As summer rolls around here on this side of the planet, CBC News mapped countries to avoid in your travel plans, based on foreign travel advisories from the Canada Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
Naturally, Canada isn’t colored on the map because the map was made for Canadians, but I think it’s safe to assume that they’d be colored green too and most, if not all, of the advisories apply to those of us here in the United States. [Thanks, John]
I’ve been thinking of doing this myself.
What would be interesting is to take travel safety data from multiple countries, I know here in the UK we have a similar service, and compiling multiple recommendations on one map. Then implementing a toggle or sliding scale between safe/unsafe based on all, continental, and country based recommendations.
Currently this map is based off a green ‘safe’ countries data, but it would be interesting to see what it would look like based off of say, Russia, a yellow ‘potentially unsafe’ country. You could probably assume from Russia’s perspective that the countries closer to Russia may be deemed safer due to both proximity and/or what levels of ‘safety’ people are generally used to day-to-day.
I could imagine that a map from the point of view of:
a) The UK, would probably be mostly the same as Canada’s POV.
b) Latin America, would paint South America as mostly green amongst other spanish/portugese nations.
c) North Korea, the map would be almost completely red!
—
Dave
Why is Japan yellow? There are places in Japan you should avoid traveling? As someone who’s enjoyed traveling to Japan, this strikes me as suspicious. It’s hard to find a place safer to travel.
Alan, I would suspect it could be related to the tsunami aftermath and the ongoing Fukushima problems. Anywhere contaminated with radioactive materials would suit the warning of ‘avoid some areas’.
Didn’t think of that. But it does seem that the map here is out of date. The “live” map:
http://travel.gc.ca/travelling/advisories
Lists Japan as “Exercise normal security precautions; a regional travel advisory is in effect”. This isn’t exactly the same key, but appears to be a less severe classification.
“Avoid all travel to the areas around the Fukushima nuclear power plant, in particular the districts and towns that have been designated as exclusion zones by the Japanese authorities.”
Japan is on the list probably because of Fukushima
Fukushima I guess…
Is Canada utterly safe?
Ditto on Japan, unless they are warning you about tentacle porn shops. Also, I see New Zealand got the shaft yet again on a map.
Is Cuba green? Perhaps for Canada, it is not a geopolitical issue.
Brazil and Argentina – “high degree of caution”? I’m not a world traveler – but somewhat surprised by that.
When I was in Rio they told us to stay off the beaches at night because drug dealers and other malcontents hang out there.
There’s a country east of Australia that seems to be missing…
I noticed that to. A fairly common occurrence, I have encountered a few maps in Canada where the country in question was excised by ignorance or the proportionality of the presentation. There are also about half a dozen or so other island nations which didn’t ‘make the cut’.
It turns out that the original map at CBC does have New Zealand, and explicitly lists the countries it omits.
That’s why its so safe in Middle Earth, people forget we are even here ;-)
Pakistan is the safe country if you only visit the main metropolitan cities such as Karachi and Lahore with a guide.. Avoid going to tribal areas.
Everyone is welcome in Pakistan. I love tourists coming to Pakistan.
New Zealand cropped again. :(
Someone post a visualisation of the relative frequency with which Flowing Data forgetting that whole countries exist.
South Korea is safe though :)
Would be even more useful if the map was interactive. For example, clicking on a country could reveal details on which areas to avoid etc. Still, in my view this is a nice example of conveying data clearly in an intuitive way.
Ha, just saw the actual CBC version does it, awesome!
I’m an Iranian and I make sure that it is totally wrong.
You are totally safe in Iran.
That’s interesting. I have a lot of friends that love to travel and I’m always worried about them. Not everywhere is like traveling in the US and Canada!