The Man Who Visited Every Country on Earth (And Made It Look Easy)

The first land border Drew Binsky crossed was the one between South Korea and absolutely anywhere else, which is to say he did not really cross a border at all, because South Korea is a country that you can enter only by air or by sea. The functional first border was the Thai-Cambodian crossing at Poipet in 2012, and it was a disaster. Drew was a chubby, sunburned twenty-one-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, on his first big trip outside the United States, halfway through a teaching contract at a hagwon in Suwon. He had heard from older expats in Seoul that you could fly to Bangkok for almost nothing on a long weekend and bus across to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. What he had not heard was that the Poipet crossing was, at that moment, one of the most corrupt land borders in Asia, and that the price for a visa was whatever a young American in cargo shorts could be talked out of. He paid sixty dollars when the official price was twenty, lost another twenty to a fake stamp and was very nearly left on the wrong side after his minibus driver tried to abandon his bag. He arrived in Siem Reap at midnight, sweaty, scammed and elated, and lay on the floor of his eight-dollar guesthouse with his rucksack as a pillow. It was, he later said, the night he understood what he wanted to do with the next ten years of his life.

The blog came first, in 2013, and it was called The Hungry Partier, which is the kind of brand name that only a twenty-two-year-old who has just discovered street food and cheap beer would think was a good idea. The early posts are very much that. There are listicles of the best 7-Eleven snacks in Bangkok. There is an entire entry on the cheapest way to do Full Moon Party. There is a photo, which Drew has never deleted out of respect for the man he used to be, of him drinking a bucket on Haad Rin beach wearing a fluorescent vest with the words I LOVE THAI GIRLS spray-painted on the back. The Hungry Partier was not, in those days, an obvious launchpad for a career. But it had one thing going for it that almost no other travel blog of that era had, which was the absolute relentlessness of the posting. Drew put up at least one piece of content every single day from August 2013 onwards, and he did not miss for the next eight years. By the time he hit the four-year mark he had become the kind of writer who knows, automatically, how many words is two hundred and how much a tuk-tuk should cost in Phnom Penh.

By 2016, the partier persona was beginning to feel ridiculous. Drew had been on the road full-time for two years by then, having quit teaching, sold the few things in his Korean apartment and moved into a series of three-dollar guesthouses across Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. The blog was making just about enough to live on. He had begun, almost as an experiment, to film one-minute videos for a then-new Facebook page in the style of Nas Daily, the Israeli-Palestinian storyteller who had recently exploded by posting a daily ninety-second video. The first Drew Binsky videos look almost amateurishly earnest. He stands in front of a temple. He says, on camera, This is Drew, and today I am in Bagan, Myanmar, and let me tell you why this place blew my mind. He talks for fifty seconds. He cuts. He uploads. Inside a year he had a million Facebook followers. Inside two, the format was paying his rent.

The decision to formally try to visit every country in the world came in 2017, in a hotel room in Cape Verde, and like most of Drew's big decisions it was made in about three minutes. He was looking at a spreadsheet of countries he had been to, counted ninety-two, and worked out that at his current pace of around twenty-five countries a year, he could complete the United Nations list in four more years if he stopped going home and stopped doubling back. He moved to Bangkok, which is the cheapest hub in the world for an ambitious passport, and built his life around a permanent fortnight-on, fortnight-off rhythm. Two weeks moving through new countries, two weeks back at his serviced apartment editing the footage, then go again. He did not see his family in Phoenix for two and a half years at one point. His parents, who had been skeptical at the start, became his most reliable correspondents, watching every video the morning it dropped and emailing notes.

The countries that almost killed the project were, predictably, the difficult ones. Iran took eight months of paperwork and a personal recommendation from a man in Shiraz he had met once on Instagram. Saudi Arabia, before the tourist visa existed, required a fake invitation letter from a businessman in Riyadh that took six months of cold emails to arrange. Somalia required a security contractor, two pickup trucks, four armed men and four thousand dollars in cash for a single twenty-four-hour visit to Mogadishu, of which Drew spent most of it inside a fortified compound that smelled of diesel. North Korea, which can be visited only as part of a tightly chaperoned tour, was easier than any of those, although Drew has been careful, ever since, to acknowledge that the smiling video he made there was filmed at three locations chosen entirely by the government and that the rest of the country, the one most North Koreans actually live in, he never saw.

The country he could never get into easily was Equatorial Guinea, and it was Equatorial Guinea that nearly broke him. The visa was technically available but the embassy in Washington was permanently shut. Cold emails to the foreign ministry went unanswered. A businessman in Malabo had agreed to send a letter of invitation but then disappeared. Drew, who by 2020 was on country one hundred and ninety with the pandemic about to close every border on earth, flew to Cameroon and crossed by minibus to the Equatoguinean border at Kye-Ossi, on a tip from another traveller. The guards on the Guinean side asked him for a thousand dollars. He had two hundred. They put him in a hut for six hours. He was eventually let through after an Equatoguinean police captain happened to be off duty in the next village, saw his Hungry Partier T-shirt, recognised him from Facebook and intervened. Drew stayed three days, filmed a short, kind, sober piece about an oil-rich country whose people see almost none of the wealth, and flew out.

The last country was Saudi Arabia, where Drew had been refused entry eight times. It was April 2021, eighteen months into a global pandemic that had stalled the project for a year, and Saudi Arabia had just begun, very tentatively, to issue tourist visas to fully vaccinated foreigners. Drew flew from Dubai with a four-page printed dossier of vaccination records, hotel bookings and a personal letter to the Saudi embassy that he had agonised over for three days. He landed at three in the morning in Riyadh, was waved through immigration in eight minutes, walked out of the terminal into the empty pre-dawn heat, and lay on the warm pavement of the kerb outside arrivals and cried for the first time on the entire decade-long trip. The countdown to one hundred and ninety-seven was over. He had stood on the soil of every single country recognised by the United Nations, plus Taiwan, plus Palestine, plus Kosovo, plus the Vatican. He was thirty years old. He had taken, according to his own count, one thousand four hundred and ninety-three flights, crossed two hundred and twelve land borders, slept in roughly nine hundred different beds and spent something close to eighteen hundred days outside the United States.

What is interesting about Drew Binsky's work, looking back, is not the achievement itself, because every-country travel is now its own small subculture and at least a dozen others have done it. What is interesting is the camera he pointed. The Hungry Partier brand died, quietly, around the time he hit one hundred countries, and was replaced with something steadier and gentler. The videos that built the four million subscribers are not the videos about the partying. They are the videos about ordering food in North Korea, getting a haircut in Iran, eating with the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, attending a wedding in Yemen, drinking tea with the last living veteran of the Bangladeshi war of independence. Drew, who can be a hammy presenter at his worst, has the rare instinct of knowing when to shut up and let the other person talk for a minute. Most of his most-watched videos are not really about him at all.

The criticism that follows him, and that he has begun to acknowledge in his own podcast, is that fast travel cheapens places. Three days in Mogadishu is not knowing Somalia. Forty-eight hours in Tuvalu is not knowing Tuvalu. The Hadzabe of Tanzania did not exist for Drew until he flew in, filmed for two days and flew out, and they will not exist for him afterwards either, in the sense of any ongoing relationship. Drew's response is, in his own words, the most honest thing he has ever said in an interview. He is not, he insists, a journalist or an anthropologist. He is a sampler. He is the man at the bar handing you a free pour of seven hundred different bottles and saying have a sip, go buy a whole one if you like it. The project, he says, is not the destination. The project was always to make the rest of the world look less scary to the millions of young Americans who watch his videos from a sofa, on the assumption that a slightly less scared America might, in time, produce slightly more travellers and slightly fewer wars. Whether that bet pays out, history will decide.

These days, post-completion, Drew lives in Bangkok with his Filipino-American wife Deanna, edits less and podcasts more, and has stopped, finally, posting daily. He goes home to Phoenix every Christmas. He is writing a book. He still flies, regularly, to one or two countries a month, but the rule is no more first-time visits. He goes back. Iran, three times. Pakistan, four. Somaliland, twice. The point of the next decade, he has said in his most recent long-form interview, is to be slower. To go for a month, not a week. To learn a language properly, in his case Spanish, because the next phase of his career, the cinematic-documentary phase, will be made out of Latin America. The Hungry Partier of 2013 is unrecognisable. What is left, he says, is curiosity, and curiosity is the only thing about him that has not changed in fifteen years.