Tours

Countries are learned as clockwise tours, not alphabetical lists. A tour is an ordered ring of countries you trace with a finger, always in the same direction, always from the same start. The order is the point: it is what turns 195 isolated facts into a small number of paths you can walk.

This document is a proposal for review. Nothing downstream depends on it yet. Argue with the groupings and the orders now — changing them here is free, changing them after 149 profile cards exist is not.

The three rules

1. Every tour circles something. A loop around nothing is arbitrary and will not stick. Each tour below names its anchor — the sea, desert, mountain range or gulf at the centre. "Clockwise around the Baltic" is a memory; "the eight Nordic and Baltic countries" is a list.

2. Twelve is the cap. Not a chunking rule of thumb — the era spine is already 12 eras x 12 slots, so a tour of 12 or fewer is a clock face. Croatia at 1, Bosnia at 2. One 12-slot device then serves both strands and you learn it once.

3. Rim first, then core. Landlocked interior countries cannot be on the ring. Trace the rim clockwise, then fill the middle. Tours using this pattern are marked rim+core below, and their countries are split into Rim and Core lists. It is a feature: "which are the inside ones?" is itself a good card.

Coverage

197 = the standard 195 (193 UN members + Vatican and Palestine) plus Kosovo and Taiwan, both of which have to appear somewhere because their neighbours make no sense without them.

Tour sizes run 4 to 13, averaging 8.2. Transcontinental states sit in the tour whose shape they belong to, not the one the UN files them under: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan tour with Eastern Europe; Cyprus tours with the Levant.

Europe

1. Nordic & Baltic — 8

Anchor: the Baltic Sea, entered from the Atlantic.

Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark

Out in the Atlantic, over the top of Scandinavia, down the eastern shore, and back west to close at the Danish straits. Germany and Poland hold the southern shore but tour elsewhere — treat them as landmarks you pass, not stops.

2. British Isles & the Low Countries — 6

Anchor: the North Sea and the Channel.

Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France

A tight ring, and the one tour where the whole loop fits in a single glance.

3. Iberia & the Western Mediterranean — 8

Anchor: the western Mediterranean basin.

Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, Malta

Up the Atlantic face, along the Pyrenees, round the Riviera, down the Italian boot, out to Malta. Carries four of Europe's five microstates in a row, which is convenient: they are hard to place individually and easy to place as a sequence.

4. Alpine & Central — 9

Anchor: the Alps and the Bohemian massif.

Germany, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland

The good link here is Austria to Liechtenstein: Austria is long and east-west, so the tour rides its whole length westward to arrive at the microstate. Germany borders nine countries and could justify a place in three tours — it is a member here and a landmark elsewhere.

5. The Balkans — 10 — rim+core

Anchor: the Balkan peninsula, between the Adriatic and the Black Sea.

Rim: Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia

Core: Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia

Note the direction: the rim runs up the Adriatic coast, not down it. Going south along a western shore is counter-clockwise. This is the tour most likely to be traced backwards, so it is worth deliberately fixing the start at Romania.

6. Eastern Europe & the Caucasus — 7

Anchor: the Black Sea, with the Caucasus as a southern spur.

Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova

The three Caucasus states form a knot rather than an arc — Georgia and Azerbaijan on the Black and Caspian coasts, Armenia landlocked between them.

Asia

7. Anatolia & the Levant — 7

Anchor: the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus

Across Anatolia, down the inland side, back up the coast, out to Cyprus.

8. Arabia & the Gulf — 9 — rim+core

Anchor: the Arabian Peninsula.

Rim: Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen

Core: Saudi Arabia

Down the Gulf's far shore, along the small Gulf states in the order they sit, round the Arabian Sea to Yemen. Saudi Arabia is the core the ring encloses, which is also the truest picture of it.

9. Central Asia — 6 — rim+core

Anchor: the steppe, ringed by the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush.

Rim: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan

Core: Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan is doubly landlocked — one of only two countries on earth that is (Liechtenstein is the other). Sitting it in the core is not a filing convenience; it is the fact.

10. South Asia — 7 — rim+core

Anchor: the Indian subcontinent.

Rim: Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives

Core: India

11. East Asia — 6 — rim+core

Anchor: China and its seaboard.

Rim: Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan

Core: China

12. Southeast Asia — 11 — two loops

Anchor: the Indochinese peninsula, then the archipelago.

Mainland: Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand

Islands: Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Philippines, Indonesia, Timor-Leste

Mainland ring first, then the islands west to east. The only tour that is honestly two paths, because the sea between them is a real break.

Africa

13. The Sahara & the Sahel — 11

Anchor: the Sahara itself.

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania

The best loop on the list. East along the Mediterranean, south down the Nile, then west along the whole southern edge of the desert and up to the Atlantic at Mauritania. A complete circuit of the largest hot desert on earth, and it makes the Maghreb-and-Sahel split feel like one fact instead of two.

14. West Africa — 12

Anchor: the Gulf of Guinea.

Cape Verde, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria

A pure coastal sweep round the bulge. Twelve countries in strict order along one shoreline is close to an ideal tour — no interior, no ambiguity, no backtracking. Gambia sits inside Senegal, which is the one thing to watch.

15. Central Africa — 8

Anchor: the Congo basin.

Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe

Round the basin and back up the Atlantic coast. The two Congos land adjacent in the order, which is the right place to learn the difference between them.

16. East Africa & the Horn — 10 — rim+core

Anchor: the Great Rift and the Horn.

Rim: South Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda

Core: Ethiopia

Ethiopia as the core is not a leftover — the highlands really are the thing the rest wraps around.

17. Southern Africa — 9 — rim+core

Anchor: the southern African plateau.

Rim: Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Eswatini, Lesotho, South Africa, Namibia

Core: Botswana, Zimbabwe

Lesotho is enclosed entirely by South Africa and Eswatini almost so, so the rim briefly runs inside another country. Worth knowing rather than smoothing over.

18. Indian Ocean Islands — 4

Anchor: the Mozambique Channel and beyond.

Madagascar, Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius

The smallest tour. Kept separate rather than folded into Southern Africa because four islands attached to a nine-country land loop would simply fall off it.

The Americas

19. North & Central America — 10

Anchor: the continental spine, then the isthmus.

Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala

The isthmus is traced as a genuine loop: down the Caribbean side, round Panama, back up the Pacific side. This teaches which ocean each country touches, which is the fact people actually lack — El Salvador is Pacific-only, Belize Caribbean-only.

20. The Caribbean — 13

Anchor: the Caribbean Sea.

Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago

The largest tour, and the one that most needs its order, because the Lesser Antilles are otherwise an undifferentiated scatter of small islands. The arc itself is the mnemonic: the chain genuinely curves clockwise from the Bahamas round to Trinidad off the Venezuelan coast.

21. South America — 12 — rim+core

Anchor: the continent, with the Andes down its western edge.

Rim: Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador

Core: Bolivia, Paraguay

Textbook. A full coastal circuit with exactly two landlocked countries left in the middle — and their landlockedness is one of the more consequential facts in South American history.

Oceania

22. Australasia & Melanesia — 6

Anchor: the Coral and Tasman Seas.

Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Zealand

23. Micronesia & Polynesia — 8 — not a tour

Anchor: none. This is open ocean.

Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Tonga

The honest exception. These are scattered across a third of the planet's surface with no ring to trace and no coastline to follow, and pretending otherwise would teach a shape that is not there. Listed west to east, which at least makes the order mean something — it is a crossing, not a circuit. This group needs a different device: a journey with eight stops, or association through the Micronesia/Polynesia split, rather than a path traced on a map.

What this implies for the maps

Every card in a tour is framed on one shared window, and each section opens with that same window at full size, members tinted and every stop numbered along the ring. The card map is a crop of the section map, so the highlight moves around a frame you already recognise instead of a frame that shifts under you. That is the point of grouping into tours at all: a per-country window teaches shape but not place.

It costs something. A shared window cannot show a microstate — the Vatican is a fifth of a pixel across a frame running Portugal to Malta. So a country too small to find gets a locator ring, and one too small to have a shape gets a second, closer map beneath. Both are decided by measuring the rendered size, not from a list of small countries, because the same country needs a zoom on a wide tour and does not on a tight one.

On the section maps the rim is numbered and the core is lettered. Two stops labelled "1" on one map is worse than no label at all, and a letter says at a glance that the stop is not on the clock face.

What this implies for the data

Tour membership and tour position become facets on each country profile, replacing the current flat region. Position is worth drilling in its own right:

• "What is at 4 o'clock in the Balkans?"
• "What follows Croatia?" and "what precedes it?"
• "Which countries are in the core of the Arabian tour?"

These are the cards that build a map rather than a list, and none of them exist under alphabetical grouping. The forward and reverse neighbour questions are especially cheap to generate and unusually effective, because a ring is exactly the structure where knowing both directions means you actually hold the shape.

Where this stands

Adopted. The flat regions are gone and akasha/tours.py is the single source of truth: a profile declares no tour of its own, so membership is a lookup and the two cannot drift. akasha lint checks the tables, and a test asserts this document lists exactly the same countries in exactly the same order — if they ever disagree, one of them is lying to you.

Written so far: tours 1-10 complete — Europe, the Levant, Arabia and the Gulf, Central Asia and South Asia. 77 countries, and about a third of the world's population is now on a written tour. The remaining 120 are content, not machinery.

The regions themselves are now an index of their own, at Regions — one world frame with all twenty-three numbered, a card for each, and a map you can fly. Tap a number and it zooms to that region and draws its ring stop by stop; Play the world walks every continent and every region in turn. That list is worth learning before any of its countries are written, and is in fact how you would learn them.

Tour 11, East Asia, is the natural next one: five on the rim and China in the core — and it completes the run of Asian tours that began at the Bosphorus.