Who is the World’s Most Traveled Man?

John Flinn tries to get to the bottom of the question in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, and he emerges with a bit of a Clintonian take on the matter. “It all comes down to whether you consider an ice-covered rock in the middle of the South Atlantic a country,” he writes. “Or whether the Cook Islands are one island group or two. Or whether Mustang is a unique and distinct place, rather than just another region of Nepal.”

The main players in the debate are two Bay Area men, Jeff Shea and Charles Veley, who both claim the title of the World’s Most Traveled Man. Each of them go to extraordinary lengths in order to collect countries, but Flinn asks: Is this really a meaningful sort of travel? “Veley’s astounding harvest of 518 countries in five years works out to an average of 3.5 days per country,” Flinn writes. “Factor in travel time and the occasional stop back in San Francisco, and there isn’t a whole lot of time to get to know these places.”

Shea agrees that Veley’s methods lack depth: “It’s nothing more than stepping off an airplane and getting right back on,” he says. “In my book, that’s not travel. The only people who might be impressed by something like this is people who haven’t traveled much.” Jen over at Written Road has another take on the lightning speed of the travelers: “That doesn’t even sound exhausting,” she writes, “it’s numbing.”

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