I’ve been looking this morning for customised travel maps, those nice maps where you can color countries where you’ve been and they sadly tell as a result that you still miss 90% of the globe. I found a couple of interesting tools, eg. amCharts Visited Country Map and the Guardian custom maps. But the thing is: they are all inaccurate.
Take Russia. I visited Moscow, several time. Never seen the rest of the country, unfortunately. Same for Canada. Been in Toronto. I’d love to visit the rest of that beautiful country. Or the States. I’ve been all around the 2 coasts, but I still miss a lot. And I’ve never been to Alaska.
So when I start using those customizable maps, how can I select that I’ve just visited Moscow – not Russia? Or Toronto – not Canada? The resulting map will show that I’ve been more or less everywhere. But that’s very inaccurate.
And so I found the Travel Score project. The basic idea behind the map is quite simple. It divides the earth into graticular blocks. By selecting those cells that you’ve already visited, the web app calculates a bunch of things like country visited, % vs. ROW, etc. Which is definitely a smarter approach. Because again I visited Moscow, not Russia. Port Arcourt, not Nigeria. Unfortunately there is no way to save or share, so you need to go with screenshots – as I did with the featured image.
Well. Maybe the final conclusion of my search is: my entire life won’t be enough to visit the world. I visited about 40 countries vs. 147. I have a travel score of 4/5 but I feel like I am still missing the most. Interesting enough, one thing has changed in the last 20 years with my travel approach. No longer alone. Because, as someone said time ago:
Happiness is only real when shared.