About My Travel Map
What it is
My Travel Map is a tool for colouring in the countries you've visited on a world map. Click a country and it fills with colour; zoom in and first-level administrative regions such as states, provinces and prefectures appear, so you can colour them one by one. The panel on the right shows how many countries you've been to and how far along you are on each continent. A second mode lets you mark places you want to go in blue.
How to use it
- Click a country on the map to fill it with the strong colour. Click again to remove it.
- Zoom in 3x or more and region borders and names appear. Click a region to colour just that region; the country then turns the lighter "partly visited" colour.
- The switch at the top toggles between "Been there" and "Want to go". In "Want to go" mode your clicks turn countries and regions blue. A place you've already visited never turns blue.
- Zoom in and the names of popular destinations (Seoul, Kyoto, Bangkok, Paris, Santorini and so on) appear with a small dot. They are a guide for finding your way, not something you colour, and the more you zoom the more lesser-known places show up.
- Type a country, region or place in the search box at the top left and choose a result; the map moves there and marks it. Choosing a city colours the region it belongs to (or the country, if the country has no regions). Press
/ to focus the search box.
- The panel shows your visited-country count (out of 195), progress by continent, and a list of records by country. For each region you can add a year and a note, and clicking a name moves the map there. On a phone, open the panel with the menu button at the top right.
- Once at least two regions have a year, the route button joins them in year order with a dashed line and numbers.
- The map button switches on a detailed base map with roads and terrain. It uses the Web Mercator projection, so the world looks more stretched.
- Every change can be undone from the "Undo" button that appears at the bottom of the screen.
- "Save as image" downloads the current map as a PNG; "Copy link" copies an address carrying your countries, regions and wishes. Opening that address shows a view-only map, and "Merge into my map" adds it to your own. Backup download and restore let you move between devices.
Data and method
Country borders and first-level administrative regions come from Natural Earth (public domain data), simplified for the web. Cities come from GeoNames: about 34,000 places with a population of 15,000 or more, used only for search, each assigned to its administrative region from its coordinates in advance. The roughly 1,250 destination names shown on the map were picked by hand and sorted into three tiers; small tourist towns under 15,000 people, such as Hallstatt, Zermatt and Ubud, were added with coordinates. The country count is based on the 193 UN member states plus the Vatican and Palestine, 195 in all. Other territories you colour in are counted separately as "other territories".
Limits and notes
- If you don't sign in, your records are kept only in this browser (localStorage) and are not sent to a server. In that case clearing browser data or opening the map on another device will not show them; use a backup file or a link to move them.
- "Sign in with Google" at the top of the right panel uses the shared ghmun.com account. When you sign in, your coloured countries and regions, wishes, and years and notes are saved to your account and follow you to other devices; records already in this browser are merged with those in your account. Only your own records are saved, and only you can read or change them. Signing out clears this browser's records, and your account keeps them.
- Share links carry countries, regions and wishes only, not years or notes.
- Disputed borders follow Natural Earth and do not express any position.
- Countries whose first-level regions are very fine, such as the UK (232 local authorities), were merged into broader regions better suited to travel: 16 in the UK, and similar merges for Slovenia, Latvia, Uganda, North Macedonia, Azerbaijan and Malta, with Philippine cities folded into their province.
- Coastlines are simplified to keep the data small, so small islands can differ slightly from reality and very small regions may have no shape. Island destinations such as Santorini are attached to the nearest region. Very small countries such as the Vatican or Monaco, which are invisible on the map, appear as a small circle if you add them by search.
- Countries with no first-level regions can only be coloured as a whole.
- The destination names are my own list, so some places may be missing.