Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
When it comes to wide exploration projects in the modern age (as opposed to single event exploration projects), people try to achieve a ‘logical collection’ of related extreme goals, and many a time, that achievement is referred to as a ‘grand slam’. For example, the popular Adventurer’s Grand Slam’ (sometimes called Explorer’s Grand Slam) is when someone scales the 7 highest summits of the 7 continents and also reaches the 2 geographic poles. No small feat that, and till date around 75 people have done it. And that’s a very, very exclusive club when you realise that 108 billion Homo Sapiens have lived and died on Planet Earth till now.
But then why keep it terrestrial only? Humans are restless beings, all in search of meaning and that’s why they created an ‘Ocean Explorer’s Grand Slam’ too which is really very extreme. Here you have to have do open water crossings of all 5 oceans only on human power. I can tell you that I have been on all 5 oceans but inside a nice safe vessel. To cross these raging waters on human power is close to insane – in fact it is insane. We are talking about The Pacific, The Atlantic, The Indian Ocean and the frigid Arctic and Southern Oceans, above and below the Arctic and Antarctic Circle respectively. The Icelander, Fiann Paul, was the first to do so in 2019 and it was also accepted by the Guinness Book as an official world record. And how many people have done this – well, exactly one Fiann Paul. What a rockstar in the world of new age record-setting explorations.
Coming to mountaineers, while they don’t call it a grand slam, but summiting the highest 14 peaks on Earth, which are greater than 8,000 meters, means you are top gun in your field. If you do it without supplemental oxygen, it just catapults you further up into the thin air. And then there are humans who go and break a world record when it comes to how fast you summit all 14 – and that is how you become a legend. Most of us have heard of the great Sherpa – Nirmal Purja who recently died on Pakistan’s Broad Peak in July’26.
But before he died tragically and untimely in an avalanche, he had truly lived his life and broken the record for the fastest accent of the ‘eight-thousanders’ as these 14 peaks are referred to. And he scaled all of them both with supplemental oxygen and without supplemental oxygen i.e. he broke two separate records related to the 14 peaks (do check his documentary on Netflix). However, the first person ever to climb these 14 was Italian, Reinhold Messner, who achieved this extraordinary feat in October 1986, exactly 40 years ago. One may say that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the greatest, given that they were the first to summit Mt Everest in 1953, but true mountaineers know that Reinhold Messner is the biggest of them all. And he didn’t build his legacy with a single event (which is to climb Everest) but he did it with a backbreaking collection of sorts – by reaching the 14 highest points on Earth.
And if we have gone up high, we must go down as well. There is only one man ever, American Victor Vescovo, who has been to the deepest point of every Ocean, in what he calls ‘The Five Deeps Expedition’.
So, this is what humans do. Many of us are obsessed with projects and long-range goals. In the extreme world travel community, we have the so-called ‘UN Grandmasters’ – people who have been to all 193 UN nations on Earth. As of 2026, there are around 500 such people – only. As I keep reminding people, more humans have been to space than have been to all countries on Earth. It’s the biggest collection out there for extreme world travellers.
But my current obsession is following the story of a Welsh explorer named Ash Dykes, who is one project driven person as well. He has 5 Guinness World Records to his name in the field of exploration and now he is on what he simply calls his ‘Project 6’. In Project 6 he will, over the next 12 months, test his limits in 6 different natural world ecosystems. He has started with the Congo where he plans to canoe the 700-kilometre length of the Sangha River (hippo & croc infested) over the course of a month, starting 3rd October. So, in a way the Sangha River expedition is Project 6.1 and he is yet to announce the other 5 sub-projects just yet. And because of his marketing savviness, he has ‘inadvertently’ become a Tik-Tok sensation where people can’t get over the fact that a young man with everything in the world would put his life on the line inside a deep and dark rainforest.
In fact, he has inspired me pick up my boots again after a gap of 3 months post my recent visit to a deep, ancient rainforest in the island of Borneo. There I had quite a scary incident and I will cover the details of my Borneo visit soon. Right now, my eyes are set on completing the 2-decade ‘Borderless Planet’ program which is made up of 4 sub-projects that add up to the entire natural world. These sub-projects are, rather stoically, called – ‘Every Desert on Earth’, ‘Every Forest on Earth’, ‘Every Grassland on Earth’ and ‘Every Tundra & Ice Ecoregion on Earth’. These 4 large biomes types and the various actual eco-regions within each of them is what makes up the natural world. And while few people have visited all major deserts on Earth before, I know for a fact that no one has been to every individual biome landmass. Hence this 2-decade program in unapologetic self-indulgence.
I believe such a series of linked projects gives people a larger story and a reason to live, to feel alive. I somehow get why some of these people do what they do. It is definitely not a normal mindset and if it were, then there would have been a line. I suppose these people don’t know when to draw the line on their own dreams. As the great explorer, Mike Horn once said – “if your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough’. And oh, by the way, Mike Horn was the first person to circumnavigate the Earth around the equator on pure human power in a project called ‘Latitude Zero’.
Nitin Gairola is an extreme world traveller who has been to every major desert & forest ecoregion on Earth and to around 150 countries as well. He is unofficially known as the ‘most travelled Indian’ and this multi-decade exploration program to witness the entire world is named ‘Borderless Planet’. Nitin is a published travel writer & poet too. Join him @ www.instagram.com/MostTravelledIndian/
