San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Inside the mysterious sport of ‘COUNTRY COLLECTING’
Last month, Lexie Alford boarded a bus in Seoul bound for the narrow strip of heavily mined territory that separates the two Koreas, stepped into a North Korean conference room usually reserved for diplomatic meetings, and broke a world record.
Alford, a 21-year-old Nevada City native, is an ultra-traveler, part of a small cadre of humans who make it their business to visit as many places on Earth as possible, and her May 31 dip into the hermit kingdom probably made her the youngest person to visit all 195 sovereign countries recognized by the United Nations.
“It was hard to process that I was actually standing in my last country,” Alford said from Indonesia last week, where she’s doing promotional work for a scuba diving resort. “I'm relieved. I'm proud of myself for following through on something I said I was going to do years ago.”
But Alford’s record isn’t official yet. For the past three years, she’s been angling for the Guinness World Record, dubbed the “youngest, fastest” by the subculture of ultra-travelers, who call themselves “country collectors.” But a byzantine compendium of evidence must be offered up to Guinness before the
record keeper will confirm the feat.
“Traveling to every country would be a breeze if I didn’t have to prove it,” Alford laughs.
“Youngest, fastest” title contenders are tasked with “making clear exactly how the travel progressed,” a Guinness rep told The Chronicle. That means compiling a formal dossier on your escapades — complete with passport stamps, copies of plane tickets and hotel receipts and two sworn witness statements from locals in each locale. All told, Alford figures she has more than 10,000 different pieces of documentation — “like 30 pounds of
pieces of paper,” she says — that she will now categorize and submit to the Guinness Records Management Team. She expects a determination within 12 weeks.
Guinness isn’t messing around with this record. Alford says she’s met young people who visited every country, but had their record applications denied because of lack of evidence.
But the prize might be worth the effort: A previous record holder, James Asquith, who hit 195 at age 24, went on to successfully launch a travel app and is now featured regularly in newspaper travel sections in his native Britain. Other competitive travelers are regularly published in media outlets, accrue enough Instagram followers to attract sponsors and, of course, revel in online bragging rights. Alford hopes the “youngest, fastest” title, which last changed hands six years ago, will help convince a publisher to print a book she’s working on about her travels.
Some of Alford’s earliest passport stamps won’t be easy for her to find. That’s because she’s been traveling her whole life. The daughter of travel agents, Alford and her parents visited roughly 72 countries together when she was younger, while planning vacations for Sacramento-area locals and guiding clients all around the world.
But her idea to visit every country on Earth didn’t take hold until she was 18. Alford had graduated from high school at age 16 and picked up her associate’s degree by the time she could vote. “But I really did not want to continue in college without knowing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she says.
While a normal teen might consider a gap year or a few months backpacking, Alford wanted to push herself. She’d heard of the Guinness record and realized her upbringing put her in immediate contention; she figured she could tick the remaining 124 countries off her list by the time she was 21. The record became an excuse to push herself to visit places she would have never considered venturing.
“I became obsessed,” she says.
Obsession is a trait Alford shares with many of the world’s most traveled individuals. Little known to those of us content to let Rick Steves be our tour guide abroad, there is a community of people who spend most of their free time (and money) visiting spots far, far from the pages of Travel + Leisure.
If you’ve been to 100 countries, you’re eligible to join Travelers Century
Club, a 65-year-old group that counts 1,400 members. They aren’t professional travelers or looking to make a living from their journeys; joining the club is more about bragging rights — like being a part of Mensa — and a chance to connect with like-minded travel hounds. But the club is just the beginning. For the real obsessive, for those who were bitten by the travel bug and came down with a chronic condition, there is the MTP list.
Short for Most Traveled People, the list includes a staggering 891 far-flung places. Think getting to the Central African Republic sounds hard? Try the South Orkney islands, a wildly inhospitable chain 375 miles off the coast of Antarctica. Or how about the Nicobar Islands, an Indian archipelago (population: 1,637) 800 miles from the mainland?
Don Parrish, a retired manager from Bell Labs who lives in Illinois, has been to 860 spots on the list. He’s currently number two on the Most Travelled People list — he fluctuates between first and second often — and says that, while impressive, Alford’s record wouldn’t even put her toward the top of the MTP list.
“She’s just starting to inhabit this world,” Parrish laughs. “But anybody who starts with a goal like [the Guinness record] is going to just naturally follow through” and become a lifelong country collector. (For her part, Alford says she’s done collecting and is more interested in experiential travel.)
Charles Veley, the founder of MTP (and current number three on The List), says the term “dromomania” often gets bandied about when he and other country collectors explain their passion. The diagnosis, a 19th century psychiatric condition that has fallen out of vogue presumably because it is not real, described the “uncontrollable urge to wander.”
“That’s a little different than people who are super passionate and want to collect something,” Veley says. “Certain people, when they get a to-do list, like me, then they can’t stop doing it until it’s done.”
Many country collectors, however, look down their noses at Guinness’ list and some of the young people who have rushed around the world in pursuit of the “youngest, fastest” title. When a traveler’s first priority is the passport stamp, and records and social media posts become the primary purpose of a visit, it begs the question: What’s the point of travel?
“People are cynical (about record seekers) and see it as a promotional stunt,” says Stefan Krasowski, who blogs about travel and runs the popular Every Passport Stamp Facebook group, where country collectors convene and carp online. “The record, I treat more as a novelty than something you would take serious.”
Alford is conscious of all the criticisms about chasing the record and has mostly avoided the sort of microvisits that barely count for travel, with two exceptions: her few minutes inside the Korean DMZ, and a trip to the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights rather than Syria. Both cases raised geopolitical concerns. (Guinness told Alford that both of those visits count.)
Still, you don’t set records by taking your sweet time, and Alford’s pace has been frenzied. Last year, she hit 90 countries — one every four days — and much of her mental energy was spent finding flights, maximizing air miles, and scouting hostels or hotels that would offer her accommodation in exchange for published content.
For every exciting, horizon-broadening experience, like sitting around an open fire with a bunch of drunk Russians while camping in Turkmenistan, there were stints in countries where Alford didn’t meet another English speaker and tourism infrastructure was nonexistent.
“I was alone for almost five months last year,” she said. “I spent Valentine’s Day in Micronesia alone. It forced me to get a lot more comfortable with myself.” Some of her time was rending, verging on harrowing. “It took me months to get out of the depression I felt after West Africa,” she said. She spent two or three days at most in Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where terrorism concerns were constant and exposure to extreme poverty and hunger left Alford shaken. “It affected me so much more and deeper than I would have ever anticipated,” she said.
Her short trip to Yemen, which is in the throes of a protracted civil war, left her distraught and questioning her extreme travel. “It made me realize how much we take for granted in the West,” she says.
Back home in Northern California, after three years on the go, Alford is finding meaning in the little things: reliable internet and electricity, and fresh vegetables. “I have a new appreciation for being an American and how free we are and the access we have to all of our basic needs,” she says. “Home is a sanctuary.” She’s not sure how much the record cost, financially. Much of her journey was funded via air miles accumulated from working at her family travel agency. “I’ve spent every dime I’ve ever made,” she says. After school, she picked up travel blogging gigs and generated web content for hotels and the travel industry. But so far, she hasn’t gotten rich from her attempt to break the record. “I haven’t bought new clothes since high school,” she says.
Right now, from the remote Indonesian island she jetted off to after the DMZ, Alford says the achievement hasn’t sunken in yet — and the newfound attention has been jarring. “The press is overwhelming,” she says. “I’ve been trying really hard not to read any of the comments.”
Once she compiles her evidence for Guinness, though, Alford hopes she can finally slow down.
“I’ve been very rushed. That’s why I’m trying to push myself to write this book,” she says. “I want to work on processing all the things I’ve taken away from these experiences and really come to terms with everything that I’ve learned.”