The Greatest Journey of All Time

I don't think I'm promising too much when I say that this is the greatest journey of all time, and probably always will be: Weltreisebär is at sea nonstop from the end of February to the end of June. This is possible thanks to Marisa from Freiberg, who works on a cruise ship. That's why she's on board as part of the crew for several consecutive voyages. The journey starts in Chile and ends in Japan. What lies in between? – you'll find out in the following lines!

On the outbound flight, there was a stopover in Istanbul before Marisa finally reached Chile. If you were to count up all the countries on this trip, you'd actually get to 19 – but of course, the really interesting ones are those the bear hasn't visited yet.

Chile doesn't count among those, since the bear has already been there twice – once with Klaus and once with the Moser family, currently the two "most successful" fellow travellers of Weltreisebär.

Still, the journey kicks off with a truly wonderful photo: you might know Easter Island with its unique statues. Now picture for a moment what it would look like with Weltreisebär sitting right in front of them. Eyes closed? Got the image in your head?

Curtain up! -> here's the first photo of the trip. Personally, I think it looks exactly as I imagined it!

In early March, there follow a few stops on islands belonging to the United Kingdom or France. These are also two countries the bear visited long ago. But since Marisa is very ambitious, there's still a photo from almost every stop the cruise ship made.

19 March – finally, the first new country … called … New-see-land! More precisely, the Cook Islands are where the bear sets foot on land. This island group is in a kind of free association with New Zealand (I don't fully understand the exact status myself), but it doesn't count as an independent state, and therefore counts as New Zealand for me. It's the 110th country and the first country on the Australian continent that Weltreisebär has visited.

A few days later, things get unpleasant. Marisa comes down with the flu, and quite badly at that. Things look grim for a shore excursion. So what to do? A pragmatic solution: photographer Lionel takes the bear ashore and shows him Samoa – in the photo you can see the "Papapapaitai Waterfall". A funny name, if you ask me. Problem solved, and a few days later Marisa gradually starts to recover.

The next stop is "Wallis and Futuna" – two small islands that also belong to France. This time there's no shore excursion, but that's forgivable.

"Why doesn't 'lying at anchor' count as a country visit for Weltreisebär, but 'being at the airport' does?" Marisa asks me. Here's the answer: when I started this little project almost 10 years ago, I had to set some "rules". I decided that all countries whose territory Weltreisebär has actually set foot on count as "visited". That means he must have been on a piece of land belonging to that particular state. So if the bear travels through Bosnia by train, he's been there. Because at that moment, he is physically in Bosnia. If he's at Riyadh airport, then at that moment he's in Saudi Arabia. Many people say an airport is "no man's land". But that's not true. Otherwise, there would have to be a national border drawn around the airport on the map – but there isn't. There are only two true "no man's lands" on Earth: Greenland and Antarctica. And both of those are shown in white on the world map.

This principle of "being on state territory" doesn't apply to seas and oceans, though. Seas don't count as national territory (lakes, on the other hand, do! – except the Caspian Sea). If you follow this logic to its conclusion, you're technically not in Germany either when standing right at the very end of the Heringsdorf pier.

Enough theory!

In the following weeks comes a true downpour of countries. Fiji and Vanuatu are the first. In Fiji, the bear has already made new friends and was nearly adopted. But hold on! His round-the-world trip isn't over yet!

Already on his first visit to Fiji (Taveuni Island), the bear even travelled a bit through time: he was standing right on the International Date Line.

Next up is New Caledonia, which belongs to France:

Next are the Solomon Islands. There was a bit of luck involved here, since warnings had been issued for storms and flooding – something that even showed up on Google Maps when I searched for the Solomon Islands.

Fiji and Vanuatu were visited once more, as there were several stops scheduled in these countries. In general, most Oceanic island nations consist of multiple islands, some of which lie several thousand kilometres apart.

By the way, Fiji is the fourth-largest country on the Australian continent after Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and takes on something of a leading role among the island nations. Most of the smaller islands are, quite literally, at risk of disappearing due to rising sea levels. One example is Tuvalu, whose highest (!) "mountain" is a mere 5m above sea level.

This problem also exists in the next country, Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribass"). This country has already reached an agreement with Fiji to relocate its population there in the future. In Kiribati, incidentally, you can observe a phenomenon also found in other South Pacific island nations: the name of the capital has changed. As a young boy, I still read "Bairiki" in the encyclopaedia, but today it's called "South Tarawa". What happened? At some point, Kiribati simply named the entire island* "capital", rather than just a part of it. *Or even a cluster of several islands: some were artificially connected via causeways, which isn't entirely without consequences. This changes ocean currents. Among other things, this even led to another island called Bikeman being washed away.

Another such example is the Marshall Islands, whose capital is no longer called Dalap-Uliga-Darrit but has been shortened to "Majuro". Both names refer to the same place, though.

Things got exciting in Micronesia. As the name suggests, the country really isn't large, but its islands are spread across several thousand kilometres. This is also where my favourite photo of the trip was taken, after the bear was briefly handled a bit roughly, since the children were fighting over him.

The Oceania leg of the journey concluded with a shore excursion in Palau:

But for Marisa, there was still another month to go. So the bear travelled with her to, among other places, Taiwan, and climbed Taipei 101 – once the tallest building in the world – for the second time in his life.

Some lovely photos were also taken on the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Oki, and at the end of May came country number 120 – South Korea. The photo was taken in the well-known port city of Busan.

With that, this journey comes to an end, and shortly after his return to Germany, the bear celebrates his 10th birthday. You can read the anniversary post about it here: https://www.xn--weltreisebr-u8a.de/?p=437 (online from 30 June 2026)

Once again, a huge thank you to Marisa, who set a new record with 11 countries visited! Any time!

What you get as a reward for 10 countries or more – you'll also find out in the anniversary blog post!