Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (25 page)

Two maps hang in Hogenauer’s office at Loyola, neatly displaying his travel history with pushpins and intricate webs of string. The
tangle is so dense over much of the world, like North America, that he can’t add new routes anymore. He insists that checklists are just a means to an end, an excuse to explore. “Look, if I’d helicoptered into every national park, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. But by
going
to each one, and finding out how to get there, and linking it to everything else, and seeing things along the way, they seem much more real.”

But I’m accustomed by now to place collectors protesting, methinks, a little too much. They all downplay the appeal of the checklist itself, but having a system is clearly a very real source of pleasure for these people. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you chuck the list at some point and just go wherever the hell you felt like? Part of it is simply the universal smug thrill of crossing something off a to-do list, of course. And Hogenauer says that
finishing
a checklist is even better. “You recognize things in their entirety. If you can say you’ve got one hundred percent of something in your background, you don’t have to worry that you missed out on something.”

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 were separated, and my mother lived on a farm way out in remote West Virginia. And I would sit in our Land Rover in the driver’s seat. I’d lay the road atlas down beside me in the passenger seat and look down and pretend that I was driving. When the road on the map turned to the right, I’d turn the steering wheel to the right. And I pretended that I was driving to the Pacific Ocean.”

It’s no accident that, in his garden-gnome travel photos, he’s always swarmed by grinning locals. Charles is scrupulously social when he travels. People are as important to him as places are. More important, maybe. “I like understanding where people are from, how they think, and seeing how that relates to geography too. There’s a real power in meeting someone and knowing something about them, just because of where they’re from.” I tell him I’ve noticed that my trivia background can do the same thing, but he disagrees—his brand of travel gets you something more. “It’s a real bond. The first step is knowing the trivia, just knowing the name of the place, but the second is having an emotion tied to it. Trivia is secondhand at best, but once you’ve been there, you can feel their situation, you’re able to relate.”

But as with Alan Hogenauer, the checklist, the system, is a big part of his travel compulsion as well. One of the first concepts I ever studied in my computer science classes was the TSP, or traveling salesman problem, in which programmers try to find the shortest route a traveler can take to visit every city in a given list. This seemingly simple problem is actually an incredibly rich and complex one, and even fast modern computers can take years to solve it exhaustively when a few hundred cities are added to the list. The traveling salesman problem is a theoretical exercise, but Charles Veley has spent the last decade working on solving it in real life.

“I love it. I’m a computer guy, and when you have an algorithm you’re working on, you find that the more you work it, the more it improves. So I was working constantly on around-the-world tickets. You want to be efficient. Let me make sure I’m not going to be stuck in a place I don’t want to be for seven days. If I just research a little
more, maybe I can find a way to make this trip more efficient and more enjoyable.”

I nod eagerly—I’m an efficiency nerd myself. My wife’s idea of a successful date is one where she likes the movie or the play or the restaurant, but I’m content if I can just find a great parking space, ideally the
optimal
parking space. What a rush.

“But does that kind of rigid efficiency take away from the spontaneous fun of travel?” I ask. “The freedom of the open road, all that?”

“Well, that’s the challenge,” says Charles. “To do both. My philosophy is always to plan every minute accounted for—but be prepared to throw the plan out the window.” In 2005, Veley mounted an expedition to Rockall, a ninety-foot-wide skerry in the North Atlantic. It’s so hard to get to that the number of recorded visitors at the time—twelve—was the same as the number of men who have landed on the moon. Charles’s attempt failed due to high swells, and his crew had to settle for reaching over the side of the boat and literally sticking Post-its to the island’s sheer cliffs. Three years later, he returned, and once again the twenty-foot swell was too high for the inflatable Zodiac to land. But, ready as ever to improvise, Charles donned a wet suit, jumped into the seething Atlantic, and splatted against the side of the rock. “It’s slippery, covered with algae and kelp and bird guano,” he says, but he “clung to it long enough to call it a landing.” He remembers it as one of the great triumphs of his life.
^*

But why? Why the risk and the time and the money just to spend a few seconds on a barren dead volcano, poking seventy feet above the sea four hundred miles from anywhere? Mallory knew: “Because it’s there.”

I came of age with the sickening certainty that everyone else on the planet had confidently mastered the adult world and I was the only one who felt clueless and a little out of my depth. For many years,
I had no idea that
everyone
feels this way, at least from time to time. Charles Veley, though, is
a man comfortable with the amenities
. He can get his bearings and feel competent anywhere on Earth, whether he’s clinging to the kelp on Rockall or ordering his namesake drink at the famous Hemingway Bar at the Paris Ritz (the “Lemon Charlie,” a favorite of Kate Moss).
^*
He speaks five languages fluently and has flown fighter jets. He knows to feign anger when government officials give you a hard time in Saudi Arabia but to smile wider when the same thing happens at an African roadblock.

That’s the dream for most people, who don’t feel totally comfortable anywhere but think that everyone else magically does. Charles is like a superhero to me, but he confides that maps are part of his secret. “The more you know about a map is power,” he says. “Take a look at someone who’s lost and someone who’s not. The person who’s not is a little bit more in control.”

If you’re a
schadenfreude
-seeker, though, know this: the NASDAQ collapse and an accounting scandal caused Charles’s start-up stock price to plummet in the first years of the new millennium, shortly after his early retirement. In one trading day in March 2002 alone, his shares lost 61 percent of their value. To pay the bills, he has recently returned to his old job as vice president of corporate development at MicroStrategy, but he’s traveling more than ever. He says he has no regrets about his decade of globetrotting, which he reckons cost him more than a million dollars. “I got to travel as a young, healthy person with fewer ties. If I’d had kids first, I couldn’t have done it at all. I’m pretty pleased with it.”

The money is the elephant in the room, I suppose, as it so often is in American life. Was Sarah Palin right? Is world travel a perk of birthright and privilege, only for those who have never in their lives flown coach or eaten at a chain restaurant? Or can normal people be supertravelers too?

Chris Guillebeau thinks so. Chris is another one of those who made a personal goal to visit every nation on Earth, even before he knew there was a club of über-rich “Greatest Generation” types doing the same thing. Like Charles, he’s a guru of travel efficiency. Unlike Charles, he’s not a dot-com millionaire. In fact, he’s a thirty-one-year-old high school dropout who now earns a living via his “lifestyle design” blog, selling self-help guides on inexpensive travel and starting microbusinesses. After 9/11, he and his painter wife, Jolie, felt they should be doing more in the world somehow, and they decided to spend four years volunteering for a medical nonprofit in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Traveling across Africa, he began racking up countries: twenty, then thirty, then forty.

“This is awesome! What would it take to get to one hundred?” he tells me he remembers thinking. We’ve met for lunch in a brewpub in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. I order a burger, rare, then feel a little guilty when Chris asks for the vegan special, something virtuous with tofu and quinoa. I wonder if the waitress can guess which one of us is an expert on the clean-water crisis in developing nations.

He did some back-of-the-envelope math, leveraging his growing skills at sniffing out cheap travel deals, and realized he could do it for $30,000. That’s still a lot of money, of course; most people don’t have $30,000 between the couch cushions that they can, on a whim, drop on around-the-world travel. But Chris saw it as a bargain. “That’s cheap!” he marvels. “That’s so cheap! What else could I buy for thirty thousand dollars? A lot of people might buy a car for that, and I can see
one hundred
different countries?” It was no contest. Off he went. He’s since expanded his quest to the entire world—his current total is 149 countries, with the hard goal of finishing by April 7, 2013.

Chris is driven by the same things that guide the other super-travelers I’ve met: the love of logistics and novelty, a near addiction to setting and achieving ambitious goals. But you won’t find him on
MostTraveledPeople.com
, voting on whether or not Point Roberts, Washington, should count on some Official List. “I don’t care about that,” he says simply.

“They’re very serious about it.”

“I know they are, and I don’t care. I wish them well. I’m concerned
about their motivation, but I hope they’re happy. If they’re happy, that’s great.”

“What’s the danger?”

“The danger is relying on external reward, because there isn’t any.” He’s right. Winter has explained his Starbucks count by saying, “I want everyone in the world to know my name,” but his eccentric quest will never make him genuinely famous. When
The Guinness Book of World Records
dropped its “Most Traveled Person” record, Charles Veley lamented that “
It was like finishing
a marathon only to discover that all the officials had gone home . . . very frustrating.”

“And he spent a million dollars on it,” marvels Chris, sighing. Chris has spent a tiny fraction of that on his own adventure, proving his point that almost anyone can travel, and extensively—it’s just a matter of how badly you want to.

The checklist may drive the addiction, but for most of these globetrotters, the journey quickly becomes its own reward. Early in his travels, Charles let his yen for efficiency get the better of him, making token stops in countries just so he could cross them off. Now he can’t wait to go back and
really
see them: Bulgaria, Iran, Honduras, Tunisia. “There is no finish line,” he says. It’s not about completion anymore.