Wisconsin man stakes a claim as the youngest person to visit every country in the world
ALTOONA - Globe-trotter is a word that gets tossed around casually regarding people who travel internationally.
Yet it seems somehow insufficient to describe the record-setting travel exploits of Dusty Pfundheller, a 2005 Altoona High School graduate.
In May, Dusty, 31, visited Israel to become — by several definitions, he believes — the youngest person to travel to every country in the world. TheBestTraveled.com, a site that tracks people who set out on the same quest as Pfundheller’s, lists him as the youngest traveler in the world to visit all 193 United Nations countries.
By his count, combining various lists, he has visited 236 countries — always trying to meet locals and never counting airport stops, as some power travelers do.
The seven countries initially singled out for their potential terrorist ties in President Donald Trump’s travel ban? Dusty checked Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan off the list in 2016, and made it to Iraq and Somalia in March of this year.
How about North Korea, generally considered the most closed country in the world? Dusty finagled his way into a visit last July and has smiling photos of himself in front of giant bronze statues of supreme leaders Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang to prove it.
Throughout his excursions, Dusty found himself increasingly drawn to exotic locales, where people were eager to talk to a rare American tourist.
“The more I went to places that most people never go or haven’t even heard of, the better the adventure I had,” Dusty said in a telephone interview from his home in Singapore.
He approaches his unofficial ambassador to the world role in a regular-guy way, showing interest in others and trying to leave a good impression of Americans in his wake.
“I just try to be myself, a nice, friendly person,” he said.
Dusty also has done volunteer dental work at sites across the globe, including the world’s smallest country, the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, where people got very excited last November to learn a dentist was visiting. By the time Dusty left, he figured he had treated half the nation’s population of about 50 people in the country’s lone, long-vacant dental chair.
Remarkably, Dusty has done almost all of his globe-trotting in the past four years while working as a dentist in Singapore and paying off his loans from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 2009, and the University of Florida College of Dentistry, from which he graduated in 2013.
He spends a little more than half his days at work and travels the rest of the time. The logistics add up because Dusty typically works 111⁄2-hour days seven days a week to build up enough time off for his adventures.
Dusty’s biggest border battles came when trying to gain access to Israel and Syria.
“Israel and Syria don’t like each other, but the one thing they have in common is the first two times they didn’t let me in, but then the third time they did,” he said.
His inability to get into Israel, the only country he hadn’t visited, made news there. The Times of Israel even ran a blog he wrote titled “Tinder Dating Got Me Deported From Israel,” in which Dusty described jsonline.com/tap. how he told Israeli security officials he had met girls from the dating site Tinder in Lebanon and Iran.
After hiring a lawyer and filing a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, Dusty got his long-sought visa and visited Israel’s famous sites with his mother, Raina Pfundheller, who called the chance to share the momentous occasion with her oldest son an “amazing Mother’s Day gift.”
For danger, he said, no place he visited compared with Somalia. The East African nation has been wracked by civil war and poverty for decades.
“I had four guys with guns that walked with me everywhere I went,” he said. “It was crazy.”
While he never saw anybody get hurt or heard any gunfire, his visit to Somalia was an unsettling experience.
“That was the only country I’ve gone to where I thought, ‘Maybe I don’t need to go back there anytime soon,’ ” Dusty said.
Dusty tentatively plans to return to the United States in the next year or two and continue practicing dentistry. He has pondered writing a book about his travels.
But there’s also the matter of the 10 countries he traveled to with other people. He is considering returning to those in the next six months so he can claim to have visited every nation solo.
“There are obviously a lot of places in the countries I’ve visited that I haven’t been,” Dusty said. “There is still so much more to see.”
“The more I went to places that most people never go or haven’t even heard of, the better the adventure I had.” DUSTY PFUNDHELLER