For travelers seeking to keep track of how many countries they’ve visited, a common question is: What, exactly, counts as a “visit”
When Kiki and I hiked through the Finnskogen region of Norway, for example, the trail took us across the border into Sweden’s Värmland province, before it looped us back into Norwegian territory a couple of hours later. Does this mean we can count Sweden as one of the countries we visited this summer?
How exactly one defines a “country” and a “visit” is something I explore in the pages of my new book, The Vagabond’s Way. Strolling the Manhattan-sized nation of San Marino is, after all, a different task than journeying across all forty-six oblasts of Russia (a country encompassing seventeen million square kilometers), and spending one year in Madagascar is a different endeavor than spending a few days there between brief stop-offs in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
So can we count our hike a few miles into Värmland as a visit to Sweden? To me, this feels like a stretch – particularly since, just last year, Kiki and I walked 22 miles from our central-Kansas home to “Little Sweden” (aka Lindsborg, which was settled by Värmland Swedes in the 1870s) and barely left our own county, let alone our own state.
A curious wrinkle to our Norway-Sweden hike was that – as its name implies – Finnskogen was settled by Finns in the 17th century, and hence the areas on both sides of the border had music, farming, and hunting traditions that were more the cultural legacy of Finland than of Norway or Sweden.
Wherever in the world one could say we were hiking that day – be it Norway or Sweden or Finland – it was interesting to look through old forest cabins that hadn’t been occupied since the 1960s. Some of the houses were still full of furniture and wooden skis and oil lanterns – as if waiting for a cadre of hipsters to wander in, spruce them up, and resume their off-grid vitality.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
Share This
