Updated, October 30, 2005
I have had the privledge to travel throughout the world both as a tourist and for my job with Global Weather Dynamics. This page contains a list of the 84 sovereign countries that I have visited.
I had intended to add comments about each country that I have
visited. But since my experiences have not been uniformly
wonderful, and since my business involves work in various
countries, I feel that it is best (for the time being) to say
nothing about my impressions while traveling. This may be a later
project.
Rules of this list:
Making a list of countries visited is not as simple as it might seem. This is mostly because the geographical boundaries and political organization of countries are constantly changing (e.g. Hong Kong, Yugoslavia, and Russia). Thus I have followed several rules in adding (and deleting) entires to this list:
Rule 1: No country occupying the same geography can appear twice under different names e.g. USSR/Russia and Yugoslavia/Serbia. So if I have visited a specific location with one name, I cannot also use the other name.
Rule 2: A country can be include if it exists today if I visited the geographical territory of that country even though it may not have been a country at that time. e.g Croatia which I visited when it was part of Yugoslavia.
Rule 3: A country can be included that existed when I visited its geographical territory but which does not exist today because it has been absorbed into another country., e.g. Hong Kong.
Rule 4: It is permitted to include countries where I have only visited the airport. Such "transit stop" countries are marked with an asterisk (*). It is not necessary to disembark from the plane to include the country in my list. Over flights do not count!