Travellers' Checks | Who is the most travelled man in the world?

In 11th place is Mike Spencer Bown, whose 2017 book, The World’s Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and Through Every Country on the Planet, suggests a higher placing, or perhaps a different title, might be in order. “Most-travelled” is, of course, a difficult term to define. To his credit, Bown claims to have “never made my living from Instagram or lifestyle blogging or podcasting or any of the other modern technological methods, whereby travel can be sustained by sharing one’s experience with a view to monetizing it”.

The same cannot be said of the highest-ranked woman on the list – and eighth overall – Cassandra De Pecol, who visited 196 countries between July 2015 and February last year, and whose hunger for publicity and perceived self-promotion through social media drew an overwhelming amount of online criticism and cyberbullying.

Perhaps the most interesting entry, though, is the little-known (at least outside his native Romania) Dumitru Dan, who visited 76 countries between 1910 and 1923, on his epic walk around the world. He started with three friends, but they were all dead by 1915: one from opium poisoning, another from falling off a mountain and the last from the effects of having both legs amputated due to gangrene. By the time Dan claimed his 100,000 franc prize from the Touring Club de France, inflation had reduced it to a paltry sum. No book about Dan appears to exist, at least in English. Bown’s The World’s Most Travelled Man, which was published in his native Canada in October, will be available at the United States and British Amazon sites from April 30, and can be pre-ordered now.