Forget Counting Countries: I’m Visiting Every State on the Map

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I'm back making YouTube videos after a long time away, and the first thing I wanted to talk about is what the big theme of my travels has been over the last 6 years.

There are currently 51 countries with my name on them. The thing is, about 40 of these are countries that I feel like I genuinely know; I lived in them for several months or even years, tried to learn the local language and made genuine friends. But for about 10 of them, I caught myself doing something I don't like to see others do, of just visiting them for the tick. Adding them up like Pokémon. Visiting small, easy countries because they got me closer to a bigger number. Or visiting a single place in a huge country and then scratching the entire landmass off one of those country scratch maps.

I know people who have visited over a hundred countries, and even a couple of people who have visited every single one, but for my own 23-year and continuing trip, I don't want the number of countries to be a metric I think about.

I prefer much deeper travels, so instead I'm chasing every state. Every province, every region, sometimes every county, sometimes every major island; basically every little dot on the map most people fly straight over. There are roughly three thousand of them in the world, so the point isn't actually to tick every single one. I'd need to live to be really old for that. The point is the journey and the people I meet on the way.

If you'd rather watch than read, here's the full video version:

Now I know what you're thinking. “Benny, that's mad. Three thousand? You've finally lost it. You can barely do the countries, never mind every state inside every country.”

And you're right, I'll never finish. But here's what 23 years of doing this has taught me. The end goal of some number was never the point. Counting countries was never actually making my travel better. If anything it made it worse, because a scoreboard rewards speed, and speed ruins everything that makes travel worth doing.

Let me show you what I mean, because I've been both kinds of traveller.

The country scoreboard is shallow

When you're counting countries, you optimise for the tick. Fly into the capital, see the one or two most famous things, get the stamp, leave. I've met people who'll proudly tell you they've “been to” a hundred countries, and when you actually talk to them, they've seen a hundred airports, a hundred hotel breakfasts, and taken the most typical Instagram shot in front of the most typical tourist spot of the country.

I'm not judging them, because I did it too for a handful of my country visits.

Countries are wildly different sizes, but they all count the same. Ticking off Monaco scores exactly what ticking off Brazil scores. One of them you can easily walk from one side to the other in an afternoon. The other is the 5th largest country on earth, bigger than the continental United States, and holds entire worlds that have nothing to do with each other.

So the scoreboard lies to you. It tells you you've seen the world when all you've really seen is the thin top layer of it. The bit that's easiest to reach and looks best on a postcard.

Brazil: the whole-country project

Instead, as an example, I've had a project spanning two decades of visiting every corner of Brazil, piece by piece. Not the tick you get from just going to Rio. All of it. Every state. As much exploration as I could within each state.

And if you've never looked at a map of Brazil properly, that's an absurd thing to attempt, because a huge chunk of it is mostly the Amazon rainforest, the northernmost point of Brazil is closer to Canada than to the southernmost point, and the East of Brazil is way closer to Africa than it is to the west of Brazil, it's so huge. And most of the states aren't so well connected between one another if you wanted to fly between them.

So I went mainly overland. Tens of thousands of kilometres by bus. Boats from the very start of the Amazon river in Peru, entering Brazil, all the way to where it meets the Atlantic ocean.

I got to states most Brazilians have never set foot in. Roraima, right up on the Venezuela and Guyana border… Acre, which Brazilians joke doesn't even exist or is full of dinosaurs… On the equator at Amapá.

And every single one of them was extraordinary. Not because they're famous. Precisely because for loads of them, no other foreigner typically goes, so nothing's been sanded down for tourists, and often you are the first foreigner not from the country right next door they've ever met in their lives. You're just in a real place, with real people, who are genuinely delighted that some Irish fella has turned up speaking Portuguese.

If I'd been counting countries, Brazil would've been one tick. One. Same as Luxembourg or the Vatican City, or Macau. I'd have flown into Rio, had a lovely weekend, and flown home convinced I'd “done” a country I hadn't even begun to understand. Instead, I'm proud to say that I've been able to visit every single one of Brazil's 26 states, meeting people in every one and having a truly unique experience every time.

The honest trade-offs

Obviously, I'm aware that I'm very lucky that I get to do this; unfortunately, I don't have loads of money saved up because of multiple problems I went through in my life that I talked about a few years ago. But I work online and I earn in a strong currency, where an average salary gets you very far in loads of countries, and since I'm nomadic and travel with everything I own in the world, I'm not paying rent or a mortgage in a far off country.

And fortunately, I did the vast majority of an expensive country like the United States before inflation started getting out of hand, back when it was still relatively affordable. Because of that, I've also visited all 48 contiguous states of the US!

South Korea is a relatively small country, but I've visited every single province of it regardless!

And last year, I spent most of the year visiting all the major islands of the western half of Indonesia, where it was incredibly affordable as a nomad working online, but I really did need to speak Indonesian to make it worthwhile.

And this isn't some finished achievement I'm telling you about from a rocking chair. It's happening right now, even as I write this.

Mexico, state by state, right now

I'm currently working my way through Mexico, state by state. Next week, I'll reach my 20th state, out of 31. And because I'm going slowly, one state at a time, I'm not doing the entirety of any of the big countries in one go. I'll be coming back to Mexico for the final 10 states some time later.

And I'm still getting valuable experiences every time, especially thanks to making sure I speak the local language.

For instance, last week I was in San Luis Potosí. My eighteenth Mexican state. I arrived knowing nobody. There was this tiny café near my place, actually a converted front room of the house of a lovely couple. I went in on day one. Went back on day two. By the end of the week they knew my order, they knew my name, and we were having proper conversations in Spanish about their lives and mine. They were very surprised to meet an Irish guy in their city and very curious to chat with me, which is quite different to the more touristy spots in Mexico where they get a little overwhelmed with the amount of foreign visitors.

I'm not going to pretend it's all magic and café owners learning your name. Going deep is slower. Since meeting people is my priority, sometimes I do miss the iconic touristy sites. And occasionally, the unique experience I have in a place may well be a bit more superficial, since meeting people on the road all the time is incredibly challenging depending on the place and the local culture. But I'll take it.

I've really been enjoying this theme of visiting every state in these recent years. I don't know how long I'll be able to travel for, so I want to have a more unique experience while I can, and despite the vast number of people travelling now compared to when I started in 2003, I'm still actually able to have a unique experience, surrounded by mainly locals, by travelling this way. I can highly recommend it!

What's coming next

Like I said, I'm back again after a really long break, and there are a few things I want to talk about as I get back into recording videos. When I talk about deep long-term projects like this, loads of people ask me how I actually do it.

How do you travel with everything you could possibly need? How do you walk into a city where you know nobody and end up with friends and social events, even if you're not super outgoing?

So over the next few videos (and associated blog posts like this), I'm going to show you exactly that. The real logistics. How everything I own fits in one suitcase. How I find the events and the people that turn a strange city into somewhere I belong. The unglamorous, practical, genuinely useful stuff underneath the whole “every state in the world” idea.

I'll also return to some of the things I talked about a few years ago when I was sharing the darkest point of my life, in terms of how I escaped from such a dark place.

If that sounds like your kind of madness, subscribe to my Benny Lewis channel, because that's what's coming. And if you followed me for my language learning advice, don't worry, because I've just uploaded a new video on the Fluent in 3 Months YouTube channel too, and I still help people who want to learn a language intensively in a supportive coaching community at the Bootcamp.