About

Who am I?

Hi! My name is Nicolai, I was born in 1985, I’m a Swiss citizen and an addicted hobby traveler.

I started traveling in 2012, when I quit my first job after graduating from university. Back then, I didn’t have a new job yet. But I had time therefore and some saved money to leave the country for a few weeks. It all started in Southeast Asia. And these first weeks of traveling turned out to be life changing. My first real trip abroad opened my eyes and I knew that traveling was what I wanted to do – and it became an addiction.

For years, I lived by the following rule: I will do at least one trip abroad every month. Sometimes, I even did three (short) trips a month, although this remained an exception. Nowadays, I calmed down a bit. I still travel a lot but sometimes I stay at home for several weeks. However, I still clearly prefer to invest in memories rather than material things.

Often friends ask me how I manage to travel that much. They assume that I work part-time, which I never did. Having “only” 30 days of vacation every year, I do use some simple tricks to maximize my amount of free days. The first one is that I try to start my trip right in the evening after a working day. Plus, I sometimes start working again the day I come back from a trip.

The second one is that I usually take my vacation around national holidays. If for example you take the week before and after Easter holiday, you only have to take eight days off for a 14-15 days journey. There are nine national holidays in Switzerland of which six are on a Thursday, Friday or Monday. The remaining six are fixed dates, so their day of the week changes every year.

Sometimes, we are unlucky and the national holidays fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Fortunately, my current employer is generous enough to give us these missed holidays as extra days off. Anyway, to summarize, I do have 30 days of vacation, 9 national holidays, 52 Saturdays and 52 Sundays. That’s almost 40% of 365 days. Not too bad, eh?

That is not all. My employer offers the option of taking unpaid leave. I’ve always done that in the last three years, three weeks per year. With that on top of the days I already had, you can travel a lot every year. And so it’s also easy to explain how I’ve been able to see so many countries in the world.

My Mission

I want to visit every single country in this world. Yes, another one who wants to do it…

In 2014, I was addicted to the geography quizzes on sporcle.com. In one quiz, you had to name every country you knew. When I was playing this game, I counted all the countries I had visited by that time and my score was somewhere around 25. Since then I added every new country I visited to that list.

At the same time, I discovered a website about a young man who was on the same mission. I didn’t even know that this was a realistic goal back then. Later, I read more about people who either had this goal or had even achieved it. The shit got real.

I told a few friends about my new life goal and they all reacted like that was the most stupid and unrealistic thing they have ever heard of. To be honest, I wasn’t too optimistic either in the beginning. It is a very expensive goal and it requires a lot of dedication. Anyway, I continued visiting as many countries as possible and my list got longer in a very short period of time. In 2016, I had visited 13 new countries, a year later even 19!

The Bet

After I reached country no. 36, my friend Tobi said: “I should count my countries as well. I think my count will be around 33.” An hour later, he sends me a list with all the countries he already had visited: 54! I was absolutely baffled. After doing some trash talk, we agreed on a bet: Whoever will reach #197 the first, gets a free flight from the loser.

What he didn’t know was that I never lose bets. It took me 18 months to balance the score. As I am writing, I’m far ahead. Tobi had a world trip planned, where he wanted to even the score again. However, he lost interest in traveling to new countries and he is stuck somewhere at 76 countries, while I have almost been to 160. So, I think we cannot call it a race anymore.

Another difficulty that came over the time is that I almost ran out of easy countries, which I can visit on weekends via direct flights. Nevertheless, I am strategically well located, as I can take flights from Basel (where I live) or Zurich (which is only an hour away by train). Besides, Frankfurt and Paris are both just three hours by train away and have airports that fly to numerous countries.

The Rules

So what does it take to count a country as visited? Fore me, a country is considered as visited as soon as you have done something in that country. Airport transits don’t count, neither do passing through by car or train without getting out and doing anything. It doesn’t count either if you just hop over the border.

However, that doesn’t mean that I have to spend a lot of time in the country. For example, I have visited Liechtenstein to watch a football game. I think I was in the country for a maximum of 4-5 hours. That counts. Some people insist that you have to sleep at least one night there but I find this ridiculous. It wouldn’t be possible either (Vatican City, for example, doesn’t have hotels).

Obviously, it’s not possible to get a deep insight into the culture of every country when you’re on a race like that. This is not my goal though. I set my focus on a few countries, where I stay longer and visit the others just for a short period of time. Will I revisit a country after I got the notch? Absolutely. I’m collecting new countries, but I still allow myself to visit places I’ve already been to.

Why 197 countries and which one do I count? There are different ways to define what a country is. I do count the 193 United Nations countries, the 2 UN-observers (Palestine & the Vatican) and 2 widely recognized countries, Taiwan and Kosovo. That is 197 countries in total. I do not count non-sovereign states like Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Wales or Aruba.

Why do I write this stuff?

First of all, I am passionate about writing. Even if no one reads my stuff, I am still saving some memories for later. Perhaps, the 50 years old version of me will read it someday and think “boy, what an idiot you were”.

Secondly, I am interested in topics like digitization, web business and data analysis, which I might use in my profession in the future. This website helps me getting better in SEO, web analysis and online marketing. At least, I will be able to use my knowledge in this private project and see how far I can go.

Thirdly, and this is the most important point, I don’t want to tell my travel stories 30 times or more. That sounds a bit selfish now, but after every trip I get asked by a lot of people what it was like and what I experienced. It is exhausting and time-consuming to report the experiences in detail to everyone. Usually I tell the first two or three people the long version of the trip, then I summarize my experience in three to four sentences and refer to my page for the detailed report.

Of course, the internet is flooded with travel blogs – there are probably tens of thousands or even more. I’m trying to be different by writing about not very common or usual travel destinations. There are tons of travel reports of Thailand, Peru or Australia, but not that many talking about Nigeria, Afghanistan or Belarus. I’m seeking to combine that by writing about all kinds of cities and countries, from London to Erbil and from Spain to Côte d’Ivoire.

Finally, I would like to point out that I am not a native English speaker, so it’s almost impossible for me to write without making mistakes. My apologies for that. Anyway, I chose to write in English in order to be able to reach more people than just the German speaking ones. 🙂

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Check out the countries I have already been to on this page.