What Constitutes a "Visit" When Trying to Get to Every Country?

I was standing outside of Golubac Fortress in Serbia, which sits directly on the Danube River and just a stone’s throw from the modern-day border with Romania, a country I have yet to visit. “We should walk over, just to say that we did it,” I joked, craning to get a better look. “It wouldn’t count,” someone in my group, a known country counter, quickly countered. That would require, at minimum, an overnight and at least one meal, they added, and we didn’t have time for that.

I agreed. I’m not a country counter, at least in the sense that I’m not actively racing to get to every country on the planet. But I could recognize that merely stepping foot inside Romania’s borders wouldn’t be enough to sate me, either. I conceded.

Prior to that day, however, I’m not sure I’d given any serious thought to what the criteria was for being able to say I visited a country. I know a long layover wouldn’t qualify, but would a day trip? An overnight? Neither are enough to really get a feel for a destination, but if you spent even a week in each of the 195 United Nations-recognized countries, it’d take 26 years to get to all of them. And that assumes you’ve committed yourself to traveling full-time for that long, which most people don’t. It creates quite the conundrum.

That said, I’m not even sure how prevalent this conversation was 40 or so years ago when Finnish writer Rauli Virtanen became the first to visit every country — or at least the first to publicly declare that he’d done so — and the trend initially started garnering attention. The difference is that today there is a seemingly inextricable link between visiting every country and social media. Reducing entire countries to grid posts captioned with check mark emojis sets entirely the wrong tone, and many travelers rightly take issue with that.

In 2015, Cassie De Pecol set out to become the fastest to visit all the sovereign countries. It took her 18 months and 26 days. “Travel allows for the development of a mutual understanding and appreciation of other cultures, religions and ways of life,” she later said of her trip in an interview. “Taking the time to integrate yourself in the diverse communities of the countries you visit offers opportunities to break down your misconceptions and biases and teaches kindness and empathy. Travel can really humble you if you let it.”

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But are you really “integrating” yourself in anything if you’re quite literally racing to get it done? De Pecol’s record has been beaten a few times now, most recently in 2019 by Anderson Dias, who completed his trip in 543 days. Impressive? Of course. But outside of a dedication in the Guinness Book of World Records, what’s the reward? Surely not the benefit of having really experienced all 196 cultures.

Johnny Ward, a 41-year-old Irishman based out of Thailand, is also counted among the elite group who have made it to every country. Unlike De Pecol and Dias, however, Ward didn’t set out with the intention to crush any records. In fact, it took him 10 years to finish.

“Basically, most people who do every country now — especially young, beautiful people — they’re just racing through it to create a social media following,” he says. “Like, what’s your message to the world? That you want to be famous? When travel’s such a beautiful learning experience, and all you’re doing it for is Instagram likes?”

“I mean, that is bullshit,” he adds.

At the end of the day, though, he believes it’s a matter of integrity, whatever that looks like to you. “Whatever you want to count as a country, count your country,” he says. “If you want to be an empty, like-chasing YouTuber, go ahead.”

To be fair, the majority of travelers appear to share this mentality, though the answer to what actually constitutes a visit is still relatively unclear. In response to a Travel Weekly column that addressed the topic, Bob Krause of Supertravel in Gainesville, Florida, wrote in and included a list of rules he and a friend devised, aptly called “Bob & Jim’s Official Country Count Rules.” Those rules are as follows:

Flying over a country or state does not count.
Traveling through the territorial waters of a country without going ashore does not count.
Driving through a country or state — even if one does not stop — does count.
Landing in a country or state, even if one does not deplane, does count. It is not necessary to clear customs/immigration of the country in order to count.
If you’ve visited a country that no longer exists, it still remains on your list.
Official territories of another country do count as separate entities.

On a Reddit thread also dedicated to the subject, one user suggested that there’s a distinction between being able to say you’ve traveled to a country versus whether you’ve visited. Many on that same thread argue it doesn’t count unless you leave the airport. Others still have a more exacting set of criteria: a one-night stay minimum and an attraction seen or a meal eaten, for example.

For my part, I believe that even setting the intention to get to every country can be incredibly limiting. First, it tends to breed the obnoxious idea that returning somewhere is a waste of time and, second, it turns countries into line items to be crossed off and nothing more. I don’t believe that “just breathing the air” constitutes a visit — I’ve been laid over in Copenhagen several times, but I don’t say I’ve visited Denmark. But maybe it does count towards a list of countries traveled to.

To that end, I guess it really comes down to why you’re doing it in the first place.