Pakistan, now here's a tough one. A large but little travelled country. We might have a rough idea of what the country looks like, e.g. the Himalayas in the north, the Indus river running through it, and we'll be able to name a few of the large cities like Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore, but from a tourist perspective the country remains a little bit of a mystery. You might be able to find the odd tourist going into the mountain area, but try to find a tour or trip report that properly covers the country, and you've got a hard task at hand.  So we've got a bit of a challenge here. Therefore let's start with the easy part, the cities: Fi...

As part of your traveller profile we give you a total traveller score. This number might seem somewhat arbitrary at first sight so it's worth explaining how we get to it. It's fairly straightforward. We've explained in the 'how it works' section that we've assigned each destination a score of either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, or 10. So world famous destinations like London, Taj Mahal, or Grand Canyon get a 10, while the lesser known minor highlights get a low score (click on the "i" when you select destinations to find out the scores). As you probably expected, adding up all the scores of the de...

Tunisia used to be a major holiday destination for Europeans looking to combine excellent beach destinations with culture and adventure. Unfortunately, due to the two terrorist attacks in Tunis and Sousse in the last few years, Tunisia has seen a large decline in tourist arrivals, which is a shame as Tunisia has a lot to offer for such a small country.  The complication with selecting the destinations for Tunisia is making sense of its beach destinations: The major beach resort towns are on Tunisia's east coast: around Hammamet, Sousse, and Monastir and a bunch of smaller towns in northern Tunisia, and on and around the island of Djerba further south. ...

What sets beenseenexplored.com apart from other 'Countries Visited Maps' is that we've added an extra layer by adding destinations. You can read up on the reasons why we did that in the 'How it Works' section. Of course, this begs the question how we decided which destinations to include. After all, if we were to make a mess of this, it would make the site pretty useless and leave you frustrated. So it's very important to get this as right as possible. First of all, it's important to get the balance right in terms of how many destinations to include for each country:...

Greece, one of Europe's main holiday destinations. Not the toughest to come to a selection of destinations, but there's one complication: the many islands. Which ones to pick and which to skip? This is our choice of destinations for Greece: Athens, of course, and also Greece's second-largest city Thessaloniki merits inclusion. Then there's the islands. Crete's a no-brainer, of course. Mykonos and Santorini are also highlights on many itiniraries and pretty much cover the Cyclades. Including the likes of Paphos and Naxos, also Cyclades highlights, might be too much and will rarely be done in isolation without visiting either Mykono...

The first of our posts in which we discuss our choice of destinations for each country is Spain, which actually was a really, really difficult one. The problem with Spain is two-fold: a lot of Spain's tourism is beach holiday tourism, which isn't a problem per se, but the complication is that it's not very concentrated, but spread out over it's long coastline and a bunch of islands. There's ten different 'Costas' after all, which unlike for example the Turkish Riviera, cannot be included under one name. Plus different nationalities tend to flock to different costas so it's easy to get biased here. There are obviously the few und...