While preparing our holiday and travel plans for 2024, I decided to look at what countries I visited in the past to see what interesting places we might have missed. The easiest way to do that is using one of the freely available countries or places visited websites. I chose visitedplaces.com, as it was straightforward to use and produced a visually pleasing map. Of course, any other similar website would have worked, too.

It turns out that as of February 2024:

I visited 23 countries out of 257. That’s 8.9% of all countries in the world!

Please note that I consider a country visited only if I stayed there at least for a few days or weeks. In particular, I do not consider short transits as actual visits. If I did so, I could add another four or five countries to my list.

Below is a picture of the world map with the countries that I visited already highlighted in green and my country or origin (Germany) marked in yellow.

Here is a link to the interactive world map where you can zoom in and pan around.

So, I already visited about 9% of the world’s countries. This fraction is a bit lower than what I expected, but reasonable, given that I mainly explored Europe until a few years ago.

I see a few obvious ideas for 2024 and the following years:

• Visit and explore the remaining countries in Europe. Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, and Norway are highest on my list.

• Visit the United States for a few weeks or months. I transited through San Francisco several years ago with a short few-hour visit, but that does not really count.

• Explore South America. Chile, Argentina, Brazil at first. Again, four to six weeks are at least needed for each to get some initial experience.

• Visit more countries in Asia. Nepal, Japan, India, Thailand, Cambodia.

• Visit some other countries in Africa. This mainly depends on how the war and general security situation develops. Egypt, Kenya, and Namibia are high on my list.