Marcus Kane

I used to picture Bangladesh as a single crowded place on a map. Then I learned the whole country is basically one giant river mouth, stitched together by something like 700 rivers and a stubborn people.

I always thought of Bahrain as a financial hub with skyscrapers. Turns out it's also one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, sitting quietly on top of a freshwater spring in the middle of a salt sea.

Most people picture one beach. The Bahamas is actually 700 islands, and only about thirty of them have anybody living on them.

A country where the ground literally burns, the mud erupts, and the rocks have been telling the same stories for 40,000 years.

Austria gave the world Mozart, the snow globe, and the modern postcard. It also has more cows than people in some valleys, and a capital that runs on coffee.

Australia is the only country that's also an entire continent. That's just the beginning of what makes it strange and worth knowing.

Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion. The year was 301 AD, and the alphabet hadn't even been invented yet.

Argentina was named for silver. The Spanish thought the rivers were full of it. They were wrong, and the name stuck anyway.

Antigua and Barbuda is a country of two islands, a Georgian naval dockyard, and a tourism claim of 365 beaches that may actually be conservative.

Angola is bigger than Texas and France combined, sits on some of Africa's largest oil reserves, and quietly hosts an antelope nobody else has.

Andorra is run jointly by the President of France and a Spanish Catholic bishop. That arrangement is over seven hundred years old and still works.

Algeria covers nearly nine-tenths of itself in desert and still hides one of the world's largest open-air galleries of prehistoric rock art.