The 188 Sovereign Countries Already Visited

5 Sovereign Countries not yet visited

What is a Country? also called a Sovereign Country, Independent State or Sovereign State, has long been debated. It is generally agreed by the United Nations, The American CIA Factbook and Guinness World Records (post 2004 definition) that there are 193 countries currently in the world.

There are 192 United Nations member nations  plus one country which is not a member, the Vatican City.

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. 

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 has already visited Yugoslavia, which changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 and retains its United Nations membership as Serbia, it doesn't need to be revisited, however as Montenegro is the new United Nations member and a new Sovereign State, that area of the world, now a country, required  revisiting. Our motorcycle has now visited Montenegro , the Sovereign State. 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 is unlikely to do so in the near future due to both Russian and Chinese opposition, and veto powers, it is not currently internationally recognised as a sovereign nation. We recently visited Kosovo prior to its claim of independence.

To support our claim that this Harley-Davidson motorcycle is the World's Most Travelled Vehicle 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:    

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