How I Visited Every Country in the World: Jessica Nabongo on Setting Records

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you've been following Women Who Travel over the past two years, chances are you're familiar with Jessica Nabongo. The founder of boutique travel company Jet Black, Nabongo became the first black woman to visit every country in the world in 2019, and throughout her two-and-a-half year journey she's stopped by the studio (and called in from some very inconvenient time zones) to update us on her travels—the good, the challenging, and the downright exhausting.

But one thing we haven't been able to chat in-depth with her on is what it takes to become a country counter in the first place. In the second installment of our How I Became series, we sit down with Nabongo to find out what motivated her to take on the odyssey in the first place, how she navigated borders while grappling with issues like passport privilege and carbon emissions, and what she's learned from taking more flights in two years than most people take in a lifetime.

Thanks to Jessica for joining us this week. And thanks as always to Brett Fuchs for engineering and mixing. To keep up with our podcast each week, subscribe to Women Who Travel on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And, if you have a minute to spare, leave a review. We’d love to hear from you. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter to keep up to date with our live episodes, meetups, and trips, too.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. This is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Connie Nass Traveler. I'm Meredith Carey, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Lolly Aricoglu.
0:11.8	Hello. Just over a year ago, we sat down with Jessica Nabongo, who was some 44 countries shy of visiting every UN-recognized country in the world.
0:20.5	Since then, she's seen all
0:22.0	195 successfully becoming the first documented black women to visit every country in the world.
0:28.2	A lot of that episode was about the in the weeds details of packing for months at a time on
0:32.5	the road and visiting countries most Americans can't or won't visit. We'll link it in the show notes
0:37.3	and you should probably go back and give it a listen if you didn't hear it the first go round. Needless to say, she's back in the U.S., and this time we're talking to her for our new How I Became series about how she became a country counter. Welcome back, Jessica. Hello, I can't believe it. I'm back and I'm finished. It's absolutely so wild
0:56.6	that we've been talking to you and following this journey on women who travel and on our
1:00.3	former travelogue podcast for like three years now. It's absolutely insane to see you in the flesh
1:05.7	and done and so many stamps in your passport since the last time we saw you. Going back to the beginning,
1:11.5	before you even had announced this journey, when did you start keeping tally of the countries
1:17.5	you were going to, or like technically start the counting? So I actually think it was probably
1:25.0	around 2010 or 11. So I had been, I moved to Japan in 2008. I started to
1:32.9	Catch Me If You Can, my blog in 2009. And there's annual reviews that I used to do on my blog.
1:39.4	And at the end of each review, I would say how many countries I had been to. And I had like one of
1:43.8	those maps where I could
1:44.9	add them in like the where I've been maps. So probably around 2010 or so. And at what point did you
1:52.4	start tallying up those countries and think, all right, I've been to quite a few places and I guess I'll
1:58.2	keep going? Like when did you get the sort of first spark of the idea that you were like, okay, all right, I've been to so many of these. Now I want to get all of them. Yeah. So I think I kind of always wanted to go to every country in the world. There was an article that I wrote in 2014 where I mentioned it. I just always said I would do it by the time I was 40, so a much more relaxed pace, if you will, because it would have given me an extra five years versus what I just completed.
2:24.9	But in February 2017, while I was in Bali, Indonesia was my 60th country, and that's where I made the decision to finish by my 35th birthday.
2:36.0	And I missed that by like five months, but finished nonetheless.
2:40.0	Out of interest, what made you decide to, you know, rush it?
	...

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