One of the things Charles Veley, the world's most-travelled man, has discovered is that there is always a bar. There was a bar on Palmyra Atoll, south west of Hawaii; there was a bar on Willis Island in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland. Ten minutes after he and I have arrived in Heligoland, we are, therefore, sitting in a pub, advertised by a gigantic wooden herring outside and crammed inside with Dutch, German and English nautical knick-knackery. It is midday and we have been on the road for four hours: first by car from Hamburg through fog and a blizzard to an airstrip at Uetersen. Then by aircraft, which took off in a perturbing foot of snow, to an island called Dune. Then by roiling ferry across to Heligoland. Veley, a neatly groomed, 44-year-old is on the lookout — for signs and wonders.
The ‘right' technique
"Heligoland: I had no idea about it," he says. "So when we got here I waited for something. I saw this piece of paper in the window saying Eiergrog and it looked interesting, so I walked past the big wooden fish and came in. My philosophy for travel is this: Always plan as if you are going to do a Japanese-style tour and every second is accounted for. But on arrival, abandon all that and do whatever feels right. Eiergrog felt right."
There is one other guest in the bar, an 87-year-old named Herr Westerhaus. He has a daughter in East Anglia and was, he says, a radio signaller here for U-boats during the war. He had so many good memories he came back when he retired.
Veley, who slips easily in and out of German, has stories for the bar girl and Herr Westerhaus; he has been to all the places they have been. Veley has been to all the places anyone has been. Heligoland is number 806 on Veley's list of visited "countries". He ticked off all the 193 UN-recognised nations eight years ago. Since then he has been collecting islands and atolls, provinces and protectorates. These days he runs a website called Most Traveled People, which has 8,000 members, mostly, like him, "competitive travellers", trading stories about Mizoram, Kingman Reef and Rio Muni.
Charles Veley grew up in Brooklyn and never left the US until he was 18. His parents split when he was young; money was tight and didn't extend to foreign holidays. Veley recalls sitting as a boy in the driver's seat of his father's car with the Rand McNally map on his knees, planning trips from coast to coast in his head, imagining himself always on the open road.
The great escape
His first attempts at escape came when he was sponsored through his computer science degree at Harvard by the Officer Training Corps of the US Air Force; this was the era of Top Gun and competition for places was intense. Veley topped as a trainee fighter pilot before being abruptly dropped from the programme when a routine medical discovered a minute scar on his retina. By that time he was pulling jets out of tailspins and imagining ten years stationed in remote airbases.
He responded to the disappointment by taking a flight over to the UK to see some friends at Cambridge and from there his addiction to travel began. He took a Eurail pass and was hooked by the possibility. The last time he was in this part of Germany he got off at Hamburg train station and went running round town trying to eat a burger. "I had never left the US and suddenly there were borders, passport stamps."
When he returned to the US, Veley joined with some friends in setting up a dotcom company creating software that delivered business intelligence, helping retailers to understand the buying patterns of consumers. He worked 100-hour weeks and managed some long-haul travel when he could. In 1999 the company, MicroStrategy, floated on the ballooning Nasdaq and the share price peaked at $333 (Dh1,223). Veley had 500,000 shares. He was about to get married, he was 35 and retired.
Scoring a goal
"I always had a goal to speak five languages," he says. "I was studying French, German and Italian at night school and then I thought: Why do this? Why not go and live in these places instead? So my wife Kimberly and I went and did a year abroad in 2000. We got two round-the-world tickets and we lived in France and Germany. Then we went to South Africa and the geography down there just blew my mind. I realised we could go to Malawi, Botswana.
Then we took another year and went to South America. And then I learned about the Travellers' Century Club, which has an entry level of 100 countries." At the same time he was getting more and more interested in round-the-world tickets. "If you really get into the mechanics of them," he says, "you can fly first or business and pay much less than economy and that appealed to the computer side of me, puzzling over algorithms."
Along the way, while he was in Tasmania, Veley discovered by turning on the TV that he was no longer a multimillionaire: the MicroStrategy share price had crashed to 40 cents but he was too far gone in his travelling to turn back. He figured the shares would bounce back. He booked some more flights.
On the way to self-discovery
It was when he and his wife were on the way to Hong Kong from Korea and he realised they could stop in Taiwan for four hours that he knew he was hooked.
For a few years after that Veley averaged around 100 countries per year. Some trips were more efficient than others. He flew to the South Pole in 2003 and took in Argentine, Australian, British, Chilean, French, New Zealand and Norwegian territories without leaving the same spot — all countries disputing a patch of land. The share price did rally somewhat and he spent more than $1 million (Dh3.6 million) on plane tickets, freighter passages and sailboat charters: A million miles of travel in just three years, which took in every place you could name and those you couldn't: Malyj Vysotskij Island, Zil Elwannyen Sesel, Ogasawara.
For much of that time, Veley's wife accompanied him, clocking up 200 countries herself but in 2004 they had their first child and now they have three, aged 6, 4 and 2, all autumn births because the Antarctic exploration season ends in February and by that time Veley had been away from home for more than three months. Since his children have been born family has been his priority but he still pursues his impossible itinerary. When we meet he is midway through a 16-stop round-the-world ticket, en route home for a week in San Francisco to catch the end of Valentine's Day and take the children to Disneyland. Then he has a province of Argentina to collect.
Without a trace
Veley says all this while we wander aimlessly in the sleet and knifing cold, fortified by Eiergrog, up to the high point of Heligoland, past a stark geometric church to a headland spiked with radio masts and overlooking rock stacks washed by the ocean. He takes it all in without comment. He doesn't collect souvenirs or take photos beyond the odd snap on his iPhone or jot down notes. Never does.
It seems almost redundant to ask Veley about his favourite places, though from time to time — he has a weirdly accurate memory for names and events — he will suggest how he had a fine time on St Kilda or he'll let slip that everyone loves country and Western music on Pitcairn.
The urge to travel to Veley's extent, a kind of attention deficit on a global scale, has a medical diagnosis: dromomania, the addiction to new experiences, the vagabond neurosis. He's a curious case, though. While most dromomaniacs are permanently wedded to the road, Veley is both rooted and adrift, very settled, he insists and almost permanently travelling.
Words of wisdom
One of the things that his years of waiting for aircraft and boats has taught him is that, try as you might, you can't force situations. "On my initial Euro trip it was late afternoon and I was in Rome and I couldn't go in the Vatican because I was wearing shorts. I remember thinking: this is the only chance I will ever have. I was wrong." The first time he tried to get to the North Pole on an icebreaker from Svalbard they got stuck in the ice at 86 and a quarter degrees latitude. He went back the next year and made it. "Things will come round again" is his mantra. His only assets, beyond financial resources — are patience and politeness in negotiating the world's officialdom. .
On the boat back to the airstrip on Dune we find ourselves in the cabin of the Heligoland ferry with German men in their sixties. They sing as the small boat pitches across the bay. They come here every year, a member of the group says as we approach the airstrip. Have been doing so for 40 years, always this weekend in February, always this place. "Nothing changes. Friends, the same. Heligoland, the same," he says. Charles Veley joins in with the singing, files away the experience neatly but I'm guessing he is also planning what to do later in Hamburg and thinking about tomorrow morning's flight, and the one after and the one after that. Novelty can have its own monotony, too.
