Travel

I’d like to clock up 100 countries during my life time. I’m up to 80-something.

	Andorra
	Argentina
	Australia
	Austria
	Bahamas
	Bahrain
	Belgium
	Belize
	Bolivia
	Brazil
	Bulgaria
	Cambodia
	Canada
	Chile
	China
	Costa Rica
	Croatia
	Czech Republic
	Denmark
	Ecuador
	Egypt
	Estonia
	Finland
	France
	Germany
	Greece
	Hong Kong
	Hungary
	Iceland
	India
	Ireland
	Italy
	Jamaica
	Japan
	Jordan
	Kenya
	Korea
	Laos
	Latvia
	Liechtenstein
	Lithuania
	Luxembourg
	Malaysia
	Malta
	Mexico
	Monaco
	Mongolia
	Montenegro
	Morocco
	Netherlands
	New Zealand
	Norway
	Oman
	Panama
	Paraguay
	Peru
	Poland
	Portugal
	Romania
	Russia
	Singapore
	Slovakia
	Slovenia
	South Africa
	Spain
	Sweden
	Switzerland
	Syria
	Taiwan
	Tanzania
	Thailand
	Tunisia
	Turkey
	Ukraine
	U.A.E.
	U.K.
	U.S.A.
	Uruguay
	Vatican City
	Vietnam
	Yugoslavia

The locals refer to the tortoises simply as Galapagos, and they typically live into their 100s. Here are my thoughts on cruising the Galapagos Islands. And here’s a rock tortoise, in Terelj National Park, Mongolia:

Some years ago I travelled overland from Finland to Singapore, taking the trans-Siberian route from Moscow to Beijing via Mongolia along the way. Look at a picture of the earth from space, at night, and you’ll see clusters of city lights dotted along the train line for 1000s of km. Here’s how humans expanded across the world.At one point the population was down to less than 10,000 humans. These days, 1 in 200 men are descendents of Ghengis Kahn

The pyramids at Giza, which for some 4,000 were the tallest man-made structure in the world, are only about 20% of the height of today’s tallest building. They’re still massively impressive though, and I think that’s because even today they’d be an effort to make.

On the other hand, the Panama canal, probably one of the most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken (25,000+ plus workers died over the 30 years taken to construct it) left less of an impact on me, simply because you can’t get a sense of the scale just from looking at it today

I enjoyed visiting Laos. Some beautiful scenery, and not yet featuring that highly on the backpacker trail.

Tanzania is a great destination too. I climbed Kilimanjaro, spent time on Zanzibar, and visited the Ngorongoro crater, the world’s largest unbroken caldera with steep, 600m ‘walls’ creating a natural enclosure for some 25,000 animals.