 | Flytrippers cofounder |
My goal is to visit every country in the world. I’m now more than halfway there: so far, I’ve visited 105 of the 193 countries (or 108 out of 197 on the other list). This travel quest has been on the back of my mind since we launched Flytrippers in 2017… but even before that, when I didn’t have as much freedom!
It helps that I’ve been living on the road as a digital nomad since 2018 and that my girlfriend is also on the same quest. We both love off-the-beaten-path destinations, like Somalia and Iraq (my #100 on each of the 2 main lists; I’ll highlight those countries at the end of this post).
I wanted to share a bit about this journey and some tricks specific to this. Flytrippers helps you travel for less with our 3 types of content, namely flight deals, travel rewards, and tips/inspiration/news.
Here’s an overview of my quest to visit every country in the world.
Which 105 countries I’ve visited
Here’s a map of where I’ve been so far (as of August 2026).
You can check out all the details on my NomadMania profile once you create a free account (which I highly recommend doing).
I have a few more new countries planned for the rest of the year, and you can follow along in real-time in my stories on my personal Instagram account.
My girlfriend Caroline and I both had this goal of visiting every country before we met. It’s part of why we connected. We mostly travel together now because we live together on the road as digital nomads.
She’s actually even further ahead: she has visited 130 countries with the same counting rules. She even went to Afghanistan as a solo female traveler!
So it’s a good time to mention how most of you are almost certainly overestimating travel risks (better understanding this fact is one of the great positives of being an experienced traveler). More on that below if you’re interested.
What it’s like to try to visit every country in the world
I really can’t stress enough how much the wonderful world of travel rewards has helped us explore our planet!
The huge welcome bonuses that are so easy to get make it so much more affordable to visit all these countries… and more enjoyable as well.
Indeed, since we move around so much, we sometimes fly business class for long journeys or splurge on stays in luxury hotels. Points of the more lucrative type in particular are great, as they provide way more flexibility and way more value!
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Averaged out over the year, this life costs us way less than living in Canada or the US.
Logistically, my girlfriend likes to plan ahead a lot, and she usually wants to see a place properly, or she’d rather not go.
I’m more willing to do a short detour to see a little and know what to expect when I come back.
In practice, we still end up with a balanced mix:
- A few months of longer stays in a year (often in affordable destinations)
- Many shorter trips filling the rest of our year (we choose together)
- Revisits to places we really like (Bulgaria and Thailand)
- Revisits to where we’re from to visit family (Canada and the United States)
Most countries are easy to travel to completely independently (our preference), but some of those shorter trips are now to more difficult countries that require expensive expeditions (due to country rules; like this year in Turkmenistan, where a guide is mandatory).
Why I want to visit every country in the world
For me, it’s mostly about seeing as much of the world as possible. The list of countries is just a clean way to keep score; counting countries is something almost all extreme travelers do.
I like discovering new places, new cultures, trying new food, and ending up somewhere that’s different from what I’ve seen before.
That gets harder and harder, but even after over 100 countries, it’s still possible. If it’s a distinct country, it’s usually distinct for a reason, and there’s usually something different there worth seeing.
The problem with traveling more is the list never really gets shorter.
The more places you see, the more you learn about other places (mostly from people you meet there or from research on the ground)… the more you keep finding spots you want to come back to or things you didn’t have time for the first time around.
I don’t have a firm end date in mind for accomplishing my goal of visiting every country, but realistically it’s still going to be at least another 10 to 20 years from here. My girlfriend and I know a ton of people who already finished visiting every country, and I’m pretty sure we will too.
What counts as a country
Travelers argue forever about what counts as a country. I like to use the 193 UN member states for my main count because it’s the most black-and-white list.
Here are the 3 most commonly used lists:
- 193: All United Nations member states (official list)
- 195: 193 + 2 UN observer states (Vatican and Palestine)
- 197: 195 + 2 less-recognized states (Taiwan and Kosovo)
As for me, I’ll certainly have hit the 195 and 197 lists too by the time I finish the 193. Right now, Palestine is the only one I’m still missing from the extra 4.
Many fans of extreme travel also count all other unrecognized (or less-recognized) countries, but that list is way more subjective.
Indeed, for many, even 197 countries is just not enough.
They often consider every territory and non-independent state that is geographically separate from its “mainland” country. Some even try to visit many (or all) different regions within a country.
There’s really way more to explore than you might think.
There are a few cornerstone lists that many in this hobby use:
- NomadMania has a great list of regions and is a great tracking tool
- Most Traveled People has another scoring system that is quite popular
- Travelers’ Century Club is more formal and has its own list of 330 territories
What counts as a visit to a country
Travelers will argue even more about what counts as a visit to a country. For me, simply being in the country mostly counts as a visit.
My exceptions are airport transits; those don’t count. Nor do things like driving the highway through Bosnia and Herzegovina between the 2 parts of Croatia (before the newish bridge; as a former structural engineer, I had to mention the stunning shortcut that wasn’t there when I went).
If I only saw the airport or a road corridor, I consider that I haven’t really seen anything of the place.
I used to count some transits. In 2024, I removed all of them from my list: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Algeria, and Chile. That left me stuck around 90 countries for longer than I wanted, but I didn’t want to hit 100 with countries I hadn’t really visited.
How I’m visiting every country (and how you can too)
First, to visit every country in the world, it really helps to become good at traveling. That includes learning all the best tips to save money on travel.
As I mentioned, travel rewards are the best way for travelers to save money very easily.
I easily get thousands of dollars in free travel every year. Get started with that ASAP if you want to travel a lot. You’ll definitely regret not starting earlier.
Then, there’s a lot of help online (since it’s 2026 and you can find just about anything) and even in person (IRL; in real life)!
There’s a whole community of people visiting every country in the world, tracking different lists, meeting up in random places, and swapping visa and border intel.
One of the best resources for extreme travel that we use is the Every Passport Stamp Facebook group (Flytrippers’ other cofounder Andrew was interviewed in their live videos about his own quest many years ago).
Someone can answer any specific question about any country. For almost any random border crossing pretty much anywhere in the world, someone has usually done it recently.
An example of super niche intel we got was to apply for a business visa rather than a regular tourist visa to enter more simply into an African country.
Speaking of logistics, one of the most outside-the-box for us was getting a Ghana residence card so we could apply for the Mali and Côte d’Ivoire visas from Ghana (instead of flying back to our different home countries). That card is expired now, but it’s a pretty cool and unique souvenir.
In terms of tools, I also track my progress on NomadMania. It’s good for countries, but especially for regions and things to see/do inside countries.
And it’s also a good way to meet interesting people in more unique places. We had beers with 2 fellow members in Kazakhstan last month that way. This year I also started using Pangea to find more people in the cities where we’re going too.
My girlfriend and I actually met in Bansko, Bulgaria, during Nomad Fest. That’s an annual weeklong conference that’s more for nomads than for extreme travelers.
But we really started traveling together after we ran into each other again in Armenia at the inaugural Extraordinary Travel Festival.
ETF is a conference for people trying to visit every country! It’s a fun one if you want to meet other “crazy” people with this same goal (there are way more than you think).
We also went to ETF II in Bangkok in 2024. And we’ll be in Bangkok during ETF III this October if you want to meet up!
Which countries are left for me to visit
While 105 countries is a lot… there are still almost as many left to visit (88 to be precise).
I still have many missing in Africa. The least-visited of the 5 different regions of Africa, Central Africa, is one of the harder blocks: expensive visas, expensive transportation, and some places that aren’t the safest depending on timing.
I also have many missing in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. There’s certainly a common thread: these are places where traveling is more expensive.
The very common flights for $20 in Europe or $50 in Asia just aren’t a thing in those regions. That’s where rewards of the more lucrative type like airline points will come in very handy: flights that are always expensive in cash are often a sweet spot of many programs.
I’m also particularly excited for Iran, Syria, and Tajikistan when the timing makes sense, as I loved their neighboring countries.
We’re hoping to go to South Sudan and Uganda later this year if the Ebola situation and Canada’s new entry restrictions don’t get worse.
Finally, in terms of safety, most of you are almost certainly overestimating travel risks. Of course, we’re not going to risk our lives in order to reach our goal to visit every country in the world.
There’s usually a safe way to explore a place (like with our 2 armed guards in Somalia), but some destinations we’d still wait to do when things get better. We wouldn’t go back to Mali right now, or go to Niger or Iran.
That said, Jordan during the aerial attacks in February was perfectly safe* even though everyone has a really hard time understanding that. More Canadians died in a bus crash in the Dominican Republic than in all the Middle East during this war.
*Perfectly safe, except maybe the taxi ride to the airport due to the driver’s skills (or rather lack thereof)!😅
Once you start traveling a lot, you’ll become a lot better at realizing how most people overreact to situations they simply don’t know well.
What it was like to hit 100 countries in Somalia and Iraq
Last year I hit 100 countries on the 193 list in Somalia and 100 countries on the 197 list in Iraq. Definitely 2 very remarkable destinations.
In Somalia, we only stayed 2 nights in Mogadishu, and it was a really cool and unique visit.
We went to Lido beach to eat and swim, visited the fish market and the old lighthouse, had a “camelccino” (a cappuccino but with camel milk) at a rooftop café (and many more around town), went to the mall, milked camels, played bowling, and had gelato.
The coffee and gelato are great, leftover from the Italian colonial days.
You can read my overview post about that trip to the Horn of Africa.
Just 3 countries before that, we briefly visited Iraq. We only had 3 nights there before going to Kuwait: 1 in a traditional reed house in Chibayish, and 2 in Basrah.
Basrah was so nice. We met someone from Couchsurfing who showed us around both nights and had us try a lot of the local food, showed us around town, introduced us to playing dominoes, and took us for a stroll on the corniche.
We also went to work from a café with great coffee, not your usual digital nomad hotspot! We were on our own there; it felt completely fine, and southern Iraq’s food and hospitality were amazing.
We’ll for sure be back in the country for longer. Flytrippers’ other cofounder Andrew visited Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan back in 2019 on his own and had absolutely nothing but great things to say.
A lot of these places sound impossible if you just rely on the news, where they only ever talk about negative events, by definition. In real life, you’ll experience a very normal trip: beaches, markets, cafés, people who want to feed you, and a normal daily routine like that of the millions who live there.
You still need to do your homework, and you shouldn’t go somewhere if the timing is bad (like going back to Mali now). But the list of countries that you really shouldn’t visit is incredibly shorter than what the media wants you to believe.
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Summary
In my quest to visit every country in the world, I’ve now been to 105 of the 193 (UN list). I still mostly just want to keep seeing new places, eating new food, and ending up in countries a lot of people skip. You don’t need to visit every country. Just don’t cross a place off your next trip because it sounds scary on the news.
What would you like to know about my quest to visit every country? Tell us in the comments below.
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Featured image: My map and me in Mauritania (image credit: NomadMania & Kevin Gagnon/Flytrippers)
