You can see the stats for this website for 2012 here. Scroll down and you will see a world map with the numbers of visitors from each country. If you click the  + sign in the top left corner of the map you can make the world bigger.

Probably not surprisingly, visitors from Japan were the most numerous – 1,057, with the U.S. (1,019) & the United Kingdom (268) not far behind.

But there were visitors from 64 other countries! Including 1 from Papua New Guinea. Where did they all come from? I just picked a few countries from the list, countries with which I have a personal relation or which I have just been reading about

• There were 30 visitors from my other native country, France
• 27 visitors from India, where Rudyard Kipling grew up (he later wrote the Jungle Book)
• 18 visitors from Jordan, where my father spent most of his national service
• 15 visitors from South Africa, for which the “great, grey, green, greasy Limpopo river all set about with fever trees” (we’ve just read Kipling’s Just-So story “Elephant’s Child”) makes a 600-kilometre border,  and where a young American and his wife (they were barely 18 years old) took time out from a round-the-world sailing adventure to visit a safari park… on their motorbike (not recommended)
• 12 visitors from Germany where my ancestors (on my father’s side) came from and where I spent several happy weeks each summer for three years starting when I was 15 (I am ashamed to say I was completely ignorant of the fact that 27-28 July, 1943, RAF bombers “created temperatures of 800-1,000 degrees Centigrade over the city [Hamburg]”, destroying “214,350 homes, 4,301 out of 9,592 factories; eight square miles were burnt out completely… fatal casualties… were 40,000 or up to 37.65% of the total population”  [Johnson, Paul. Modern Times. New York: Harper Perennial Classics. 2001- see Wikipedia’s picture here] no, they did not teach us that in my British school history lessons)
• 8 visitors from Algeria where I lived for 9 months as a child, barely 6 months after the country gained its independence and 9 months after a horrendous bloodbath in the city – no wonder my mother was nervous the whole time we were there!
• 8 visitors from New Zealand, of which I have very fond memories
• 6 visitors from Turkey which I want to visit some day
• a handful of visitors from lots of tiny countries in Europe like Poland, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Czech Republic (I once taught a class in which student was Czech and I kept referring to his country as Czechoslovakia), Lithuania, Latvia, Norway (a not-tiny country which produced heavy water, which the Nazis wanted for making a nuclear bomb, but the French stole it and smuggled it to England before the Nazis invaded – the entire world stock of heavy water at the time, in 26 cans, and stored them in the Windsor Castle library; read the story here), Bulgaria, Austria, Portugal
• 4 visitors from Vietnam which suffered  war for 30 years
• 3 visitors from Iceland which figures so prominently in The Way to Freedom novels
• 3 visitors from Greece which I have visited twice, the first time alone, as a student, and where I discovered that the Greek gesture for ‘come here’ looks like the one for ‘go away’ in England (it is very similar to the gesture the Japanese use)
• 2 visitors from South Korea, which I have visited a couple of times, once not exactly of my own accord
• 1 visitor from Nepal and
• 1 visitor from Papua New Guinea

Click the link to see the world map showing where this blog’s visitors in 2012 came from.