Travel map guides
Practical answers about counting countries, rebuilding old trips and printing your map.
- How Many Countries Are There in the World?193, 195 or about 250: the three common answers, who uses each one, and which total to use when you count the countries you have visited.
- What Counts as Visiting a Country?Airport layovers, border hops, cruise stops and train transits: the rules travellers use to decide whether a country counts, and how to pick yours.
- What Percentage of the World Have You Visited?The formula, a quick reference table for 193 and 195 countries, and why the share of land you have covered is usually a very different number.
- How to Rebuild Your Travel History From Old TripsWhere to find the dates and places of trips you took years ago: photo data, email, passport stamps, airline accounts and location history.
- How to Print a Travel Map Poster: Sizes and ResolutionPixel sizes for A4 to A2 and common inch formats at 300 dpi, when to use PNG or SVG, and what to tell the print shop.
- Why This Map Looks Different: Equal Earth vs MercatorMercator maps make Greenland look as big as Africa. An equal-area projection shows real sizes, which matters when you colour in visited countries.
- Why Flight Routes Curve on a MapThe shortest path between two cities is a great circle, which looks curved on a flat map. What that means for route lines and distances.
- How Many Continents? Where Border Countries BelongSeven continents is the common answer, but Russia, Turkey, Egypt and others span two. How this map assigns them, and how to count continents visited.
- How to Back Up and Move Your Travel MapYour map is stored in your browser. How that works, what can delete it, and how to save a backup file and load it on a new phone or computer.
- How to Share Your Travel Map Without Creating an AccountThree ways to share a travel map: an image, a link that carries the map inside it, or a backup file. What each one reveals and when to use it.
- The Largest and Smallest Countries and Your MapSix countries hold over 40% of the world's land and 27 are too small to click. Area tables and what they mean for a visited-countries map.
- How to Log Trips to Countries That No Longer ExistTravelled to the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia or East Germany? Which present-day countries to mark, with dates of each change.
- How to Count Travel Days and NightsDays or nights, the departure day, overlapping trips and flights across the date line: a consistent way to count how long you have travelled.
- How to Build a Travel Bucket List on a MapTurn a wish list into a map you can plan from: mark countries you want to visit, keep them apart from visited ones, and group them into trips.
- What to Write in a Travel Journal: Notes Worth KeepingPhotos show what a place looked like. A few lines per stop keep the rest: who, where you stayed, what it cost and what you would repeat.