Jaywig's Journeys

Little W countries and territories.

I really do mean little. We have Wales, Western Samoa, Wallis and Futuna Islands and Wake Island. A country under dispute is Western Sahara. On my Map of the World circa 1960, Wake and Wallis Islands earn speck status, while Futuna and Western Samoa either were unnamed as such back then or were less than specks in the big blue Pacific. To add insult to injury, Western Samoa does not exist for Lonely Planet in its big The Travel Book which purports to take us on "a journey to every country in the world". This makes me think WS no longer exists under that name, even though it appears in the Usborne Spotter's Guides FLAGS sticker book of 1997. Doomed, I'd say, to be renamed, by its plain red flag with a yellow Southern Cross on a blue rectangle in the top left hand corner.

Now let's look at Western Sahara. On the aforementioned Map of the World circa 1960 there is a similarly shaped territory in West Africa called Sp. Sahara. I presume the Sp. refers to Spanish, not Spelling. Interestingly, this block of land is divided into two sub-sets: Rio di Oro in the south and Seria El Hamra in the north. The division is announced with a straight dotted line running east to west until it reaches the Atlantic Coast where, if you were the painter of such a line, you would be able to shade your eyes against the sun to see if the Canary Islands have drifted any closer.

I will discuss Wales in a similarly erudite manner in the next blog, if it actually exists as a separate country.