She Visited Every Country in 18 Months and Set a World Record

Cassie De Pecol grew up in Connecticut in a family that did not travel. Her father was a contractor. Her mother taught dance. Her only foreign trip as a child was a single week in the Bahamas, during which, she has said with the wry deadpan that has become her trademark in interviews, she spent most of the time inside the resort eating spaghetti. There is nothing in her early biography to explain what came later. She was a quiet, thin, blonde girl who at fifteen began saving every dollar she made babysitting toward a one-way ticket out of New England, although she did not yet know where. The ticket, when she finally booked it at twenty-one in 2011, was to Costa Rica, for an internship at a tiny ecotourism farm in the cloud forest. She stayed seven months. She came home with a duffel bag of dirty laundry, no money, and a single fixed idea, which she wrote into a notebook on the flight back and never crossed out. The idea was that she was going to see every country in the world before she was thirty, and she was going to find a way to make it pay for itself.

The first four years after Costa Rica were the years no one writes about, because they are not glamorous. She worked three jobs in Norwalk, mostly waitressing, picked up part-time sales work for a backpack company, lived in her parents' basement and rejected every dating invitation. She read every book she could find on World-Record holders, sponsorship, sustainable tourism and personal branding. She built a spreadsheet of two hundred and ninety-six potential sponsors, divided them into tiers by likelihood of yes, and began cold-emailing the bottom of the list to practise her pitch on companies she did not yet care about. By the time she got to the top of the list, in late 2014, she had refined the pitch to a single page. The expedition would visit every UN member state plus Palestine and the Vatican in under two years. Each country would receive a tree planted in its name through her partner non-profit. Each country would also receive a one-to-three-day talk to a youth or university audience on sustainable travel, in exchange for ground logistics from the local tourism board. The branding sponsor would be one main travel company that funded the airfares, plus a handful of smaller equipment partners. The pitch worked. Within nine months she had her main sponsor, a luxury travel agency called International Institute for Peace through Tourism, plus airline miles, plus a single black backpack.

The launch country was Palau, partly because Palau was both small and photogenic and partly because it was almost as far from Connecticut as it was possible to start. The president of Palau personally welcomed her at the airport. He planted the first tree. She gave the first talk to a room of teenagers in a community hall, telling them, with the careful midwestern earnestness that almost everyone who interviewed her would later remark on, that she was nervous and that she had not yet figured out what she was doing. From Palau she flew to Micronesia, then the Marshall Islands, then Kiribati, then Nauru, then Tuvalu, the seven smallest island nations of the Pacific knocked off in three weeks, a punishing schedule of overnight stopovers and tiny propeller flights with no scheduled second attempt if she missed a connection. She lost six kilos in the first month. She slept on terminal benches three nights out of seven. She had not, she has admitted since, really understood until then how brutal the geography of the project actually was.

Once the Pacific was done she crossed to Asia and the pace settled into the schedule that would, more or less, hold for the next year and a half. Two countries every three days. Wake at four. Talk to one local youth group. Plant one tree. File one Instagram post. Sleep on the next plane. She had brought one small black carry-on suitcase and one single black-canvas backpack, the same two bags that would do the whole trip, and inside them was the smallest packing list she could manage: three changes of clothes, one cocktail dress for embassy events, a laptop, a small camera, a single pair of running shoes. The laundry was done in hotel sinks. The cocktail dress survived a hundred and ninety-six washes. She did not, by her own count, eat a sit-down meal in a real restaurant for more than the first three months. Most of her calories came from sponsor-supplied protein bars, fruit at airport lounges and the buffet breakfasts in whatever hotel the local tourism board had put her in for the night.

Some countries were strange and tender in ways that no schedule had predicted. In Saudi Arabia, in 2016, she became one of the first solo women in years to be granted what was effectively a tourist visa, in a country which had not yet officially created one. The interior ministry assigned her a male chaperone who, she said later, spent the entire two days saying almost nothing, opening doors and looking at the floor. She gave her talk in a women's college in Riyadh, in English with simultaneous translation, and after the formal Q-and-A a young Saudi student walked up to her, took her hand and said, very quietly, that she was the first woman she had ever met who had been to more than five countries. The student began to cry. Cassie wrote about that moment, two months later, on her blog, as the moment she stopped thinking of the expedition as a personal record and started thinking of it as something whose value was measured in those one-to-one encounters.

There were terrible days. In Libya she travelled with armed guards for forty-eight hours, slept fully dressed in a hotel with the lights off in case of mortars and gave a talk to a small audience that included two Libyan generals. In Yemen, where she would finish the project, she arrived during a brief ceasefire in late January 2017 and was driven from the airport at high speed past walls pockmarked with shrapnel. The last tree of the expedition was planted in a small garden in Sana'a, attended by a UN aid coordinator, two local journalists and three children who had walked half a mile to be present. Cassie wrote in her notebook on the plane out of Yemen that she had spent eighteen months trying very hard not to cry on camera, and that she had not entirely succeeded. The footage from that final day, much of it shot by her own phone, has a clarity to it that the early polished YouTube videos do not. She is plainly exhausted. She looks twenty years older than the woman who had left Palau. The shot of her stepping back onto the tarmac at JFK on 2 February 2017 to applause from a small crowd of family and sponsors is the shot that ran in newspapers across the world the next day.

Guinness World Records confirmed two titles in 2017. Fastest time to visit every sovereign country and first documented woman to do so. There had been at least three earlier claimants, all men, but none had documented every single border stamp to the standard Guinness now demanded, and Cassie had spent the entire trip having her passport scanned and her boarding passes archived to a Dropbox folder that, by the end, ran to fourteen thousand individual files. The criticism, when it came, was inevitable. Travel writers asked, with some fairness, what it really means to have visited a country if you spent less than seventy-two hours there, slept in an airport hotel for most of it, and never met anyone who was not a tourism-board representative. Cassie's answer, in her TED talk a year later, was disarmingly modest. She said she had not, by any honest standard, seen the world. She had merely been to it. The two things were not the same, and the difference was the rest of her life.

The Skal Peace Project, the small non-profit she launched on the back of Expedition 196, has since trained more than four thousand young people on three continents in sustainable tourism principles, and it remains, in her own description, the most important outcome of the trip. Cassie herself has since settled with her husband in Costa Rica, on a small farm not far from the original ecotourism volunteer placement that started it all in 2011. She runs an extreme-goal-setting podcast and an occasional adventure event for women. She is, by Instagram standards, almost unfindable. There are no daily stories. There is no monetised brand. She has gone, with apparent relief, in the opposite direction from the speed of Expedition 196. The other lesson of every-country travel, she has said in her quieter recent interviews, is that you cannot do it forever and you should not want to. You do it once. You learn what you learn. Then you find one small place and stay there long enough to be useful.

If there is a single sentence in all of Cassie De Pecol's writing that her readers have quoted back to her most often, it is one she wrote on the flight home from Yemen and posted, without comment, the next morning. The news, she wrote, exaggerates how dangerous the world is. The danger, in fact, is the opposite. The danger is sitting on your sofa long enough to believe that the news is the truth. Almost every country she had entered, she insisted in interview after interview for years afterwards, had treated her better than she had been told it would. The Iranian taxi driver who refused to take her money. The Egyptian security guard who walked her around a museum after closing. The Pakistani family in Lahore who insisted she eat dinner with them when they saw her looking lost in their street. The hundred small acts of unprompted kindness, she has said, are the actual record. The other record, the Guinness one, is just the paperwork.

The expedition's quiet legacy, more than half a decade later, is not the record itself, because two other people have since broken it. The legacy is the template. Almost every solo, sponsored, multi-country project that has launched since 2017 borrows, knowingly or not, from the same playbook. Two bags. One main sponsor. A non-profit partner. A trackable Dropbox of evidence. A talk in every country. A single black dress that survives a hundred and ninety-six laundries. The pattern, which seems obvious in retrospect, was not obvious until Cassie De Pecol made it work. The first big idea is always the one that is hardest to take seriously, and she had taken it seriously enough, alone in her parents' Connecticut basement at twenty-three, to write it down in a notebook and not cross it out.