Bouvet Island

Map

April 6–7, 2015

The French navigator and explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier discovered Bouvet Island on January 1, 1739.

Today, this island (circled in red) is of major interest to crazy travelers (like me) who are hell-bent on visiting every single country in the world. The thing is, the Antarctic Treaty stipulates that no one can claim ownership of any land south of the 60th parallel south (the dotted line around Antarctica). But Bouvet Island was unabashedly claimed as a dependency by Norway.

Bouvet Island is included in the Russian National Classification of Countries of the World.

Bouvet Island has its own top-level domain, .bv.

The country calling code for Bouvet Island is +47.

The waters within 200 miles of Bouvet Island are the exclusive economic zone of Norway.

It’s extremely difficult to land on Bouvet Island in a Zodiac because of the big waves and lack of a quiet bay.

Most people (about 100 of them in the entire history of humanity) who have managed to step foot on Bouvet Island arrived here in a helicopter. One of them was the taxi driver in Arkhangelsk, who used to land here during his time as a polar worker.

Our ship circled the island for two days, hoping for the weather to clear up. Alas, the winds never died down. But we were still among some of the luckiest travelers: we got to see the island itself, and not just a solid wall of fog like most others do.

I returned to my workstation. The travelers’ opinions were divided. Some thought that having seen the island was enough to count as visiting it. Others said that until they set foot on rock, they hadn’t really been there. The president of the world’s largest travelers’ club convened an emergency meeting of its distinguished members (all of whom were on board, of course) and adopted a new rule whereby circling an uninhabited island by sea counts as a visit.