Category and filtering help

[eluser]Sceneshift[/eluser]
I would be really grateful if someone could help me out here.

I have a system where the user will navigate through categories, which whittles down the results as they go. Here is an example of how it would work:

Country -> Region -> Area

Clearly this is possible with CI, and at the moment my URL looks like so:

http://www.myname.com/search/country_region_area/result
(where result is the 'place' they found from filtering down)

The problem is, the category (country_region_area) is just a string, and it would be stupid to try and make breadcrumbs etc out of this data. As I understand it, an alternative would be to setup url routing and have something like http://www.myname.com/search/country/reg...ea/result/ but I can't help but feel like there is an easier method?

Can someone please shed some light on to how I can keep track of the categories I navigate in a efficient manner, perhaps its worth setting up a category system in the database, but then that would require horrible recursive functions to create the breadcrumbs.

Thanks!