MEANDER - Maphead - page 116

like 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,
felttheyshouldbedoingmoreintheworldsomehow,andtheydecidedtospendfouryears
volunteering for a medical nonprofit in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Traveling across Africa,
he began racking up countries: twenty, then thirty, then forty.
“This isawesome! What wouldittake togettoonehundred?” hetells meheremembers
thinking. We've met for lunch in a brewpub in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. I or-
der 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 ex-
pert 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 motiva-
tion, 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,”buthiseccentricquestwillnevermakehimgenuinelyfamous.When The Guinness
Book of World Records dropped its “Most Traveled Person” record, Charles Veley lamen-
ted 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