I’m lucky. I’ve had the privilege of international travel. That’s something that’s been denied to much of the world’s populace.
Some people are denied the pleasures of travel by law. My American passport is powerful talisman that allows me to travel almost anywhere in the world. Other countries’ passports are not so mighty.
Some people can’t afford to travel. Oh, there are far more expensive obsessions, but having the travel bug requires disposable income and the ability to take time away from their jobs. Not everyone has that.
Some people have obligations that prevent them from traveling. If you’re taking care of a child or an elderly family member and no one else can shoulder those obligations, you’re stuck.
And some people don’t travel for purely internal reasons. This is especially true of Americans. They’ve been taught to fear the people in the next village or the foreign country. Or the spark of curiosity and the tinder of imagination haven’t come together inside them. This can be the most stubborn impediment to travel, because it can’t be cured by simply giving people a passport, some money, or a helping hand with their family obligations.
I’m a travel evangelist and addict. The more I travel, the more I want to–and the more I encourage others to do so. When I’m flying home from a trip, I pick up an in-flight magazine and page to the back where the maps are and start thinking about where I could go next. Not long ago, a friend showed me how I could make my own travel map. So I did.
Maps like these are marketed as a way to visualize all the countries you’ve visited, but I look at them the other way around. This is a map that shows (in red) all the countries I haven’t been to yet.
Here’s an interactive version:
Of course, this Mercator projection exaggerates the size of countries in the northern and southern quarters of the globe. A projection that was more faithful to the actual relative areas of different countries would show that there’s even more of the world I haven’t been to. And of course, countries are artificial and arbitrary ways of dividing up the world. If there were a map that simply showed the municipalities I’d visited, the map would be a sea of red spattered with a few hundred blue dots.
People who are thought to be “well-traveled” usually have seen a small percentage of the big wide world. Keeping that in mind make travel both a humbling and frustrating thing to do. No one’s seen the whole world. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying.
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