All Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian – 8
By Nitin Gairola
Elon Musk recently made a very witty statement about all those who he may have inadvertently offended in his life. He said that ‘I reinvented electric cars and I am sending man to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?’
Well, I am not doing any of the above for humanity, nor do I wish to. I also hope I am not offending anyone either. However, deep down, my insane drive to see ‘everything’ represents a slightly neurotic, obsessive behaviour which can’t be linked to a ‘chilled-out, normal person’. The good thing is that it’s a positive obsession which doesn’t harm anyone, but an obsession it surely is. And it is this obsession that led me to some soul searching about my way of travel, how I can be the No. 1 at it and who my travel competitors are.
So, I had this idea about checking if there are some big travel (not exploration) related records I can still go for – be it at the level of Guinness, Asia Book or India Book of Records. I started checking out profiles and articles of some insane and extreme jet age travellers i.e. people who came too late for doing ‘geographic firsts’ such as first to visit the North/South Poles, first to reach the highest points on Earth, etc., and who frankly would not be fit enough to explore had it not been for the jumbo jet which Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta naturally didn’t have 8 centuries ago. But these travel junkies claimed to be called the ‘Most Travelled People Ever’ since they had not only been to every sovereign nation but also to almost every province or state within every nation.
But I soon realised that there are more than 300 people on this planet who have been to every UN country (although 200 are documented), around 10,000 plus who have been to over 100 countries (although only 2,000 are documented) and while there is no one yet to visit all 1500 odd provinces or states of all countries, but at least 10 are in the race and very close to hitting the mark at around 1300 or so out of 1500 (check ‘Nomad Mania’ or ‘Most Travelled People’ clubs for this one). With these facts, I realised that despite my intense travels, I will never match these global country collectors to be called a World No 1. Basically, humans love collections, with some collecting cars, houses, watches and these people were collecting countries. So here, even if we did visit all 193 UN member nations, we would have 300 people ahead of us worldwide and that would also include 2 resident Indians and an Indian who is now a US citizen. So, we were beaten on this count before we had even started the race.
With that I thought that, while these people have visited all countries, has anyone seen all parts of the ‘natural world’, the so called physical or geographical world that is made up of real deserts, jungles, grasslands, tundra, mountains and plateaus and not imaginary and shifting lines on the map that give us our countries. So, I wondered how many such features are there on Earth and can we logically split the natural world just as countries divide the political world. Thus, I stumbled upon the thought that I could be the first human to visit every desert on earth. But alas, there are 8 billion (i.e. 8,000 million or 800 crore) humans alive at this time and another 100 billion who have lived in the past, and after a few months of research I realizsed that a German called Michael Martin and his partner Elke Wallner had already crossed all deserts by 2004 (when I was just 24 years old), and thus had become the first humans (or any living creature for that matter) to do so.
Then I thought I could be the 3rd (bronze medal) but soon found out that there is Harry Mitsidis, Michael Runkel, Sascha Garbow, Gustav Adolf-Junge, Joao Paulo Peixoto, Axel Wacht and Carl-Gustaf Siby who have done it too. So, that made me at best and potentially No 10 in the world. I was naturally quite despondent, but my mind doesn’t give up easily. Richa, my partner, made me realise that we may have been licked in the global race but all these people were non-Asians. With that eureka moment, I realised that I will be the first Asian, first Indian and also the first person from the Indian sub-continent (which includes all our neighbours) and first from the so-called ‘Global South’ as well (which includes all relatively less developed countries i.e. the whole world except US, Canada, European nations, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia & New Zealand and majority of them are in the southern part of the planet). My competition at the Asia level was intense, too, as I was competing with a Japanese person (Kazuto Matsumoto), a Chinese (Shihe Huang), 2 Singaporeans (Wee Cheng Tan & Shanaka Goonewardena) and a Russian (Igor Sergeev), all of whom are crazy, extreme travel collectors.
After tracking the record for visiting all major deserts, I started listing all major jungles (at least 100,000 square km in area), all grasslands, longest mountain chains and largest plateaus. Also, I looked at the world’s various biomes or eco-zone types, with a biome being a natural division of the world based on its specific vegetation and animal life, and some examples of biomes are the various kinds of deserts, forests, grasslands, tundra, etc. Besides, I visited all the continental and oceanic tectonic plates (our land is over these slowly moving plates and their movement causes earthquakes and forms volcanoes), all continents and sub-continents and all climate zones. I went a step further and started noting down my UNESCO World Heritage sites and national parks seen. I believe I will have another set of records wherein I will not only be the first Indian but the first person ever to visit all these places in the natural world without ever using self-owned personal transportation i.e. without my own car, bike or anything else, since I have always made use of public transport or private tour vehicles. That would truly be unique, since even Michael Martin of Germany visited all deserts of the world in 2004 using his personal motorbike.
And to be clear, my ‘most travelled’ angle is based on the number of unique places of the natural world I have visited and it does not consider how long I have stayed there, or how many miles I have travelled. Besides, these natural world biomes are the reason for the MTI or the ‘Most Travelled Indian’ claim and not visiting all countries, although I have been to more than 100 as well. This natural world was the white space in extreme world travel I was looking for and when I found it, I didn’t look back. I had found my mission and my life’s story.
(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.)
