Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings Page B

into the seething Atlantic, and splatted against the side of the rock. “It’s slippery, covered with algae and kelp and bird guano,” he says, but he “clung to it long enough to call it a landing.” He remembers it as one of the great triumphs of his life. *
    But why? Why the risk and the time and the money just to spend a few seconds on a barren dead volcano, poking seventy feet above the sea four hundred miles from anywhere? Mallory knew: “Because it’s there.”
    I came of age with the sickening certainty that everyone else on the planet had confidently mastered the adult world and I was the only one who felt clueless and a little out of my depth. For many years,I had no idea that everyone feels this way, at least from time to time. Charles Veley, though, is a man comfortable with the amenities . He can get his bearings and feel competent anywhere on Earth, whether he’s clinging to the kelp on Rockall or ordering his namesake drink at the famous Hemingway Bar at the Paris Ritz (the “Lemon Charlie,” a favorite of Kate Moss). * He speaks five languages fluently and has flown fighter jets. He knows to feign anger when government officials give you a hard time in Saudi Arabia but to smile wider when the same thing happens at an African roadblock.
    That’s the dream for most people, who don’t feel totally comfortable anywhere but think that everyone else magically does. Charles is like a superhero to me, but he confides that maps are part of his secret. “The more you know about a map is power,” he says. “Take a look at someone who’s lost and someone who’s not. The person who’s not is a little bit more in control.”
    If you’re a schadenfreude -seeker, though, know this: the NASDAQ collapse and an accounting scandal caused Charles’s start-up stock price to plummet in the first years of the new millennium, shortly after his early retirement. In one trading day in March 2002 alone, his shares lost 61 percent of their value. To pay the bills, he has recently returned to his old job as vice president of corporate development at MicroStrategy, but he’s traveling more than ever. He says he has no regrets about his decade of globetrotting, which he reckons cost him more than a million dollars. “I got to travel as a young, healthy person with fewer ties. If I’d had kids first, I couldn’t have done it at all. I’m pretty pleased with it.”
    The money is the elephant in the room, I suppose, as it so often is in American life. Was Sarah Palin right? Is world travel a perk of birthright and privilege, only for those who have never in their lives flown coach or eaten at a chain restaurant? Or can normal people be supertravelers too?
    Chris Guillebeau thinks so. Chris is another one of those who made a personal goal to visit every nation on Earth, even before he knew there was a club of über-rich “Greatest Generation” types doing the same thing. Like Charles, he’s a guru of travel efficiency. Unlike Charles, he’s not a dot-com millionaire. In fact, he’s a thirty-one-year-old high school dropout who now earns a living via his “lifestyle design” blog, selling self-help guides on inexpensive travel and starting microbusinesses. After 9/11, he and his painter wife, Jolie, felt they should be doing more in the world somehow, and they decided to spend four years volunteering for a medical nonprofit in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Traveling across Africa, he began racking up countries: twenty, then thirty, then forty.
    “This is awesome! What would it take to get to one hundred?” he tells me he remembers thinking. We’ve met for lunch in a brewpub in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. I order a burger, rare, then feel a little guilty when Chris asks for the vegan special, something virtuous with tofu and quinoa. I wonder if the waitress can guess which one of us is an expert on the clean-water crisis in developing nations.
    He did some back-of-the-envelope math, leveraging his growing