All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By NITIN GAIROLA
Now you know how world travel started for me from my previous few articles, but for a very long time until a few years ago, I didn’t know what to name a traveller like me or my style of travel. I happened to be one who loved the idea of seeing more and more of the places in the world, which is the opposite of ‘slow travel’. Such kind of a traveller (and there are many) actually keeps a count of his or her travels. In 2011, I know I started counting my countries (which is what many start with) and it was around 2012 when I started visiting the ‘natural world’ (deserts, jungles, mountains, etc.) but I didn’t keep a count of those initially. In fact, country count is kept by almost everyone who does international travel, but some just take it to the next level of competition.
So, cricket is a competitive sport and we all recently witnessed the men’s world cup to see just that; Football is a sport, as is Formula 1 racing and tennis. I just named 4 of my favorite sports. However, as a kid, like millions in India, I also watched professional wrestling or WWF as it was popularly known in the 1990s, but later the name had changed to WWE with ‘E’ standing for ‘Entertainment’. It was a fine line between sports and entertainment since we all know that such wrestling was always predetermined, staged and for the entertainment of fans, and wasn’t real competition.
Why I bring this up is that some people around 70 years ago decided to start competition in extreme world travel as well. This is when the ‘Traveler’s Century Club’ or TCC of California opened up in 1954 and it was considered as a very exclusive club, the membership of which required one to have visited at least 100 or more countries. There are around 2,000 members in TCC presently. Now we also have 2 other very popular world travel clubs which are even more extreme. They divide the world not just into 194 UN countries or 250 odd ‘UN plus’ list or the 329 of Traveler’s Club, itself, but into 1500 odd locations, i.e., the world is split into states or provinces within each country and to be at the top, you need to visit as many as possible with some individuals having reached more than 1300, which is truly epic if you think about it. These travel ranking clubs are ‘Most Traveled People’ and ‘Nomad Mania’ (earlier called ‘The Best Traveled’) and such kind of travel for rankings is called ‘competitive travel’, aka ‘Travel as a Sport’.
But then any sane person would ask – Why do you want to bring competition into travel, don’t we have enough of it already? And doesn’t one travel to enjoy or to escape, to engage and to learn from and about the world? But after speaking to many such travellers and being one myself, I realised that most of them are not pig headed or egoistic but actually very well read people. 
Besides, more than intelligence, what they have is a wide view, a zoom out perspective and the ability to connect the dots and add colour to world topics which would otherwise be bland. They are certainly not deep academics, but they are not shallow either and do carry a context which many don’t. These people and their lives are very well covered in a book called ‘Mad Travelers’ by Dave Seminara and I highly recommend it to you. It is one of my favourite books since I relate very strongly to it.
So, competitive travel is when people like me decide we want to be the ones to be the ‘first’ (to travel someplace or all places) or have the ‘most’ (countries visited, deserts, forests) or something else like that. From the moment long ago in early 2011 when I declared in front of a decent sized group that I would visit 100 countries, I got bitten by this competitive travel bug. In fact, I had no idea why I would say 100 when I had visited only 12 at that time…Maybe because I liked cricket. I can’t speak for all other competitive travellers, but in my case I also loved to travel for the reasons mentioned earlier, i.e., to engage and learn from and about the world, but less to escape.
The tag line of Traveler’s Century Club is ‘World Travel – Passport to Peace through Understanding’ and for me that says it all. ‘Travel as a Sport’… The greatest reason for travelling is to get this perspective, and gain some empathy and kindness. For me it’s all about the human experience of seeing and feeling your only planet first hand. However, with that being said, these records, the trophies and certificates are satisfying tangible things to hang on your wall or place on your desk – right next to your books and the world map, globe and atlas.
(Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and has travelled the natural world more than almost any Indian ever. He 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. More than anything else, he loves his Himalayan home.)
