I Love the Whole World, It’s Such a Brilliant Place

So my latest obsession is geography. As I write this, I have a giant world map sitting over my computer here at home, a beautiful first-anniversary present from my wife. (To be clear, it is not the map pictured above. I just thought that one looked cool, is all. I’m allowed.)

I’ve spent way too much time over the past four days learning the names of every little speck of land that Google or Wikipedia can tell me anything about. And of course, geography plus curiosity equals history, so there’s that, too.

Here’s the deal: the world is crazy. Did you know…

• Ethiopia and Liberia are the only two countries in Africa that were not formerly European colonies.
• Liberia (not to be confused with Libya) was actually run by ex-slaves from America for a while, with a government modeled after the U.S. government. Hence the capital, Monrovia, named after President James Monroe.
• Ethiopia, meanwhile, got invaded by Italians during the so-called Scramble For Africa in the late 19th century. The Ethiopians gave them the boot. By the way, Ethiopia – the most mountainous nation in Africa – was an early adopter of Christianity, and today remains as a pocket of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in a sea of Islam.
• Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, which is not half as crazy as the fact that the Democratic Republic of the Congo used to be a Belgian colony. Where do these little countries get that much land?
• The tiny, mostly-uninhabited island of Bouvet, in the south Atlantic, belongs to Norway but actually has its own Internet Top-Level Domain: “.bv”. Nobody’s using it, which seems like a massive missed opportunity. Wikipedia also claims Bouvet is the most remote island in the world.
• A whole nation called Nauru sits entirely on a single island in the Pacific, occupying just 21 square kilometers and containing only about ten thousand people. I’m not sure which blows my mind more: that a country can be that small, or that it’s still only the third-smallest nation in the world, after the Vatican and Monaco.
• The Maldives, a tiny island chain off the coast of India, sit at an extremely low elevation above the sea, and are predicted to be the first country in the world eradicated by rising sea levels due to global warming. I mean, eradicated. Wow.

I’ve been trying to find good documentaries on some of these countries (the Maldives, for instance), and it’s harder than I expected. Anyone know any good websites for free (or cheap) documentaries, on this topic or any other?