We have a rule on this team: we don't throw around the word 'historic' lightly. We've covered enough travel stories to know that the internet loves to inflate everything into a milestone. But when we sat down to write about Jessica Nabongo, the word kept coming up — and honestly, it earned its place.
On October 6, 2019, Jessica Nabongo landed in Seychelles and completed something that, at that point, no Black woman in recorded history had done: she visited every single country in the world. All 195 of them. Let that number sit with you for a second. One hundred and ninety-five countries. Some of us on this team haven't even been to 19.
Jessica was born in Detroit to Ugandan parents, and she grew up with a passport that already had stamps most kids' didn't. That early exposure to movement — to the idea that the world was something you moved through, not just read about — seems to have lodged itself somewhere permanent in her. She studied at the University of Michigan, went on to get a master's degree from the London School of Economics, worked for the United Nations in Geneva, and somewhere between spreadsheets and summit meetings, decided she was going to see everything. Not some of it. Everything.
She launched her blog, The Catch Me If You Can, which became both a travel diary and a running argument with the travel industry's very narrow idea of who a 'traveler' looks like. We've spent time in airports where the stock photography shows the same type of person over and over again. Jessica, consciously or not, became the counter-image. A Black woman with a camera and a carry-on, showing up in places the algorithm never expected her.
