The Quest to Visit Every Country in the World
There are 193 official countries on Earth. Fewer than 100 people have seen them all. The 34 people interviewed for this book have made it their life mission to visit every last one of them.
Jam-packed with nearly 500 pages, these revealing Q&A interviews examine the lives of ordinary people who have undertaken extraordinary travels in their quest to visit every country in the world. Learn about their adventures and explore the highs and lows of what it means to be an extreme traveler, from near-death experiences to moments that have left even the most jaded traveler speechless.
How did they do this?
What have they sacrificed?
What compelled these people to go beyond the realm of the ordinary tourist to see the entire world?
The answers to these questions and more are contained in this rare look inside the minds of some of the world’s most-traveled people. Their stories, ranging from being questioned by U.S. Special Forces while doing a solo tour of war torn Iraq, to showing a Costco ID card in order to tour a restricted launching place for space satellites in French Guiana, to entering Libya during Arab Spring and getting caught in the cross fire of cigarette smugglers, and many more, are guaranteed to fascinate and entertain every travel fan.
A Sample of Stories Inside:
In Lagos, Nigeria I once almost stepped on a dead man lying on the sidewalk. No one around me seemed to react or think it was strange, everyone just walked around him or stepped over his corpse…
While traveling up a river in Suriname on a zodiac just after dusk with flashlights on looking for eye shine, we suddenly saw hundreds of pairs of little sparkles floating down the river toward us. Turned out to be tiny spiders on leafs which must have been blown off trees by wind further up the river — magic…
…But here we found ourselves in Mogadishu, being looked after by a dozen machine-gun toting men and a friendly warlord. For three days, we stayed at a downtown Mogadishu hotel and were driven around the city in pickup trucks with an ample supply of armed bodyguards…
I was in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s with my mother. We had flown to Port Moresby from Cairns, Australia. After a day or so we flew to Lae and then to a town in the highlands to see a festival called the sing-sing. The locals were dressed in nothing — that is they were totally naked. My mother at that time was already elderly but that did not stop a chieftain from deciding that he wanted to make her his fourteenth wife. We found out at the hotel that he would not take no for an answer, so his men were coming to the hotel to take her by force…
So many odd memories, as to travel is to be a stranger in strange lands. Some that come to mind are riding out a typhoon in a top-heavy wooden junk in the sea north of Sumbawa, Indonesia, in the darkness watching the disco-blue phosphorescence of the giant waves thrashing us, while steel-hulled car ferries were sent to the bottom with all hands lost; suicide bombers in Kabul popping with a sound like opening bottles of Coke, after spraying the crowd on Chicken Street with machine pistols and then hurling themselves into the Ministry of Culture to explode; a deer staggering over to me walking on bone stumps, while the dragon that snapped off its legs lurches in for the kill…
…I remember one low point from that voyage, where I was SCUBA diving with US Fish and Wildlife people who were collecting fish and coral samples. The blood from the fish-spearing was attracting sharks, and at least six of them were circling my legs as we called the dive short and surfaced prematurely. Somehow, the crew had lost a visual fix on our dive spot, and allowed the vessel to drift off at least a mile away, and now could not find us in the setting sun. We treaded water in strong chop for at least 45 minutes while fending off the circling sharks…