World Heritage Site

When I wrote about the TWHS Masters three weeks ago, I was surprised to find that people who visited all or almost all countries were missing out on also having visited (T)WHS in those countries. A drop of 30-40 is not uncommon. I decided to have a closer look at which countries are the hardest to visit a WHS in, and why the WHS in those countries may have stayed unvisited.

None of the WHS visited

At the moment, 168 states have at least one WHS. The best scorer (Shihe Huang) among the community members has visited WHS in 154 countries. So he misses 14, and the others at the top of the rankings even lack up to 35 countries. 

So which countries do they miss? Looking at the Top 16 members displayed in the rankings, together they have 94 different countries where they are missing a visit. The 10 Most Difficult are:

A few other countries just outside the Top 10 are notable as well, as they have more than 3 WHS to choose from but are rarely covered: Burkina Faso (4), Cote d’Ivoire (5), DRC (5), and Tajikistan (4). You can find the full list here.

General factors that come into play

Not visited the country at all

Obviously, if you haven’t visited a country, you won’t have visited any WHS in it either. This isn’t a big factor among this group of well-travelled members though: 6 of the 16 have visited all 193 countries and 7 others have 138+ (mostly in the 150s). For the remaining 3 I couldn’t find any public sources for their UN count.

Open or closed to tourists, dangerous or not, difficult and expensive visas: the people at the top of these rankings have travelled for so many years that such complicating factors have little impact. Only 4 miss out on Yemen for example.

Only WHS in their country

30 countries have only one WHS, and all of them (except for the city-state WHS Luxembourg and San Marino) figure on the ‘Most Difficult’ longlist of 94. Some people are even stumbling on the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Santo Domingo or Bridgetown. Six of the ten most difficult countries have only one WHS. So 'having only one WHS' seems to be a major defining factor.

The Inheritance Effect

There’s an administrative factor as well: if you have ticked one component of a serial transnational or transboundary site, you will “automatically” get a tick for the other countries involved, even when you may have never set foot there. So if you have visited Sangha in C.A.R., you will also get Cameroon and the Republic of Congo! Moldova is also a notorious example, as a visit to any Struve site will give you a Moldova tick as well. Unfortunately, due to the way we register visits on this website, I cannot differentiate between them. 

But I don’t think this is a major factor: most transnational and transboundary sites are located in countries that are well-covered anyway (Europe, North America). Only Qhapaq Nan will get you a big bonus (6 countries), and if you have made it in time to the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex it will give you 3 fairly difficult countries in return (Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso).

Country specific factors

When we zoom in on the individual countries, the following observations can be made:

Single and remote, costly, specialist WHS

Remote island WHS are always hard, as they are costly and also require a specific interest in marine activities.

• Marshall Islands: people often 'tick' the country via the Island Hopper Flights that will land you on Majuro Atoll. But its only WHS is Bikini Atoll, 3 days further away by a chartered ship. Only 2 people from the whole community claim to have visited it.
• Kiribati has a similar pattern: its Phoenix Islands require a private or chartered vessel. 3 people within the whole community have visited; all are part of the Top 16.
• And Solomon Islands to a lesser extent as well: its main airport at Honiara is better connected to the outside world, but East Rennell requires an onward domestic flight that goes twice a week and then "a car ride more expensive than the flight". 3 members have visited, 2 of them are within the Top 16 of this survey.

Odd, single WHS 

Although a country’s first WHS often is its major tourist site or a place in or near the capital, a few countries have made odd choices:

• The low ranking of Angola I think is due to three factors: it was a hard country to visit because of visas etc for a long time, its only WHS Mbanza Kongo is quite out of the way, ánd Mbanza Kongo is a relatively recently added WHS so it usually takes a while for visitors to catch up. 
• There are several valid reasons to visit Papua New Guinea, but Kuk? It lies close to Mt. Hagen though, so it is accessible, but most people wouldn’t bother as it seems so unappealing. 
• Guinea has only one WHS, Mount Nimba, far from the capital and without a tourist infrastructure. It even is a transboundary WHS, shared with Cote d’Ivoire, but few people will have visited that side either.

Not wanting to pay up for Central Africa

The following Central African countries all have more than one WHS, but still are in the top 10 least visited countries. You can’t get away with covering capital cities only here.

• Chad: two good WHS, but they take time, money and stamina to reach. Maybe the heat, the wild camping and the need for an agency also deters people.
• Cameroon: easy country but its two WHS both require (expensive) specialist agencies to get into and are not so popular that sharing is an option.
• Central African Republic: realistically only one of its two WHS is reachable, but again: time, money and stamina are needed.
• Republic of Congo: both its fine WHS are accessible on specialist tours.

My conclusion is that the main factors why some countries aren't covered well are: (a) having only 1 WHS, plus (b) the cost versus perceived benefits of reaching that WHS if it lies out of the way. People who don't like marine sites aren't going to pay for a 10k+ EUR chartered voyage to a remote island, and neither do people who dislike the desert go all the way in Chad.