Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
I have written about the most well-travelled Indians earlier as well, in some shape or form. But I felt a lot of new Indian travellers have burst onto the scene and so a revisit was probably in order. This also comes on the back on my Valley of Words session yesterday evening and I felt the new readers would get a perspective into who all are out there stamping their Indian passports around the world. The new readers should also know that I am for sure not the only big Indian world traveller today, although safe to say I am one of the first extreme travellers from India since I have been at it around the world from 2007 onwards. That’s well before the age of smart phones, tons of online travel content and a well-connected world.
So just looking back, before I got published in Uttarakhand’s favorite local English newspaper under the feature titled ‘Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian’, I did some thorough research. The research took me over 2 years to check my world travel competition and it was done to make sure this ‘most travelled’ tag wasn’t a hollow claim or name. I even went to official record books to ensure the claims were properly registered and certified before I had them published. This 2-year deep dive made me find 2 types of extreme world travelers – The majority who ‘count countries’ and the few who visit the natural world extensively. The latter are people like full-time explorers, adventurers, wildlife photographers, scientific researchers, conservationists or nature enthusiasts. Not always the young vloggers (YouTubers) who have just entered the world travel scene. That YouTuber profile is either just a good travel content creator or a ‘country collector’, but that too is a slight generalisation.
In my case, my medium to reach out has always been the written word, so loosely I can be called a blogger but I prefer to know myself as a writer and very soon an author I hope (when I finally release my ‘first’ book). In the initial years of world travel I started writing for the very popular global brand of travel guides, Lonely Planet, and this lasted nearly a decade. And during that time, my world travel records & content also got sporadically published in pretty much all the major newspapers & media houses in India such as Economic Times (ET Travel), Business Insider, The Print, Business Standard, HT, Yahoo, The Week amongst others.
But in all of these past publications, particularly Lonely Planet, my writing was naturally curtailed as I could not give my own perspectives on a particular travel experience and the authenticity was not always there (for good reasons as the travel guide business is indeed a ‘business’). That all changed after Garhwal Post started my weekly Sunday features and now I have been reaching out to the regular readers of this wonderful newspaper since October 2023. Garhwal Post has given me full freedom and so my content is now released more like a travelogue where I can write honestly about my experiences on the road, lend my perspectives on the world I see and give my opinions too.
My first feature on Garhwal Post set the tone for a world travel column and the essential theme hasn’t changed since, nor will it ever. This isn’t a weekly column for any random ranting and ramblings, it is only about travels to the natural world (all deserts, forests, etc.) with my partner, Richa. And somehow this true-blue style of travel storytelling seems to resonate with the readers too. At least they know it’s 100% honest and not some content out of a travel brochure, which I find so unauthentic and it is truly unfortunate when a few travel bloggers and vloggers have to resort to it for a few quick bucks. In my case, I believe I can go till the end of my life writing travelogues for my dear readers and never run out of pictures & stories (do we call them ‘pictories’?)
But as I said earlier, all this extensive and intensive traveling for the past 2 decades doesn’t mean I am the only well-travelled Indian, as there are a host of other mega world travellers in India and I happen to even know a few of them personally. But one thing is true that the majority of them are into travelling the political world of countries and are called ‘country collectors’ and hardly anyone is into my area of travelling the entire natural world of biomes (every desert, forest, grassland, tundra and ice eco-zone on Earth) and this is something which Sir David Attenborough has popularised through his wildlife documentaries. The natural world is generally the domain of real explorers but since I wasn’t fit enough to be one, I just decided to visit them like a traveller, with the only difference that I decided to visit ‘all of them’, in every part of the planet. So, I am sort of a ‘collector’ too, but of the natural world regions.
Coming back to the country collection club, I found 6 Indians clearly ahead of me and really top of the stack. These are Kashi Samaddar (world record holder & 1st Indian to visit all countries in 2008), Benny Prasad (2nd & with the record for being the fastest to visit all in 2010), Prasanna Vee (2018), Ranjan Sharma (2019), Arvinder Bahal (2023) and Ravi Prabhu (2024). All 6 have visited every single country on Earth and, yes, that’s all UN recognised nations and the non-member states too. Besides these 6, a few more are ahead of me in their ‘country count’ and they are the late great Meher Moos (180+ countries), Suhas Mahajan (176), Sangeetha Ranganath (wife of Prasanna Vee had been to 170+ as per the net), Anurag Dasgupta (164), Vijay Anand (151), Gautham Kamath (148), Sameer Singh (145) and a few popular vloggers are there as well – namely Navankur Chaudhary & Shubham Kumar, both of who claim to have been to around 150 (their YouTube channels are Yatri Doctor & Nomad Shubham, respectively).
Besides these Super-15 ‘country collectors’, there are yet a few more Indians in and around my neighborhood such as the very popular blogger-author couple, Savi & Vid of ‘Bruised Passports’ (114 together as per the net). There is also an extreme adventurer, YouTuber and a person with an Arnold Schwarzenegger physique, named Paramvir Singh Beniwal (his popular YouTube channel is ‘Passenger Paramvir’ and he is on 120+ countries at just the age of 28). Another one is Raja Ghosh (channel name – Explorer Raja) and he too has been to 120 countries and, lest I forget, my partner Richa herself has almost reached the 120-country mark, making her one of the top female travellers in India. Matter of chance, recently I met someone who happened to know a gentleman named Shridhar Sethuram, who has ‘ticked off’ 120+ as well. That gives you an idea just how much we Indians are travelling the world now.
I do hope I haven’t missed anyone inadvertently but it would be unfair to not mention Indians who are in ‘World Travel God’ Harry Mitsidis’s Nomad Mania lists. ‘Nomad Mania’ is one of the most comprehensive, authentic and validated platforms for extreme world travellers who count countries and provinces / regions around the world. They have a database of over 70,000 world travellers (as of December 2024) making them the biggest such club or platform by far. Their 2 competitors which I also admire are Most Traveled People or MTP (by American Godfather of extreme travel, Charles Veley) and Traveler’s Century Club or TCC, an organisation formed in 1954, whose membership requires an individual to have visited minimum 100 TCC countries & territories. So other than the extreme world travellers already mentioned, some of the notable ‘country collecting’ Indians on the Nomad Mania platform (as of Oct’25) are – Rajesh Singh (125 countries), Abhilash Surendran (119), Prab Durai (117), Prashanth Shankara (117), Rohit Aswath (112), Arijit Patra (111), Ryan Gazder (107), Nitin Tyagi (105), Naman Patni (105), Shivaye Gulati (100), Dharmendra Naidu (100) and Rahul Vijay (99). I had also read a slightly dated Outlook Traveller article from 7 years ago which mentioned names of those Indians who were on the Traveler Century Club list back then, such as – the Oza couple, Vivek Bellur and ASR Murthy. They would have visited a lot more countries 7 years down the road.
Besides those who have this insane travel mania, there are other world travel vloggers and bloggers travelling the globe very well too, besides being really popular as well. One of these is the well-known MTV VJ, Shenaz Treasury, who is likely to have crossed 100 countries (as per the net). Other amazing international travel content creators are Varun Vagish (Mountain Trekker channel and one of the first big travel vloggers), Deepanshu Sangwan (Nomadic Indian channel), Vishnu Saha (Wandering Maniac channel), Tanya Khanijow (possibly the most popular female YouTuber from India), Radhika Nomllers (another popular female YouTuber) and Kamiya Jani (owner of Curly Tales blog & YouTube channel). There are a lot of popular travel bloggers too who have been to many countries such as Ajay Sood, Shivya Nath, Kritika Goel and Anusha Swamy. I happen to have a friend who is also a very successful solo female traveller, author and freelance journalist, Pallavi Pasricha. It is actually so good to see more and more female world travellers from India who are fancy, free-willed and flying. Besides these amazing Indian globe trotters, I am sure there are quite a few other known and unknown travel vloggers and bloggers out there, but my knowledge takes me this far only.
Now on to my specific case – I happened to be obsessed with nature and the natural world of wild places and wildlife. The intent was never to visit every country although I will probably end up doing that along the way. My main travel angle is Earth science, geography and the love for the natural world. So, I wondered if I could break some world travel records in this area while enjoying and learning during the ‘Around the World’ adventure. This was given the fact that I am no scientist and I don’t pretend to be anything more than a world traveller. And then came the breakthrough moment when I realised no Indian or Asian had ever visited all deserts of Earth. Post that I went one step forward, researching if anyone had visited all major forests of the world, major grasslands, tundra & ice regions for that matter. These 5 (deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra & ice) make up the living landscape on Earth, which are also called Biomes.
That became my ultimate goal in life and now I am on the verge of becoming the first ever to visit every major natural world biome as part of a project that I call ‘Borderless Biomes’. This is since countries have borders, barbed wires and barricades but the world of deserts and forests does not. Hence my claim is being the ‘Most Travelled Indian of the Natural World’ since clearly there are those who have visited all countries of the political world before me.
Meanwhile as we are squabbling about who the biggest world traveller is, we are hit by a reality that there have been real explorers from India in the past and that none of us are anything compared to some of them. All of us today leverage the incredible age of the jumbo jet, overnight stay infrastructure, the smart phone & internet, online aggregators, far more relaxed visa or entry rules and even entry routes.
So, here I have to mention the name of a travel hero of not just Uttarakhand but all of India – Pandit Nain Singh Rawat. He was a real explorer and from 1865-1875, had many long adventures in Tibet, Nepal and the overall Himalayan region, and that too incognito. In fact, he had been ‘immortalised’ by a statue next to the Survey Chowk in Dehradun and this may have been the first statue of an Indian explorer anywhere in India (I don’t remember seeing any other). And since my home is in Dalanwala (Dehradun), I used to pass the statue every time I went to Rajpur Road, Astley Hall or Clock Tower via EC Road. But on my current visit to Doon, I noticed that it’s no longer there. Perhaps he is out on a brand new expedition!
Jest aside, another person from the past who travelled extensively was the Sikh Guru and Saint, Guru Nanak. It is believed that he travelled far west up to the western edge of Asia (Middle East) and all across the Himalayan lands and South Asia. Besides, we had Kishen Singh (went with Nain Singh), Bodhi Dharma, Bachendri Pal, Arunima Sinha and Adi Sankara.
I am sure there are many others too who I have missed to highlight due to my ignorance, but overall I have tried my best to be comprehensive with the focus being on modern day extreme ‘terrestrial’ travellers from India (hence space & underwater is not considered as that comes under exploration). This tribe of Indian world travellers is ballooning as more and more of us are getting our passports stamped. I just hope there comes a time when a billion aspirations of seeing the world are met, since there is no greater joy than to see the only planet that we will ever call home.
Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He is on the verge of becoming the first to travel to every Desert, Forest, Grassland, Tundra & Ice biomes on Earth. Nitin has set world travel records certified by India Book of Records, has written for Lonely Planet and holds National Geographic conservation certifications. He is also a senior corporate executive in an MNC and in his early days, used to be a published poet as well. Reach him at: www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/
