Planning a Ship Trip from New Orleans to Morocco and Counting Countries
Geography is rarely as permanent as a map suggests. Borders dissolve, unions fracture, and the digital applications people use to tally their personal travels frequently require recalibration. This reality forms the backdrop of an upcoming sea voyage originating from the ports of Louisiana.
That arithmetic, however, no longer holds up.
The Arithmetic of Travel and the Problem of Disputed Borders
For decades, keeping track of visited territories was straightforward for many tourists relying on memory or scrapbooks. The advent of digital tools like the “Been” app introduced systematic tracking, but it also exposed the subjective nature of what constitutes a “country.”
According to accounts detailed by Chilichili, the traveler’s tally began in 1992 with a trip to Mexico, following a cross-country move to Reno, Nevada, in a U-Haul truck in August 1987. Over subsequent decades—including a stint living in Europe, trips across the Caribbean, and six nations visited in West Africa—the count crept upward through India, Nepal, Scotland, Türkiye, and Greece.
Yet, digital tracking apps complicate simple integers. Scotland, despite its distinct flag, cultural identity, and separate historical tracking within many traveler itineraries, is part of the United Kingdom. Similarly, Hong Kong has functioned as a British colony and later a Chinese special administrative region rather than a fully sovereign state. When these distinctions are enforced, the total count drops below the anticipated milestone of 50.
Geopolitical reality reinforces this fluidity. South Sudan did not exist on modern maps prior to 2011. Czechoslovakia vanished from European atlases at the close of 1992. For travelers who visited these regions in good faith, the administrative label attached to the soil can shift dramatically over twenty years, even if the physical ground trodden remains unchanged.
The Logistics of Modern Maritime Transit and Infrastructure
Embarking on a voyage from the Gulf Coast of the United States to North Africa involves complex maritime logistics, international customs protocols, and port authorities. Maritime travel from New Orleans requires coordination across municipal, state, and federal jurisdictions, including the U.S.
Travelers undertaking extended ocean voyages often rely on specialized logistics planning to manage documentation, vessel schedules, and international transit regulations.
Furthermore, property restoration and domestic continuity play a parallel role in long-term travel planning. As highlighted in the source accounts, the journey to Morocco coincides with returning to a home following a destructive house fire. Rebuilding a domestic space while planning international transit underscores the intersection of personal asset management and global mobility.
The Journey as the Destination
A multi-week voyage across the ocean is fundamentally an exercise in transit rather than destination-chasing. Spending weeks aboard a ship prioritizes the rhythm of the sea over the rapid velocity of modern air travel. It reflects a deliberate choice to slow down the pace of observation.
This deliberate slowness mirrors the process of evaluating what remains after a crisis. Just as physical possessions are sorted through after a residential fire to determine what survived, personal records—such as a lifelong list of visited nations—are subjected to a rigorous audit. Permanence, it turns out, is negotiable, whether measured in geopolitical borders or domestic heirlooms.
As the vessel prepares to cast off from Louisiana toward the African coast, the exact numerical tally of nations may remain short of fifty, but the value of the journey itself remains uncounted.