I have a bone to pick with geography

So I was reading a blog post about traveling around the world, and the writer talked about Equatorial Guinea, and how expensive it was. And I thought, oh, bushwoman was supposed to have gone there for Peace Corps, but then there were riots or something, and so she went to Botswana and lived in the bush instead. But then I thought, oh wait, there are multiple Guineas, let me check on that. Yeah, turns out she was supposed to have gone to just plain Guinea, not Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, or French Guinea (another continent altogether). Well, French Guinea is technically Guyane, but it's also called French Guinea, so it's close enough.

So my gripe is this - with all the millions of words in the hundreds of languages in the world, four countries have to be named essentially the same thing? I would think the makers of geography could be a little more creative than that.