The 190 Internationally Recognised Countries Already Visited
3 Internationally Recognised Countries not yet visited
Samoa , Tonga , New Zealand
What is a Country? also called a Sovereign Country, Independent State or Sovereign State has often been debated. It is generally agreed by the United Nations, The American CIA Factbook, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, and Guinness World Records that there are 193 internationally recognised countries currently in the world.
There are 192 United Nations member nations plus the Holy See (Vatican City) which is listed as the only non-member state.
The American
CIA Factbook (Notes and Definitions under Entities) states
there are 194 Independent States. The 192 United
Nations members plus the Holy See (The Vatican) and Kosovo (whose
statehood is not currently recognised by the United Nations).
According to Wikipedia there are: "193 states with general international recognition: 192 member states of the United Nations (UN). 1 state with general international recognition but not UN membership, governed by the Holy See (a UN permanent observer): Vatican City".
The Guinness World Records people published a list of 256 places in November 1996 that they used to recognise as countries or territories for record attempts. This was hotly debated as some people had claimed to have visited many more, and today there are over 670 places that some organisations recognise as places used to define the "most travelled person". By July 2004 the endless debate on what was or was not a country had not been resolved to the extent that Guinness World Records sent out the following information. “Unfortunately we no longer maintain such a (country) list ourselves because there is so little agreement on this subject internationally that virtually everyone disagreed with our list anyway!.....Rather than become involved in endless debates on this subject we've decided to 'freeze' the records in this category. At present when we refer to countries we mean the member states of the United Nations (i.e. sovereign countries), but do not get involved in the 'territories' debate.”
As Guinness World Records stated there is little agreement on what constitutes a territory, let alone islands, states, colonies, atolls or non independent countries and as such we have not added these to our total of countries visited but have listed some of them for interest.
The world's newest country, Montenegro, was accepted by
the United Nations as a member on the 28/6/06.
As our motorcycle had already visited Yugoslavia, which
changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 and retained
its United Nations membership as Serbia, it didn't need to
be revisited, however as Montenegro, the new United Nations member
and a new Sovereign State, now an "internationally recognised country",
required revisiting. Our motorcycle visited Montenegro , the Sovereign State on 31/10/06.
It would seem illogical to claim to have visited a country if it
did not exist at the time of the visit!!
The UN protectorate, and province of Serbia, Kosovo, recently
declared itself an independent country. As the United Nations has not
recognised this claim, and it is unlikely it will be recognised in the
near future due to both Russian and Chinese opposition, and their UN veto
powers, it is not currently internationally recognised as a sovereign
country. Although we visited Kosovo prior to
its claim of independence if it becomes internationally recognised we will
need to revisit.
To support our claim that this Harley-Davidson motorcycle is the World's Most Travelled Vehicle (ie it has visited the most places on earth), we have included the following. The motorcycle has visited 357 places using the Most Traveled Peoples List. The Travelers' Century Club publishes its own list it accepts as places its members can count for a visit. The motorcycle has visited 223 places according to that list. Emil and Liliana Schmidt, for their world record of the Longest Driven Journey use the pre 1996 Guinness World Record List, adjusted, of 259 places. The motorcycle has visited 197 places using that list. Other travellers like Emilio Scotto's motorcycle trip have not indicated what list they have used to calculate their claims to places visited nor a list of places visited to permit a comparison. Should anyone wish to discuss our claim to "The World's Most Travelled Vehicle" we would greatly appreciate correspondence on the subject by email to:
Story and photos copyright Peter and Kay Forwood, 1996-
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