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What is your Countage?

If you love to travel, you have a countage. Travellers young and old have a countage, but many haven’t taken the time to calculate theirs. It doesn’t take long and it is not a complicated process.

Countage is the combination of country and age.

But it’s not the age of your country. A quick google search could determine the age of your homeland. Even countries which have recently changed their names, such as Eswatini (nee Swaziland), and Czechia (nee Czech Republic) have an official age.

No, countage is specifically related to you and your travels.

Countage is the number of foreign countries you have visited compared to your age.

You might visit a foreign country for a holiday or vacation, or you might work or volunteer in that place. You might stay for a few days or a week, or find yourself living in this new land for years – you might even fall in love with the country, the culture, the landscape, the food-or one local in particular, and make it your adopted home.

Either way, countage refers to visiting a country which is not that of your birth or permanent residence.

If you are 50, and have visited 43 foreign countries, you would have a countage of -7.

Conversely, if you are 43 and have visited 50 countries, you have a countage of +7.

Travellers will differ in their definition of a ‘visit’. Some will tick off a country if they spend just one night within its borders. Others will claim a country if they have its seal stamped in their passport – but passport stamps can be collected while simply passing through an airport for a short layover, and seeing a country’s airport terminal is hardly seeing the country. Furthermore, many countries don’t stamp passports at all these days, because the country belongs to a zone of multiple countries, such as the Schengen Area, or the government understands that its stamp may complicate the visitor’s chances of entering other countries in the future (such as Cuba).

Visiting a country more than once does not increase your countage. Plus, if a country you visited later splits into two or more separate countries, that doesn’t earn you more ‘points’. So, if you visited Yugoslavia when it was known by that name, you can’t claim extra points for having been to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

So, what’s yours?

Positive or negative?

And are you about to jump online right now and book a flight to a foreign country in order to increase your countage? Is it a country you’ve always wanetd to visit, or is it any country which helps you turn your negative countage into a positive?

It just has to be a country you haven’t visited yet.

If you want a positive countage, get moving!