MEANDER - Maphead - page 115

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. *
Butwhy?Whytheriskandthetimeandthemoneyjusttospendafewsecondsonabar-
ren 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 confid-
ently 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 bear-
ingsandfeelcompetentanywhereonEarth,whetherhe'sclingingtothekelponRockallor
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 fight-
er 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'sthedreamformostpeople,whodon'tfeeltotally comfortable anywherebutthink
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 ac-
counting scandal caused Charles's start-up stock price to plummet in the first years of the
newmillennium,shortlyafterhisearlyretirement.InonetradingdayinMarch2002alone,
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
SarahPalinright?Isworldtravelaperkofbirthrightandprivilege,onlyforthosewhohave
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. Un-