Is Traveling to Every Country in the World a Worthy Cause? This Group Thinks So.
November 28, 2024 at 06:44AMPeople love to collect things—even countries. In this piece, Tim Neville meets Charles Veley, a 58-year-old from Marin County, California, who in 2005 founded an online group called Most Traveled People. There are now 30,000 members, and Neville joins a few as they bag another spot—a conflict zone in Azerbaijan. It is no wonder that fewer than ten people have seen more of the globe than Veley has, but is this way of traveling an achievement, or a little bit gross?
I’d never heard the phrases “extreme travel” or “country collectors” before I met Veley. The idea of them didn’t sit well when I did. Few things make me feel as fulfilled as travel, and I’ve built a decades-long writing career around it. Before that I spent years traveling and studying in Germany, Peru, and Bolivia. Twice I’ve lived in Switzerland, where I learned the local dialect and where my daughter was born. Each trip I’ve taken—even the ones to difficult places like Afghanistan and North Korea—reinforced a level of humility and shared experience that makes me feel like the most privileged person on earth. Float on your back in the warm waters of Palawan while millions of bats take to the sky, or drink tea on the floor with the Yazidi in Iraq, and the cup that holds all that is possible in your life suddenly can hold a little more. I am deeply grateful.
So the idea of reducing something so meaningful and transformative—and increasingly exclusive—to a collector’s game felt supremely icky, a big eff-you to the world and its cultures and all the resources it takes to go from A to B. How uninterested do you have to be in a place to create rules that govern whether you’ve actually been there?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/27/is-traveling-to-every-country-in-the-world-a-worthy-cause-this-group-thinks-so/
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