ONE-HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY-THREE COUNTRIES

New York, November 7, 2013 (in my luxurious SoHo loft)

I just counted from an UN list of countries the ones I have visited so far, crossed off 153 and realized I am running out of places to explore without stepping over my tracks.

To get to really know those countries, I sometimes stayed put and sometimes traveled on local buses, hitchhiked, floated on big and sometimes tiny river boats, and sometimes also on luxurious dive boats. I crossed the Atlantic four times on small sailboats,
• once from Cornwall in England with my children to New York, without previous sailing experience,
• then singlehanded from Holland, via Cornwall, the Azores to Newport, Rhode Island in the US,
• then from Dakar in Senegal, with Emilie my wife, and partly my daughter Nina, to Florida via the Cap Verdes, the Caribbean and the Bahamas,
• next from Bordeaux in France to Florida, via Ireland, the Azores, also with Emilie.

Sometimes I was driving cars and trucks, or riding on camels, donkeys and horses, for a short lark even an ostrich on a South African ostrich farm, sat in the driver's seat of scooters and mopeds, rode on back seat motorcycle taxis. Once as passengers on motorcycle back seats on a really lousy road in the former DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Vietnam we, Emilie and I, crossed over the mountains to Laos.

The brain got shaken to mush on rattling bush taxies, stuffed dallah-dallahs of East Africa or on the Paris-Dakar rally across the Sahara.

Sometimes goals were reached at a more leisurely pace by trekking;
• once over the Himalayas, described in my book A SHORT STINT IN TIBET,
• or in the Sahara, after our caravan was robbed in the middle of nowhere in the desert, when we had to walk to Timbuktu (described in the documentary film, BAREFOOT TO TIMBUKTU, and in my book SEASONS OF SAND, Simon & Schuster 1993.
• In Patagonia, Emilie and I circumambulated the majestic Torres de Paine and trekked many days between Chile and Argentina.
• Trekking in the swamps of the Brazilian Pantanal with Cato, the farmer, meant sidestepping crocodiles.

Traveling was almost always by local means, eating local food, sleeping where locals sleep.

I got treated in local hospitals;
• for a hernia  operation in Uruguay,
• an eye extraction in Tanzania,
• a festering wound on my belly in Paraguay
• an arm paralysis in Brighton, England (before the single-handed North Atlantic sailboat crossing).

I heard their laughter, and sometime joined in. I saw — and felt — their sorrows.

As mentioned a few times before in this blog:

I HAVE AN INTENSE LOVE AFFAIR WITH OUR PLANET.

Sometime in the future I plan to describe a few of my more memorable encounters with our planet. It will be from memory because most of those exploits took place when computers were but the stuff of science fiction. 

• • •