Bonangst Cogagu Carbuta

I'm organizing my travel in trips, chunks of 2-10 weeks of travel in one region or around the world. To differentiate them I come up with original easy to remember names like: Togobinblah, Beguahosni, Romargeaz Soni, all earlier in 2026. For the fourth trip of this year, I had a bad name, Nomadmania 6-11 so last week I decided to change it to Bonangst Cogagu Carbuta. Easy, catchy, logical.

In red, the countries visited on this trip

This whole trip was determined by two events. Okay three. First was Ioan's wedding scheduled for

Two years of retirement. My new job. Not that bright anymore

I retired in May 2024. Earlier that January we decided that we will take a few years, maybe ten, to travel together to all the countries in the world. We started with two very long trips, full of energy and enthusiasm. A third round the world trip described before and a three months trip to Africa and Middle East. Then almost without pause a fourth trip around the world, a “brief” one, with Ioan and his future wife to Korea and China and then alone to Siberia, Mongolia, Belgium and Germany. It was then, on the shores of Lake Baikal that we decided to split our chores, I will travel to all the countries in the world and Ileana will stay home to take care of the important stuff…

Our Third Voyage Around The World

At some point last year Ileana asked why don’t we go to Samarkand. Very good question, why not? Let’s go. We looked it up, saw that we might need a few days, but if we go there we should also go to Khiva and Bukhara. It might take 10 days, best time to visit should be in the spring or fall. Slowly over several months that idea turned into a trip of three and a half months (104 days) around the world in which we visited 14 countries. Here is a brief summary of what we did. 

First some numbers:

• UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) - 36 (in the text below the number in parentheses identifies the running count).
• Tentative World Heritage Sites (TWHS) - at least 15
• Countries - 14: eight new for both of us, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Oman, Bhutan, the Netherlands was new for me, revisiting England, Turkey, UAE and Thailand, plus of course, Romania.
• Flights - 23, for 29300 miles (46900 km), and at least 75 hours.
• Road trips - give or take 9200 miles (14700 km), some of it on highways and some of it on really picturesque “roads”. 
• 20921 pictures to go through to select a few for you...

Our goal to visit UNESCO World Heritage sites played a major role in the planning of this trip. Ileana had seen a couple more than me and to make it easier to keep track, I asked her to take me to two of them: London’s Kew Garden (245) and Amsterdam’s 17th century Canal Ring Area (248). 

Kew Garden, up in the temperate house

Two Year Report on the Road to 500

Two years after deciding to keep track of the World Heritage Sites, here I am trying to catch up… I should have done regular updates but never got to it. The previous blogpost has been at the top of this site, promising new posts but looking abandoned. How am I supposed to fix this? I should never let this happen again… How to summarize the extraordinary places we’ve seen or the things we learned? 

Stranded on Lord Howe Island, a remote and barely accessible world heritage site in May 2023

The Road to 500

It is hard to tell when I first learned about UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Probably at some point before our trip around the world, and then, as we decided our destinations, it was a secondary factor in our decision making process. 

Our trip didn’t really have a theme. Probably the best way to describe what we wanted is to go back over and over to Maria’s first post. But at some point it turned out that our interests and UNESCO’s mission overlapped significantly. As we tried to discover various countries, learn about their most special features and visit famous and unique cultural and natural sites we invariably ended at one or another World Heritage Site.

For those of you who need a refresher, 50 years ago the General Conference of UNESCO adopted a “Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, a unique international treaty linking for the first time the concepts of nature conservation and preservation of cultural properties - recognizing the way people interact with nature, and the fundamental need to preserve the balance between the two.”

In 1978, Galapagos Islands  became the first of the first 12 sites inscribed on the World Heritage list. In 2012 there were 936 monuments and now, in 2022, there are 1154.

During our round the world trip we missed a couple sites in ways in which I cannot explain, like the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates  or the Old Historic Cairo. By far the hardest to explain miss was the Barcelona Music House, we were in line for the tickets and we still didn't know we had to get in, our sister bought tickets for herself and her family and the lady closed the ticket counter for lunch in front of us. But, nonetheless we visited 75 world heritage sites on our trip. They included the most amazing sites you all heard about and some just as good that you never knew that exist. And at some point in the following years it really made sense to start planning a trip from the UNESCO list. We did it first in Portugal in June 2015, and again in Japan when we returned in 2015 and so on.

Fast forward nine years later, I mentioned to Ileana Ruxandra that some time before our trip I saw a web site about some people who traveled to a lot of places, I had a very vague recollection and it was a pity that I lost track of the whole story. One day I decided to search for it and after a few hours I found what I was looking for and discovered that it evolved into a much larger group, a great website and a fantastic phone application: most traveled people (MTP: The Extreme Travel Club https://mtp.travel )! The MTP Apps: iPhone and iPad and Google

“MTP challenges its members to expand their horizons, by dividing the land area of Earth into 1013 distinct regions, including countries, states, territories, islands and enclaves. We also track … all UNESCO World Heritage Sites. For many, adding to their MTP totals and turning their personal map from red to green is their life’s work. No one in history has ever completed the list!” They have an annual meeting and vote on what is an MTP place. More importantly they also keep track of all the world heritage sites and sub-sites in a much easier way than even UNESCO or Wikipedia. Registering and checking boxes, I got to a little over 150 but digging deeper I learned that we didn't quite reach the formal boundaries so we had to eliminate Mapungubwe or Ambohimanga. Some sites are represented by one building and some have multiple subsites distributed over a large area or even across countries or continents. It is a dynamic list, a couple of sites had to be delisted as they were destroyed, but the list is slowly expanding through a very elaborate system. Countries sign up to the UNESCO charter, propose sites on World Heritage Tentative Lists and after they meet some of the criteria and the local government does a lot of protection work, would be voted for and listed. We could visit a place that is interesting or famous and many years later learn that it has become a World Heritage Site. So this is how I got to see my 149th site, we visited Madrid in 1990 and again in 2020, but it was only last week that I learned that in 2021 UNESCO listed Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro! 

Anyway, it is not about lists and counts, but this is a really big world and the more we see the more we realize how much we haven't seen or learned about. It can be quite depressing to really understand the enormity of it all and how little we can actually do, see or learn. It is also liberating to accept that we cannot do it all, that each and every trip, site, day or even moment is valuable in itself and we don't have to worry about the whole of it.

But it is both fascinating and pragmatic to use the whole knowledge of the world and the consensus of a bunch of experts to get some direction of what is really special and worth visiting on this planet. This happens to be the stuff we really care about (and museums!), not some fancy hotel, bar or restaurant, not some private island or a fun filled cruise or an amusement park. 

I was looking again and again at "the list". There are 1000 more and we'll never see them all, and some might not even be worth seeing, but we can die trying. At this pace it would take many lifetimes, but can we aim for about 500? That could be realistic if we are really determined and organized and aim to see 10-15 a year over the next 30 years!

Not surprisingly, Ileana Ruxandra is just as interested as me in this topic. She went further to discover the World Heritage Site for World Heritage Travellers at https://www.worldheritagesite.org started by a lady in Netherlands who dedicates her life to visiting all the sites and offering a platform for advice to fellow travelers. Together with MTP we now have all we need.

So starting in May 2022 the "race" is on!  Follow me at https://mtp.travel/users/47765 We'll update here as we can the next 351 world heritage sites that we visit and if it happens, the ones we revisit or complete (some of these listing have multiple sites and they could all be meaningful).

Ready?

10 Years Later

Ten years ago we left on our trip around the world. One week ago, our oldest daughter got married. The two events are somehow similar as they each capped a very intense two and a half year period of preparation, multiple questions, tremendous growth and some stress.  And similarly the major event is just the beginning of an extraordinary journey. For Maria and Derek it will be a whole life. For us, 10 year ago, it was for a short, defined time of fifteen months or less “however long we enjoy ourselves.” 

Every day, once or several times, we remember something from our trip, we refer to it somehow, we think of a place or a person or some lesson we learned. Without question it is the one unique, fantastic thing that we did and we still have not met anyone else who did something similar.  Our children, now adults, might not know exactly how this trip shaped their life and cannot compare with what would have been without it but can certainly give it some credit for what and where they are in their young adult life.

We still traveled, not as much and certainly not since the beginning of the pandemic. Still we can appreciate from our home how the world has changed in the past 10 years. We enjoy staying put and we long to travel and this contradiction is fine with us because we have this trip to remember. 

We never wrote a book and never made a film. We never watched the whole footage that we took, only bits and pieces. At times we reread some of our blogposts to refresh some details, sometimes we have to search for the exact name of a place. There are probably some pictures that we’ve not seen yet, so this anniversary is a good time to look back and go through some of those memories all over again.

Check for the 10th Anniversary Photos on https://noi6.myportfolio.com 

Back from where we started

Really?

I doubt that!

We’ve been home for quite some time now. But you already know that.

The doors of the airport open and we stumble with our too many bags (our stay in Romania tripled or quadrupled our belongings). The first thing that I see is a big panel on which is written “Bun Venit” (Welcome in Romanian). My heart skips a beat as my adoptive country greets me with my own language. And then I notice the other ones: Malaysian, Russian, German… hey, we’ve been there too.

We take turns driving the rented car: instinctively the foot is searching for an inexistent

Which Was Your Favorite Country?

It is sad to hear about what's happening now in Egypt. I take no pleasure in reminding you that I predicted in my blog that it will be a long and tortuous road toward a decent society. Give credit to the people in power anywhere - they make reality much worse than the worst nightmare. We are so lucky to have made it there last November and so glad that we didn't listen to our doubts and outside advice and traveled there. Of all the countries that we visited it was the only one that we all liked in equal measure. We all rated it with an 8 out 10. Read on and you'd realize why this is as close to perfection as possible.

A graphic representation of our scoring results from February 2013

Numbers and Money

My favorite saying is "a statistician drowned in a river with the average depth of 2 cm." Many people don't get it, but I use this in different situations, asking somebody to look at things from a different angle, or just not to take numbers or statistics too seriously. Anyhow, for reference, here are some numbers.

We visited 33 countries. One might argue rightly that I artificially inflated the number by including Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau, who some might consider part of China; Lesotho, which we visited on a day trip; France, where we spent a night in a motel across the Swiss border; Vatican, a tiny republic inside Rome; Saudi Arabia, where we only stayed 10 hours in the airport and it even includes Romania and United States (our home bases). I added all these places because they have different histories, cultures, currencies and/or borders and passport stamps. Even briefly, each experience was a special lesson for us. I think that the country model is way overrated, but unfortunately this is what we have in today's world.

North Camp of Mount Everest. China or Tibet?

We Did It

We did it or we made it. However you want to put it we went around the world and we are back home in five whole pieces. We left Bucharest on Sunday afternoon, in the end of January. A short flight to Vienna, a change of planes to Berlin. A little adventure, I booked a hotel at the wrong airport, I realized at the last moment thanks to Ina. Overnight in Berlin, a short encounter with our friend in the hallway of the airport and we got on our last flight. At JFK we got a car and drove a couple of hours toward our house. We left the children to spend the night with a friend in New Jersey and we spend the last night in a hotel. Tuesday morning we drove a few more hours, stopped at Sam's club and Aldi for groceries. We spent $500 on supplies, for the first time in ages we didn't have to calculate how much we needed to buy, we just got everything that we could think of to resupply our pantry and fill our fridge. In the afternoon, we did the last few miles toward our house. It was epic. Unplanned, Louis Armstrong started to sing on the car stereo "What a Wonderful World". We did the last few miles singing and naming all the landmarks that we've learned so well on our way home. When we entered the house there was a lot of screaming and jumping. It took a few minutes of going through the house to recognize our home. In the evening friends joined us for pizza and champagne. It was epic. We did it, or we made it, however you want to put it, we went around the world!

At the airport in Berlin, AirBerlin carousel 

5 Things That Make Egypt the Most Interesting Country Yet

I might say that Egypt is my favorite country so far as well, but that might be a bit of exaggeration and a lot of relief from the fact that we're going home soon… so I'll just use the adjective 'interesting,' and go from there.

Interesting can mean a lot of things. It can mean interesting as in "lots to learn about it." It can mean "slightly negative situations you're being polite about." It can mean interesting as in, "haven't seen this before."

So, without further ado, here's my list.

A History of Greece Through Our Travels

People come to Greece to see the Acropolis and dip in the sea, to eat gyros and yogurt. Or to learn some real history. It is the birthplace of the Western civilization, the beginning of art as we know it and the first experiment in democracy. During our four weeks here we learnt a lot. We visited a lot of places as they came our way, but it makes more sense to put them in historical perspective. I am sure it will help us to remember, but I also hope that you will learn something new.

Our itinerary in Greece

Summer Camp

So it's about time I confront the keyboard and my rapidly deteriorating ability to type and write a blog post. I figure summer camp is as good a thing to write about as any. Except for the fact that it will be heavily censored, as this took place at a church camp, and further censored as this is a family blog and swearing is not included, and censored even further because the participants will probably end up reading it. Maybe.

Friday, Aug 17: Fly to UAE, bid parents adieu, fly to JFK, reach Saturday somewhere over the ocean.

Saturday, Aug 18: Keep flying, fly to Pittsburg, wait around to be picked up by someone, we do not know who.

Colors

On the last day of the contest Capture the Color we found out that we were nominalized so we didn't lose any second. Here they are:

Blue

Lesotho is the third poorest country in the world. This bar was on top of a hill and had a few customers. I liked that I could interpret the written signs as "Be prepared, you are going to be disarmed by two sisters!"

Green

Tsiribihina River, Madagascar. Planting rice.

Red

Kyoto, Japan Preparedness, Japanese style

White

Taj Mahal, India 

We went to visit first thing in the morning and a heavy fog was all around us.  This man was sweeping the leaves that fell in the night time.

Yellow

Antsirabe, Madagascar

Water is scarce in Madagascar and is usually brought from the river or the water pump in yellow jugs. The boy was collecting them and caught a ride on his wheeled platform.

Welcome Home

Africa can be summed up in two words:

Welcome home.

You Should Visit Kruger While You're Young

When I say 'young,' I'm assuming the following things:

- You have the ability to sit in a car for an entire day, with set rest stops where you can get out and stretch your legs. (Assume three hours, max, between rest stops)

You may want to cry when you see the car in the morning.

Problems in Madagascar

When we tell people we're going to Madagascar (or, later, have been to Madagascar), their first reaction is "Whoa! That's so awesome!"

And it is awesome. But beyond that, it's really hard to go to Madagascar. Don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful country. There are amazing animals— lemurs, for example, are only found in Madagascar, and there are x73 species. And chameleons are everywhere. Not to mention snakes, spiders (there is a spider here that is huge, completely non-poisonous, and whose silk is used for making Kevlar vests), and a variety of flowers and butterflies.

As well as lemurs. Everywhere.

The 200 Day Mark

We've been on the road for two hundred days! Since last time I wrote a collection of anecdotes, I think it's a great idea to write another. Excuse the lateness; I've been bad at keeping up with blog posts, as you may have noticed.

Let's recapitulate where we've been since Hong Kong.

 We've been in:

Macao

Cambodia

Thailand

New Zealand

Hawaii

Australia (though I won't write anything about here in this post)

The trouble is that

A Whiz Through Malaysia

Please get ready to hop into a vehicle that will whiz you through most everything we did in Malaysia at record speed. Please keep hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and make sure to close your eyes if you start getting dizzy.

…  ready?

Singapore and Writers

In August 2011, I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo. Like November, the goal is to write 50,000 words of novel in a month. The idea had come all of a sudden, and I couldn't wait to write it. About midway through, I found another writer whose story looked interesting. I PMed her to tell her so, and as we were talking, I think I whined a bit about my word count (always an important consideration, though in 8 events I've never lost once).

"Oh, there's a writing group I help run. It's on TinyChat, if you want to join in."