A man who traveled to every country on Earth tells us which countries were the hardest to get to.

It too Albert Podell 50 years to accomplish this goal, and it was arduous. I'm voting for Nauru as the worst of the hardest to get to:

From the late 1960s through the early ’70s, the denizens of this tiny Pacific island were the wealthiest people on the planet per capita, due to the dense and valuable guano deposits left on the island by fish-eating seabirds over a period of eons. The last of these rich phosphate resources were depleted by 2006, and the suddenly impoverished Nauruans were compelled to make a living in other ways. First the country became a tax haven and alleged money-laundering hub for Russian criminals. Then it established internment camps for refugees as part of “the Pacific Solution” to prevent the refugees from reaching or remaining in Australia, and effectively closed its borders to all visa-seekers not approved by the Australian High Commissioner to prevent foreigners from monitoring the migrants’ conditions. Nauru relaxed these restrictions with the formal end of the Pacific Solution in 2008. And though the country remains a dumping ground for many refuge-seekers, it is now focused on legitimate enterprises, including tourism, making it far easier to get a visa—the island’s airline arranged mine, and I finally visited in 2011. But unless you are on a crazy quest to visit every country, you might want to skip this uninviting strip-mined mess of a speck of limestone.

He's written a book about it, so this is one of these situations where reading is really preferable to real life.

Another one of his hard-to-get-to countries is Kiribati, one of my favorite countries to read about and never even consider going to. It's the subject of one of my favorite books, "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific," by J. Maarten Troost.