I’m in England to meet a true travel legend.
Harry Mitsidis, the founder of Nomad Mania, and the person who arguably has been to most places in the world.
Nomad Mania is a community for extreme travellers and a website that divides the world into 1281 regions. When you fill out the regions you’ve been to you will appear on different rankings, which includes Cities, Sights, Museums, Islands, Airports and lots more.
For that Nomad Mania is quite unique. It’s the only website listing travel achievements through so many aspects and the aim is to create an active multicultural community of travelers, which inspires travel while being a true reference to all 1281 regions of the World.
On the Master Ranking list Harry himself is number one. He’s been to 1188 of the 1281 regions. Obviously he’s been to every country in the world. All the 193 UN nations. He did his last UN country, Equatorial Guinea in March 2008.
Since then he’s all most been to all of them again.
But there’s so much more than just jumping quickly into a country to say that you’ve been there. It’s about really being there – seeing, sensing, meeting, understanding and comparing.
Traveling has become Harry’s way of life, and staying put has become increasingly hard.
Harry Mitsidis was born in London to a Greek father and a South African mother, and has grandparents from Poland and Turkey. So there was always an international element to it all, and this just grew and grew through the years.
Already in 2001 he had visited all the countries of Europe, and then he aimed for the whole world, which initially started as a joke but gradually, as it became within his reach, turned into an obsession.
Before we sit down for the interview, Harry takes me for a stroll through Chatham – the town where he lives. He wanted to show me just how ugly it is.
Then we sit down for a talk about travel and in the second episode, Harry shares some of the adventures he’s had in his traveling life.
Nomad Mania also does a podcast called The Nomad Mania Podcast, hosted by Ric Gazarian.
