What changes when you cross a border: the side of the road, plugs and voltage, phone codes, emergency numbers, web domains, writing systems, time zones, date order, the start of the week and where tourists go. Handy for travel and for guessing where a photo was taken.
The collection brings together data Hookito already uses: the capitals and facts behind the country pages, the outlines from the countries list, the paintings in Art, the album lists in Audio and the night side of the globe. The boundaries combine Eurostat GISCO and Natural Earth data. The world maps use a plain equirectangular projection, cropped at 84° north and 58° south; the continent and Europe maps are zoomed from more detailed boundaries.
Spotted a mistake? Write to submissions@hookito.com.
9 maps
Driving sides, plugs, voltage, phone codes, emergency numbers, web domains and scripts: what changes when you cross a border.
The left side survives mostly where the British Empire left its mark, plus Japan and Thailand. Where a country has no value in the data it stays grey: 12 of 208.
Driving side: Hookito country data, largely based on REST Countries and Wikidata. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Type F leads with 67 countries. Where a country lists several types, the one most countries use is shown. The Europlug (C) only wins where nothing else is listed. Check the country page before you pack an adapter.
Plug types: Hookito country data, largely based on REST Countries and Wikidata. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Arrivals count trips, not unique people. Figures are for 2019, a comparable pre-pandemic baseline. Grey-blue indicates no data. Source details and reuse terms: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-tourist-trips.
Data: UN Tourism (2025), via Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/international-tourist-trips). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain). Source data and citation ↗
Share of GDP directly attributable to tourism. Figures are for 2019, a comparable pre-pandemic baseline. Grey-blue indicates no data. Source details and reuse terms: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tourism-gdp-proportion-of-total-gdp.
Data: UN Tourism (2025), via Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tourism-gdp-proportion-of-total-gdp). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain). Source data and citation ↗
The zones follow geography with a few surprises: Bangladesh (+880), Cambodia (+855) and Laos (+856) are in zone 8, Myanmar (+95) in zone 9, and Russia shares +7 with Kazakhstan. Turkey’s code is +90 and the Dominican Republic’s +1, corrected from the source data.
Calling codes: Hookito country data, largely based on REST Countries and Wikidata; zones per the ITU numbering plan. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Japan has the lowest, 100 V. Brazil and Belize use both voltages; France is corrected from 400 V (three-phase) to 230 V. A plug adapter does not change the voltage: check the label on your charger, most are rated 100–240 V. 15 places without a value stay grey.
Voltage: Hookito country data, largely based on REST Countries and Wikidata, with corrections for France, Brazil and Belize. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
A country is coloured by whether 112, 911 or 999 appear among its listed numbers; 19 countries outside the 999 class also list 999, among them the UK, Kenya and Qatar. Mobile phones often connect 112 or 911 even where they are not listed, but don’t rely on it: check the local number when you arrive.
Emergency numbers: Hookito country data, largely based on REST Countries and Wikidata. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
.de is from Deutschland, .ch from Confoederatio Helvetica, .es from España, .hr from Hrvatska and .za from Zuid-Afrika. The domain is the country’s two-letter ISO code in lower case, except .uk for the United Kingdom; Kosovo and Western Sahara have no country domain.
Domains: the ISO 3166 two-letter code of each country (the IANA root zone uses it for every country here, with .uk for the UK). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Each country shows the script of its most likely locale in CLDR, so many countries with more than one script get one: India (Devanagari for Hindi, also Latin and a dozen regional scripts), Serbia (Cyrillic, Latin is common too), Kazakhstan (Cyrillic, switching to Latin). South Sudan is shown in Latin script, where CLDR’s likely locale is Arabic, because English is its official language; Chad uses both Arabic and French.
Scripts: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
8 maps
Time zones, clock changes, date order, the 12- or 24-hour clock and which day starts the week.
Each country shows the short date of its most likely locale in CLDR; many countries write dates more than one way. Canada’s en-CA uses the ISO order 2026-11-25, though day-first and month-first are both common there, and Iran and Afghanistan count years in the Solar Hijri calendar. Where ICU has no data for the main language, an official co-language is used (French in Haiti, English in Ghana).
Conventions: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Each country shows the separator of its most likely locale in CLDR; many countries use both, for example Canada (English and French) and Switzerland (a point in German Swiss usage, a comma in French). Locales written with Arabic-Indic digits use the Arabic decimal separator ٫; in CLDR, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates default to Western digits and a point, and the Maghreb to a comma.
Conventions: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Each country shows the short time format of its most likely locale in CLDR; spoken and written habits often differ, and many places use both. CLDR gives the 12-hour clock for most Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas and the 24-hour clock for Brazil; timetables almost everywhere use 24 hours.
Conventions: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
This is the convention calendar apps use for each country in CLDR; ISO 8601 starts the week on Monday everywhere. Afghanistan, Egypt and Iran start on Saturday, the day after the Friday rest day, and CLDR has the Maldives start on Friday.
Conventions: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Mostly CLDR’s weekend per country; Bangladesh, the Maldives, Brunei and Nepal are corrected by hand because CLDR leaves them at Saturday–Sunday. CLDR gives India and Uganda a Sunday-only weekend, though many offices there close on Saturdays too, and weekends vary within countries: some Malaysian states rest on Friday and Saturday.
Conventions: Unicode CLDR, most likely locale per country (via ICU in Node.js). Weekends of Bangladesh, the Maldives, Brunei and Nepal corrected by Hookito. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Countries with several zones are coloured by their capital’s, so all of the United States shows Washington’s −5 and all of Russia Moscow’s +3; 18 countries here have more than one zone. Standard time is the smaller of the January and July 2026 offsets, so summer time is left out.
Time zones: IANA tz database (zone.tab), offsets for 2026 via ICU in Node.js. Capitals: Hookito country data. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
A country counts if any of its tz zones has more than one offset during 2026. Only part changes in Australia, Canada, Chile, Greenland, Mexico and the United States: Arizona and Hawaii, Saskatchewan and Queensland stay on standard time, and Mexico keeps summer time only along the US border. Morocco and Western Sahara set the clocks back an hour during Ramadan instead of in winter.
Time zones: IANA tz database (zone.tab), offsets for 2026 via ICU in Node.js. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
Russia has 11, Canada and the United States 6 each. Overseas territories with their own country code are listed separately in the tz database, so France counts 1 here, though with its overseas regions it spans 12 zones, and the US count leaves out Puerto Rico and Guam. Unofficial zones (Xinjiang in China, Eucla in Australia) and Moscow time in occupied Crimea are not counted.
Time zones: IANA tz database (zone.tab), offsets for 2026 via ICU in Node.js. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO). Additional boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain).
You’re welcome to share, print or adapt these maps. The renderings are licensed CC BY 4.0: credit them as “Map: Hookito, hookito.com”, with a link to this page where you can.
The underlying data keeps its own terms, so keep its credits too. Administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics (Eurostat GISCO), which also applies to most country outlines. Additional boundaries are from Natural Earth (public domain). Each map lists its other sources: Wikidata and GeoNames for country facts, Our World in Data for the statistics, Unicode CLDR and the IANA time zone database for the calendar and clock maps, flag-icons (MIT) for the flags, Wikimedia Commons for the paintings, NASA Earth Observatory for the night imagery. The maps are offered as finished images only; the boundary data itself isn’t available for download here.
