Fifty Up

I recently passed my half century and was very pleased, but two hundred and forty nine or thereabouts is the ultimate goal. I’m not talking about runs or wickets though, or even the accumulated years of life, where two hundred and forty nine would be bordering on a piss-take. The half century milestone the annoying anorak in me is compelled to tell you about is my fiftieth country. For the record, it was Malta.

The trouble is, having bustled, whistle-stopped and cajoled my way to fifty different coloured bits on the world map, upon reflection I felt underwhelmed. Only fifty countries in twelve years??? Why the hell have I not been to every damn country there is?

Paradise Lost, Opportunity Cost

Money aside, one thing that springs to mind is the honour rule my friend, Bones decided on that applies to everybody, no exceptions. A country remains unvisited until you have spent at least one night there, not necessarily sleeping. This means that an afternoon on the arch Californian tourist trail in Tijuana is not the same as being in Mexico. I spent a day in a clapped-out bus rattling across Mozambique with a giant official visa in my passport, stopped for a spot of lunch outside an office, even yarned with a couple of police officials, and officially have never been there. I even persuaded a Zambian border guard to let me run a hundred metres into his country, which he did with a smile before waving me back with a machine gun, and it doesn’t count.

Latterly the problem has been children. There, I said it. After my wife developed pregnancy on our Indian ramble of 2004, travel has not been quite as possible for us as it was. There has been precious little new stuff in the last four years and we tend to stick to tried and trusted destinations (like my mother-in-law’s in Poland, where one may survive for months on a diet of ass-kissing).

The real mistake the way I see it is to have visited certain countries umpteen times. Did I need to constantly feed my addiction to France, squandering money on it as fast as I could earn? Did I really need Sicily when I had already clocked off Italy? Well, yes I did, but perhaps I should have tried to fit in an Egypt, too.

That’s right; I haven’t even been to Egypt. Extremely poor, isn’t it? To tell the truth, a friend’s apocalyptic toilet story has always stymied its appeal, which is no excuse at all given surprise bowel movements are one of the essential experiences of travel.


Piña colada

Anyway, a quick glance at my trusty world map reveals some opportunity to rectify my misspent wanderlust. What say I do the ol’ Baltic Shish Kebab and take down Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and maybe even a Finland? That would be a pretty useful catapult up the ladder. Thank God for the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rolling across the Armpit of Africa looks a good option too if I can wangle it with my wife. Between Dakar and Libreville I could probably knock off ten or more countries in a fraction of the distance it took me to drive my van from Stockholm to Sagres in the magical meandering summer of ’03.

The Caribbean Necklace could earn you a lazy twenty as you languorously arced your way from Port-of-Spain to Port-au-Prince by ferry, yacht, drug-running Cessna, or banana boat in possibly the pièce de résistance of international nation bagging. The islands are so close, so small, so subtly different, and so potentially brilliant, that this trip would without doubt blow your mind. This corner of the globe is so tantalising that my son’s bedtime stories involve him shaking up a piña colada in Puerto Rico before making a small fortune running bootleg out of Havana. He just goes with the flow.

Admittedly this terrible case of so-many-countries-so-little-time has become obsessional. I also have to admit this habit of bagging countries for sport is degrading. After all, international travel amounts to nothing more than crossing imaginary divisive lines which have little relationship to diversity and are simply contrary to one of the underlying reasons we travel – to have a beer (or similar tasty comestible) with the locals and a wee look round; or the promotion of goodwill and understanding, if you prefer.


Chasing the Big Wave

I have an enduring philosophical difference with my friend and rival Big Wave Harbour that revolves around a question: what is a country? It may seem obvious but is tricky to answer nonetheless, illustrated by the principality sub-debate. Monaco for example is a principality. It is still a country. Big Wave says it is not. What about Wales? They have their own football team, I say. Big Wave says no, they do not have their own government. Ah, I say, Monaco does! Boo yah! This is not the point.

The point is that the word country is not an absolute. Instead it can conjure up more and greater concepts than the rigidity of borders and political demarcation allows. I devoted a month to exploring self-sufficient Euskadi, straddling the western extremity of the Franco-Spanish border, a destination fiercely independent of its dominating parents. It is probably my favourite place in the world, and until there is a Basque state the Basque country it will ambiguously remain.

Russia is a single entity but covers almost one-eighth of the world’s land area, with complexity worthy of several lifetime’s exploration. If you spent the night playing poker with a mafia hitman in Moscow and flew out the next day never to return, and a million roubles stuffed in your underpants, you have had a brilliant experience. Does it mean you’ve been to Russia? If I fly to Cape Town from London for a long weekend, then claim knowledge of South Africa, you are entitled to ridicule me.

This gives me some perspective. The range and depth of possibility makes simple nation-collecting a meaningless pursuit. Travel is an exercise in humility, a delicately unstable blend of curiousity, inspiration, perspiration, desire, sensory stimulation and humanity. It does not depend on resorts stayed in, trend following, and certainly not number of countries visited. I should be celebrating the depth of my travel not deride its numerical shortcomings. So what if extra time was spent studying vindaloo in Goa because I was too chicken to go to Sri Lanka.

So actually I am ecstatic about making fifty countries because of the breadth of experience it has given me, something the names and numbers cannot convey. At last I can see that the self-centred pursuit of country one-upmanship has no real place in my travel story. Yet, deep down it is hard to deny that like a fart from the guy in the aeroplane seat in front of yours, it is all pervasive and impossible to travel anywhere without it being there. It is the thing that ultimately drives me to go somewhere else. I have to accept this.

Big Wave Harbour is the most well travelled person I know. That by no means makes him the most well travelled person there is, but he is quite thorough all the same. He is a humble man, and an inspiration, travelling without prejudice. At last count he was somewhere in the seventies, maybe even the eighties, and doesn’t truly care, while is always aware. Still, I back him to make two hundred, and as long as he keeps setting the pace I will be trying to catch him. I can’t wait until I reach one hundred.

Then on to two hundred and forty nine. Like Whispering Death.