Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [76]
The checklist ensures novelty and breadth of experience as well. The specter of mortality, the awareness of limited time, seems always to be with these systematic travelers, especially the older ones. Hogenauer tells the story of working at his first job, for Ma Bell, with an older coworker who had elaborate plans to finally see the world with his wife upon retiring. She died the very day he retired. “The look on that guy’s face!” he remembers sadly. “It was such a momentous realization. You’ve got to do things when you can.” So why go back to Cancún if you’ve never seen Tierra del Fuego? Why put off seeing Laos if you’re right next door in Thailand? Gather ye visa stamps while ye may! Old Time is still a-flying!
The Travelers’ Century Club has expanded the world’s list of “countries” to 319, but even that is too limiting for some collectors, forever hungry in a shrinking world for the next place, the new thing. And so a TCC member named Charles Veley created MostTraveledPeople.com, a website where his loyal globetrotter readers can vote on an even longer list of legit destinations. They’ve currently inflated the count to a whopping 872. All fifty U.S. states are now separate “countries” on the list. So are the twenty-two regions of France, even if they’re all about the size of Vermont. It’s the rare spot that doesn’t make the cut, in fact. Point Roberts, Washington, a tiny bit of the United States that dangles down from Canada just a few hours northwest of my house, is currently on the vetoed list, with only 40 percent approval.
No one’s been everywhere yet, but the competition is intense. “I get a lot of e-mails from people claiming that other people are cheating,” Veley tells me, his unfailingly mild, affectless voice betraying no irritation whatsoever. “Some people just like to tattle.” We’ve met near his home, a converted colonel’s residence in San Francisco’s decommissioned Presidio. He looks exhausted, not so much from last week’s four-country swing through Europe, during which he was able to cross off the tiny North Sea island of Heligoland, but from a subsequent stop that sounds even more grueling: taking his three young children to Disneyland.
Though Guinness doesn’t have a category for it anymore (too subjective, too contentious), Veley is, by the universal acclamation of international newspaper headlines, the world’s most traveled man. He’s been mugged in Buenos Aires and peed on by Costa Rican tree frogs. He’s had his canoe overturned in the hippo-infested waters of the Zambezi River. But in photos of his journeys, he’s always smiling placidly, usually in a neat Oxford blue shirt and khakis, whether he’s hanging out with Nepali holy men, Ethiopian village children, or Rio’s Carnival showgirls. The overall effect is like that prank where a stolen garden gnome turns up in odd places all over the world, always with the same wide eyes and benign grin.
At thirty-seven, Charles became the youngest person in the history of the Travelers’ Century Club to polish off the club’s entire checklist. He and some friends had founded the software company MicroStrategy, and the dot-com boom of the late nineties had made them millionaires many times over. Charles decided to retire early and see the world. All of it.
He traces his wanderlust back to a childhood fascination with geography. Not all systematic travelers love maps—TCC chairman Klaus Billep confided to me that “when we add Abkhazia or Tokelau to our list, people have no idea where they are. They have to call us or look them up on our website.” But Charles is a map nut after my own heart.
“I remember visiting my mother. My parents