then over time it will get easier and I’ll get better at it. I should really try to apply this to other areas in my life. Learning Danish in the New Year perhaps?
Writing on a daily basis also forced me to explore ways of being more efficient. I set up macOS Automator to prepare and optimise images. I created HTML snippets to save time with common blocks, and I bulk created draft blog posts. All of this meant I could use more of my limited mental energy on writing rather than admin.
Throughout 2021 much of the world gradually opened up. I got to return to the UK and meet my new cousin
Exploring Barcelona
Hiking along the coast near San Sebastian
Separating people from politics
Writing about countries with terrible governments is always a challenge. (Actually, writing about countries with mediocre governments is even a challenge). Often it’s the dysfunctional regime that makes the country fascinating from the outside. North Korea is a classic example of this. Yet these villainous regimes directly lead to billions of people living worse lives than they otherwise would. I genuinely struggled to avoid dedicating entire posts to criticising these countries based on their governments.
But I didn’t set out to write about politics. A country is so much more than its government, and all regimes are ultimately temporary. Personally, I often struggle to persuade non-British people that the UK’s right-wing mouth-frothing anti-European government doesn’t represent the views of the majority of Brits. Maybe this is why Boris Johnson’s government is currently collapsing like a house of cards. Either way, whatever becomes of Boris Johnson, us Brits have far more pressing matters on our hands, such as keeping up with explosive parish council politics.
Wrapping it up
This project was a tough slog at times, but I couldn’t be happier that I stuck with it. It gave me a glimmer of hope during the grim, dark winter lock-down months and gave me a way of exploring the world while stuck in my apartment.
Writing also gave me a sense of continuity and made me realise how quickly things can shift for the better. Despite it seeming like there were no prospects of travel in January, we’ve managed to visit Greece, Germany, The UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden this year. And Andorra became my 50th country in September. Right now with the tsunami of Omicron (and somehow personally managing to get covid twice in a month), things look bleak. However as this blog has taught me, soon enough the sun will be shining and we can hopefully all dust off our backpacks again.
There’s an incredible world out there. Go and explore it, even if you can’t be there physically, it’s still worth it.
Wrapping up the final post…
Epilogue
A few surprises from my journey
Cameroon has exploding lakes, Dominica has boiling lakes and Bolivia has pink lakes.
Learning about unexpected things like musical movements whether it’s Zambian Zamrock, or Guinean jazz.
There’s only one country starting with the letter O. Who knew?
In the Philippines, the island of Luzon is home to a lake with an island with its very own lake. Do I talk about lakes too much?
The countries I really want to visit next:
This journey has not been good for quelling my wanderlust. There are so many new places that I now want to visit (in no particular order).
