Marcus Kane

Panama is the country that cut itself in half so the world's ships wouldn't have to sail around South America. The rest of the story is even better.

Palau has 340 islands, 21,000 people, and a jellyfish lake where the jellyfish forgot how to sting. It's also rewriting the rules on how a country protects its ocean.

Pakistan sits at the crossroads of three of the world's great civilizations, and the geography alone is hard to believe until you see the numbers.

Oman is the part of Arabia that doesn't try to dazzle you. It just shows up with old forts, blue water, and a quieter version of the modern Gulf.

Norway is longer than most people realize, richer than most countries can imagine, and stranger in its small habits than any travel brochure lets on.

A small Balkan country with one of Europe's oldest lakes, a wine tradition older than Rome, and a name it only settled on in 2019.

Niue is one of the smallest countries on Earth, and one of the strangest. A single raised coral island, a population smaller than my high school, and a sky so dark the whole nation is officially protected.

Nigeria has more people than any country in Africa, more languages than most continents, and a film industry that quietly outpaces Hollywood by output.

A country mostly made of desert, named for a river that only clips its southwest corner, with the youngest population on Earth and dinosaur graveyards under the dunes.

A country with sharks in a freshwater lake, an island built from two volcanoes, and a capital that quietly moved its downtown after an earthquake and never moved back.

A country where flightless birds replaced mammals, the prime minister has a sign-language counterpart, and the sheep outnumber the people six to one.

A country where a third of the land sits below sea level, more bikes than people roll past windmills, and dinner is at six sharp.