Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
The year is 2026. It is not 1956 when the jumbo jet arrived on the scene. It is not 1976 when independent travel started 2 decades later, fuelled by the craze for the Lonely Planet travel guides that helped western backpackers make itineraries and find cheap hostels. It’s not 2006 either, when the internet arrived but was in its infancy when it came to leveraging it for flight and hotel bookings (no smart phones then) and it is definitely not 2016 when the smart phone came to the fore coupled with free wi-fi and basically you could do everything on it – from travel planning, to finding routes, booking flights via online aggregators, hotels and tours and submitting your e-visa applications too (the full page visas on passports are now going away, alas). And how can I forget to mention that in the last 10 years the advent of the travel influencer has taken place, aided by his or her smart phone camera and a selfie-stick for YouTube, Instagram and Facebook content.
Needless to say, the travel world and world travel has dramatically changed in these 70 years. From being reserved only for the ultra-rich in the developed countries in 1956, to being accessible for everyday people in well-to-do nations in 1976, and then for the well-to-do in developing countries as well by 2006. A decade later around 2016, anyone from the so called ‘upper-middle’ or the ‘middle’ class could make at least 1 international visit and now in 2026 I feel anyone, anywhere around the world can travel internationally at least once. But, of course, this may not necessarily mean an international flight and definitely would not apply to the poor, regardless of their country. It may not also apply to a few who live in very large countries since they have a lot to see within their own nation.
And so, in all this democratisation of ‘normal travel’, some folks now are doing insane things around the world and for them travel in itself is not enough. Travel is not a break or a holiday but it is an obsession to do extreme adventures and, in the process, learn a bit more about the planet and about themselves. These extreme world travellers are seeing every country on Earth, and then every country twice, thrice and even every state or province within every country!!! And then there are like me who are not only visiting every country in the world but also visiting the entire natural world of biomes, thus giving a new dimension to extreme world travel.
There is another lot who are walking, cycling or driving around the world on not just multi-year trips but multi-decade ones. In the walking sphere, a name that’s doing the rounds on the net off late is that of British adventurer, Karl Bushby, who is about to end his unbroken 27 year ‘Goliath Expedition’ in which he has walked nearly 50,000 kilometre around the planet and is now headed home to the UK. This trend of ultra-long walks was set by George Meegan during his 30,000+ kilometre ‘Americas Walk’ up the length of South & North America between 1977 and ‘83. Jean Beliveau beat that record when he walked around 75,000 kilometres over 11 years from 2000 to 2011. I also have to mention National Geographic writer Paul Salopek who is on his ‘Out of Eden’ walk around the world since 2013 (from Ethiopia), on the footsteps of our Homo Sapien ancestors. He is currently in Alaska, in winters, and still has to walk the length of the 2 Americas (as was done by George Meegan) in order to reach his destination at the southern-most tip of South America.
In similar vein, the motor-vehicle travel hero is German Gunther W. Holtorf, who along with his wife, journeyed nearly 900,000 kilometres over 26 years and to 179 countries in his Mercedes Benz G-Wagon he called ‘Otto’. And then there are 2 individuals who have visited every country without flying and only 1 of them has done this in a continuous unbroken journey. That gentleman is Danish, Torbjorn C Pedersen or ‘Thor’, who did this between 2013 and 2023. Prior to that, Canadian Graham Hughes had completed visiting every nation without flying in 2013 (but this was not a single unbroken journey).
So, in these mad, record breaking or ‘off-limits’ quests of extreme world travellers (be it every country or every natural world biome or undertaking ultra-long journeys), we are bound to enter dangerous countries and dangerous wild places. Many come with deep red warnings of most developed world governments as well, with the really paranoid ones being those of Australia, Canada and USA. But is the ‘high’ of danger the motivation for these extreme world travellers? Not really and how can it be? No one wants to be caught in a bad situation. This risk comes with the territory of pushing the boundaries in world travel at a time when international travel is rather common and normal.
This normalisation of world travel has reached a point where I think nearly every well-to-do person that I am acquainted with would have visited at least 1 country outside India and the number for most is at least 10 and that’s why even 50 today sounds ordinary. The secret is that once you cross 50, it becomes a bit harder and once you cross 100 you have to take significant risks. Till 50 or 100 it can be quite dandy since you would visit the small & safe countries of Europe and South East Asia, besides the other developed nations in North America and Middle East. The island nations (beach destinations) also add up to the tally, especially those in the Caribbean that can be easily reached via cruises. But if anyone asks you your ‘country count’ and you say it is 100+, then they would know that you have arrived. However, it still won’t be called extreme world travel unless you do something truly extraordinary and extreme. But this is still very much the domain of travel and not exploration since even these extreme travellers make full use of the modern tourist infrastructure (try doing this without planes, trains, buses & motels). There are no pretentions that money can get you around and while it takes a lot of organisational skills and a bit of courage to do this, it primarily comes down to vision, will and some greenbacks.
So, this is our field and as crazy as it may sound, it has a lot of takers. Travel communities and clubs such as Nomad Mania (NM), Most Travelled People (MTP) and Traveller’s Century Club (TCC) collectively have over 120,000 members worldwide. From within these clubs, you also have very few members in an ultra-exclusive Extreme Traveller International Congress (ETIC) that has elite annual meetings in some seriously obscure, strange and dangerous locations. Some of these examples being the northernmost parts of icy Siberia, Mogadishu (capital of Somalia), Baghdad (capital of Iraq) and volatile regions in Colombia that were earlier held by FARC (a guerrilla group). ETIC was formed by another great extreme traveller – Kolja Spori of Germany and this ‘War or Dark Tourism’ is a major pull as well for such people.
A few excellent sources for finding about these travellers are Dave Seminara’s book, titled ‘Mad Travelers’, and Harry Mitsidis’s ‘Welcome to the Hotel Nomad Mania’ and ‘The Curious Case of William Baekeland’. These books, written by non-Indians, mostly cover international travellers only but we do have a few big world travellers from India too and a generic google AI search on ‘extreme world travellers’ actually brings out names of Kashi Samaddar, Benny Prasad and yours truly, Nitin Gairola (I am a bit embarrassed to write this, though I am happy that my name features in this Generic AI search next to such travel gods). A few major international names that pop up are those of the great Harry Mitsidis, Charles Veley, Babis Bizas, Lee Abbamonte and Lexie Alford. I should also mention one Mike Spencer Bown who visited all countries over a 23-year journey starting in 1990. These people are truly right up there as world’s most extreme travellers and frankly the world’s most travelled persons.
These adventurers are chasing both the exotic and the extreme ‘off-limit’ places on the world map, all in a mad dash for a ‘rock-star world traveller’ status and to definitely learn more about the extremes on a seemingly uniform planet. The sheer magnitude of such travels and the madness of travelling this way becomes apparent when you realide that there are more people who have gone to space than who have travelled to every country in the world (approximately 700 vs 400). It’s rarefied air up there in this ‘all country’ club and it is further filtered when you decide to go above & beyond ‘just’ visiting all countries. And, to be clear – sky diving off planes & cliff sides, base jumping or bungee jumping is not considered as extreme travel within these circles, since it is just an adrenalin pumping sports activity in a controlled environment.
In my upcoming features, I will be taking you to some of the far-flung and off-the-beaten path places that I have visited as recently as a few days ago. The idea is to take you through some real-life experiences but not to recommend many of these visits. I did it at my own risk and I would not advise visiting most of these destinations, since there are many normal tourist friendly places left on the planet. The only thing in defence of these off-the-beaten path travels is that they support the economies of broken-down countries & states as opposed to supporting (read ‘stuffing’) rich economies. The major downside of these visits is taking good photographs, since the military & civilians who are on the edge of existence do not take kindly on being ‘shot’ by a camera and ‘captured’ in a frame.
I had a funny incident a few days back at the Oman-Yemen border where I was seeing many military vehicles (Humvees) zip by and I asked our fantastic guide, Karel, if I could photograph them from inside his big SUV. On this, pat came his reply – “of course, of course you can….if you wish to stay a bit longer here”. We had a good laugh and I came back home without an image of the security (although I captured a lot of photographs where the military was not present). What I also did was that I took a screenshot of my little blue GPS dot on Google Maps to show exactly where we were. Imagine paying extra money to reach a place that you can’t photograph at will? Well, that’s the way it is in extreme world travel, where the idea is not tourism but seeing a world that most don’t, and for good reason.
Here’s wishing the dear readers of Garhwal Post a very happy and fulfilling 2026. Do watch this space next week…
Nitin Gairola is from Dehradun and is an extreme world traveller who has seen the natural world extensively and is often referred to as the ‘Most Travelled Indian’. He is on a quest to become the first person to travel to every major desert, forest, grassland, tundra & ice biome on Earth, besides every country. 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. www.facebook.com/MostTravelledIndian/
www.instagram.com/MostTravelledIndian/
