Day 29 - Cambodia 🇰🇭

After gaining independence from France in 1953, the second half of the twentieth century was pretty traumatic for Cambodia. The Vietnam war spread into Cambodia in the 1960s, followed by a coup in 1970 and the communist Khmer Rouge era (that resulted in the death of two million Cambodians), then the Cambodian-Vietnamese War from 1978 to 1989. 

In the early nineties Cambodia was governed by the United Nations mission which handed over to a democratically elected government. Since then numerous twists and turns have resulted in Cambodia having a superficial multi-party democracy while being governed by de-facto one party rule.

Phnom Penh skyline from Sora Skybar

Cambodia is split in two by the Mekong river. There was no connection across the river other ferries until 2001 when the Kizuna bridge was finally built with support from Japan. The Mekong river is famous for its houseboats and villages. Cambodias most famous tourist attraction though is undoubtedly Angkor Wat a temple complex 50 times larger than Machu Pichu.

In terms of cuisine Cambodians are best known for eating insects, crickets, ants and even tarantulas. Cambodia also has award winning rice which is reportedly the best in the world.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

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Day 28 - Burundi 🇧🇮

Today we’re staying in Africa for the last country beginning with the letter ‘B’.

Burundi is a tiny mountainous country in the Great Rift Valley wedged between Tanzania, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Like Burkina Faso, Burundi is a country synonymous with unrest and civil war. It’s unsurprising then that the life expectancy is only fifty years, and the GDP per capita is only $900. This gives Burundi the dubious honour of being the poorest country in the world. Unsurprisingly Burundi was ranked as the world’s least happy nation in the 2016 World Happiness Report, although only 4.5% of the population has internet access to read this report.

Like Burkina Faso, much of Burundi’s population is reliant on subsistence farming. Although, as someone writing about every country, Burundis exports are a refreshing change from oil or petroleum products. Burundi’s biggest exports are coffee (34%) and gold (25%).

On a happier note Burindi has an ancient method for brewing traditional beer. It’s drunk by sitting around a large container of communal beer and multiple people then use straws to drink the beer. I’m not sure how corona compliant this practice is, but it does sound fun.

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Day 27 - Burkina Faso 🇧🇫

Burkina Faso is not a lucky country.

The first of these disadvantages is that it’s a landlocked country. It’s in Western Africa bordering Benin (that we covered last week) and in is in that awkward Sahel belt meaning much of its land is being consumed by the expanding Sahara Desert.

 Burkina Faso was a French colony until 1960, known as Upper Volta until adopting its current name in 1984. Burkina Faso literally translates as “Land of the Honest (Incorruptible) Men” according to the CIA World Fact Book.

Burkina Faso is deemed as one of the world’s most dangerous countries, in fact it’s so dangerous schools are closed because of security incidents  and the UK Foreign Office advises against all travel.

It’s unsurprising that Burkina Faso is dangerous - it’s suffered recurring droughts, serious famines and many coups and counter-coups over the past 50 years.

On a more positive note, Burkina Faso is home to the largest craft market in Africa and some truly incredible Sudano-Sahelian architecture.

80% of Burkina Faso’s population rely on subsistence farming.

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Day 26 - Bulgaria 🇧🇬

When I think of Bulgaria the first things that come to mind is its reputation for Black Sea beaches popular with Russians and budget skiing.

Bulgaria borders Romania to the north along the Danube, and is separated from Serbia and North Macedonia by mountain ranges. To the South East it borders Turkey and is strategically important as Europes main overland connection to Turkey. One other claim to fame is that Bulgaria is home to The Stone Desert, Europe’s smallest desert.

Bulgaria is the EU’s poorest country and  had the dubious honour of being ranked as the most corrupt country in the European Union in 2018. This isn’t Bulgarias biggest problem though. It has the fastest shrinking population in Europe and is projected to lose 23% of its population by 2050.

Even though Bulgarians may be rapidly emigrating, they’re leaving behind Shopska, or Bulgarian salad. It was recently awarded the best dish in Europe in a contest organised by the European Parliament. Don’t they have parliamenting to do?

Bulgaria’s other culinary claims to fame are its unique yoghurt and the fact that in Soviet times it was the forth largest exporter of wine in the world. Nazdrave!

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Day 25 - Brunei 🇧🇳

Brunei has a GDP per capita similar to Spain or South Korea. This is kind of surprising for a small country on the island of Borneo in South East Asia with barely half a million inhabitants. This is mostly explained by Brunei’s huge oil and gas reserves. Most of these oil reserves are at sea which mean it’s been able to keep most of its tropical rainforests intact.

Sadly this is one of the few positive things I can say about Brunei and it’s oil reserves. In a similar fashion to Angola, most of the wealth from its oil ends up in the hands of its leaders. In this case, the sultan of Brunei who is absurdly wealthy.

We’re talking 7000 cars, 10 luxury yachts and 150 mansions kind of wealthy. If that wasn’t enough, he lives in the largest palace in the entire world.

Unlike the leaders of Angola, the Sultan uses a small proportion of the oil and gas wealth to buy the silence and loyalty of the country’s populous. The government provides low cost loans for cars and houses.

Sadly none of this can make up for the draconian regime’s horrific human rights violations. As Human Rights Watch states, “the penal code is essentially a roadmap for violating rights.” It requires death by stoning for sex outside marriage and homosexuality; amputation of limbs for stealing; and 40 lashes with a whip for lesbian sex. It would be kind of kinky, if it wasn’t so utterly brutal and depraved.

It’s fair to say that I absolutely won’t be visiting Brunei any time soon as I’d be stoned to death on arrival for being both gay, and criticising its insecure despot of a Sultan.

In the off-chance that this glowing write up hasn’t put you off your next holiday to Brunei I’ll leave you with a list of other things which are illegal in Brunei.

• Christmas

• Eating during Ramadan

• Sitting to closely to a member of the opposite sex

• Not liking Durian fruit

• Cointreau

• Winking at the Sultan

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Day 24 - Brazil 🇧🇷

What do you do with a country like Brazil? Brazil is huge, it encompasses literally half of the continent of South America. It’s home to sixty-percent of the world’s largest rainforest. It’s the most biodiverse country on the planet. 

There is so much to write, yet can I do that justice in a few paragraphs. I also have a nagging feeling that this project should focus more on countries that aren’t normally in the limelight. Countries like Bhutan, or Bosnia are perfect examples of this.

Normally I’d feel obliged to bang on about Bolsonaro or attempting to dig out a list of unlikely trivia facts. Did you know Brazil is home to a number of Osama bin Laden themed bars, or that Brazilian prisoners can reduce their sentences by reading books?

Nope. Today I’m going to be selfish and write a list of things I want to do when I eventually get to visit Brazil. So here’s my Brazilian bucket list:

• Attend the Rio Carnaval

• Take a trip to the colourful city of Salvador da Bahia

• Watch some (or try some) Capoeria on the beach

• Take a jungle tour to the heart of the Amazon

• Hang out on Copacabana beach

• Visit the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland

• Explore the abandoned, jungle enveloped Gavea Hotel

• Start my days with a cafezinho

• …then continue my day by drinking my bodyweight in Caipirinhas and eating many coxinhas and grilled prawn skewers

I’m going to make a start right now by making a Caipirinha and listening to some João Gilberto.

Rio Negro

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Day 23 - Botswana 🇧🇼

Today’s trip to Botswana will be brief. I spent most of today out exploring Copenhagen’s solidly frozen harbour. I even took a VERY short dip in a water hole near our apartment! 

Botswana is a landlocked country in Southern Africa sandwiched between South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Botswana is widely seen as an African success story. After achieving independence from Britain in 1966 it became a democracy with a good record for free speech and equality. It was also fortunate to discover three of the world’s richest diamond mines around this time.

In fact, one of the biggest diamonds ever found was recently unearthed in Botswana.

Botswana is home to the world’s largest inland delta, the Okavango delta and Makgadikgadi Pan which is one of the world’s largest salt flats.

Actually Botswana is a mostly flat country, but despite this, has a stunning array of savannas, deserts, wetlands and salt pans. Around 38% of the country is dedicated to national parks.

These habitats are home to over 150 different species of mammals (including the “big five”) and boasts the world’s highest concentration of African elephants. Botswana really seems like the perfect place to go on a Safari.

Okavango Delta, Botswana

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Day 22 - Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦

Today I’m less of a writing mood than I was yesterday, so instead I’m sharing lots of photos I took when I visited Bosnia back in 2018. For our summer holiday that year we did a circular road trip around Southern Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia.

Our route

Almost everyone who writes about Bosnia and Herzegovina writes about the 1990s war, and the tensions between the Serb and Muslim populations. Today I’m going to focus on happier times, but if you want to learn a bit more about these tensions, check out this documentary - Bosnia and Herzegovina: and ethnically divided country.

We visited during the Red Bull cliff diving competition Mostar, 2018

We stayed in the infamous city of Mostar. If you’ve not heard of it you’ve almost certainly seen the beautiful Stari Most bridge being blown up during the war in 1993. We stayed in the pristinely maintained Ottoman-era Muslibegović House right in the centre of Mostar. It’s both a wonderful hotel and also serves as a museum.

It was over breakfast here that we met our friends Petter and Aron, who later that day became our partners in crime exploring Mostar’s Sniper Tower. Despite being a tourist hotspot, Mostar is full of derelict buildings and reminders of the war. The Sniper tower is a former bank seized as a sniper vantage point during the Bosnian War is now a secret graffiti art gallery. Getting in involved quite a bit of clambering over fences and avoiding anti-climb paint - but it was worth it.

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Sniper Tower, Mostar. We definitely didn’t break in.

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The Muslibegović House

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Joe getting ready to jump into the Kravice falls

One final point about Bosnia and Herzegovina - the food is incredible. It’s a perfect mix of Balkan, Turkish and Mediterranean cuisines. Think delicious grilled meats, flatbreads, and mouthwatering salads. For this reason alone, I want to return one day!

Roadside views near the Montenegro border

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Day 21 - Bolivia 🇧🇴

Even though I haven’t actually been to Bolivia. Today I’ll be reminiscing about the time I almost visited Bolivia.

Bolivia is the western hemisphere’s highest, most isolated and most rugged nation. I can certainly believe that having driven to the Chilean - Bolivian border next to the small Andes hamlet of Parinacota. This is the highest place I’ve ever been in my life and at almost 5000 meters I can report that altitude sickness is real.

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The queue for the Bolivian border

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This shipment was permanently delayed

We were so tantalisingly close to Bolivia - around a mile back from the border are lines of trucks waiting to cross the dirt road into Bolivia. Bolivia has been particularly reliant on this trade route ever since it became a land-locked country after the War of the Pacific.

These mountain roads are challenging to drive in a regular car, let alone an enormous lorry. The  roadsides are strewn with burnt out wrecks of HGVs which didn’t make the journey. To this day Bolivia is in terse negotiations with Chile over it’s all-important Pacific trade route.

Bolivia is even exploring opening up Atlantic trade routes with the Paraguay-Paraná waterway. As South America’s poorest Bolivia really does need all of the trade routes it can get.

One surprising fact about Bolivia is that despite being land-locked, it has a navy - based in Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world.

Bolivia technically has two capitals. La Paz, and Sucre. Sucre is the constitutional capital where the Supreme Court is located, and La Paz is where all the seats of government reside. I’m keeping this in my stash of pub quiz facts.

La Paz, Bolivia

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Day 20 - Bhutan 🇧🇹

Bhutan is a small landlocked country perched high up in the Himalayas between China to the North and India to the South. Even though it looks absolutely tiny on a map, in reality, Bhutan is a similar size to Switzerland.

Bhutan is a truly surprising country - just look at its pristine medieval architecture, its bizarre-looking takins (or gnu goat), the fact it has over 12,000 monks and nuns and the fact that TV and internet were banned in Bhutan up until 1999.

The government of Bhutan has implemented some really unusual policies. For the nation only opened its doors to tourism in the 1970s and any foreigner who enters Bhutan must pay a $250 / day to the government. The only exceptions are people from India, Bangladesh or the Maldives. To be fair this $250-a-day fee does include three meals each day, accommodation, a guide and internal transport. They’ll even throw in camping equipment if you ask nicely.

Another eyebrow-raising policy is the Bhutan government’s focus on “Gross National Happiness Index" as opposed to any other measure of success.

Sadly though, Bhutan has not been entirely successful in this goal. It actually ranks 95th out of 156 countries in the 2019 World Happiness Report. However, this is largely due to the nation's poverty, and the challenges of bringing economic and social equity to a society that is still predominately agricultural.

Paro, Bhutan

Buddha point, Thimphu, Bhutan

Due to its Himalayan location, Bhutan is very mountainous. Gangkhar Puensum is the highest mountain in Bhutan and is also the highest unclimbed peak in the world. 

Bhutan has also used the mountains to its advantage as most of the country is powered by hydroelectric power and this also accounts for around 40% of Bhutan’s exports. This makes Bhutan the only country in the world where its largest export is renewable energy.

In fact, Bhutan is the only carbon sink nation on the planet, trapping more carbon in its 70% forest cover than it emits.

Countries like Bhutan are the reason I’m doing this virtual journey - prior to today I’d only ever heard of it in passing, but it’s now somewhere I definitely want to visit one day.  One day Bhutan I will visit and be mesmerised by your spectacular scenery, impressive architecture and hospitable people. Oh and momos! I’m definitely going to eat a ton of momos. 

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