Youngest American to Visit Every Country, at Age 21

Lexie Alford was born in 1998 in a small town in Northern California to two parents who ran a travel agency, which is the kind of biographical fact that explains almost everything about the rest of the story. By the time she was three months old she had her own passport. By nine months she had been on her first international flight, to Mexico. By the time she was three she had been on every continent except Antarctica. The Alford family ran their business out of a converted barn behind the house, and the dining-table conversation, from before Lexie could form sentences, was about open jaws and overnight layovers and which Caribbean islands were currently waiving visas for American children. Most of the rooms of her childhood home contained at least one wall map. The Alfords took their daughters out of school for weeks at a time, sometimes months, to travel, and either negotiated assignments with the teachers in advance or simply absorbed the failing grades that came back when Lexie returned. The school, she has said, was always a side concern. The travel was the school.

Her first solo trip, as a twelve-year-old, was to Switzerland to ski with a family friend. Her first solo backpacker trip, in a hostel of strangers, was to Cuba at sixteen. By the time she was eighteen and on the verge of graduating high school, she had already, casually and without any record-attempt intention, been to seventy-two countries. It was her grandmother, of all people, who first pointed out that she might be close to a number worth chasing. The grandmother had been doing the maths at Thanksgiving and observed that, if Lexie kept going at the same pace, she could be the youngest American ever to have stood in every country in the world before she turned twenty-two. Lexie, who had been planning a gap year, sat with the idea for a single weekend. Then she went home and wrote, on a piece of printer paper she taped above her desk, the number one hundred and ninety-six, and underneath it, in red marker, the date of her twenty-second birthday. She had three and a half years.

The numerical record she was chasing was a strange one, because the Guinness World Record for youngest person to visit every country had been established in 2013 by a British traveller named James Asquith at the age of twenty-four. Lexie was not the first to try to break it. At least two other young Americans were attempting it at the same time. The race, as several travel-industry blogs of the late twenty-tens framed it, was not really a race so much as a series of overlapping itineraries among twenty-somethings filming each other on the road. Lexie's pace, once she committed, was punishing. She averaged a new country every nine days for eighteen months. She lived almost entirely out of a single carry-on bag. She missed her sister's high-school graduation. She missed two Christmases. She filmed the entire experience for a YouTube channel called Lexie Limitless that grew, almost by accident, from fifteen thousand subscribers at the start of the project to over half a million by the end.

Some of the countries she remembers best are countries she barely saw. North Korea was three days inside a chaperoned tour group and one polite conversation in halting English with a Pyongyang waitress about her favourite K-pop song, an answer the waitress did not, for obvious reasons, supply. Yemen was a forty-eight-hour transit through the island of Socotra, where she swam alone at sunset under a sky of dragon-blood trees and was, for the only time on the entire trip, momentarily unable to convince herself she should keep going home. South Sudan was a three-day stop arranged at the last minute through a fixer in Juba, who picked her up at the airport in a battered Toyota, drove her to a small hotel, sat in the lobby for two days while she slept, then drove her back. Liberia she nearly skipped. The flights were impossible. The hostel reviews were grim. She went anyway. She wrote, in the long Instagram caption she posted the night she left, that she would not have forgiven herself for finishing the list without it.

The danger, which her parents had been quietly worrying about for years, materialised in two specific incidents that Lexie has talked about in interviews only in the most general terms. In Nigeria, in late 2018, she was followed for two days by a man whose interest in her she could not, even now, fully decode. She changed hotels twice. She left the country a day early. In Saudi Arabia, where she travelled alone in the months immediately after the new tourist visa was introduced, she was groped on a public street by a man who melted into a crowd before she could photograph him. She did not report it. She kept moving. There was, she has said many times since, no one to report it to, in the practical sense, and she had a flight to Bahrain at six the next morning. She has since said, with the candour she has not always extended to the lighter parts of the project, that solo travel as a young woman is not, in spite of what every motivational caption suggests, fully safe, and that the few thousand kind strangers do not, ethically speaking, cancel out the very small number of dangerous ones.

The final country was Mozambique, in June 2019. Lexie had picked it deliberately. It was a country in which her family had never been, a coastline she had read about as a child in one of her mother's old guidebooks, and far enough off the main African circuits that finishing there would feel, she had decided, more like a beginning than an end. She flew in from Eswatini on a single-prop plane. She was met at the small Vilankulo airport by her mother and father and her younger sister, all of whom had flown in the previous afternoon as a surprise. She walked off the tarmac, saw them on the other side of the chain-link fence, dropped her bag and ran. The footage is on YouTube. It has been watched, at the time of writing, just under four million times. Her father is crying. Her mother is laughing. Lexie, who had not really cried during the entire fast eighteen months of the chase, is doing both at once.

Guinness confirmed the record three months later. Twenty-one years and seven months. The youngest person ever to have visited every country in the world. The previous holder, James Asquith, sent her a public message of congratulations. Lexie, with a grace that her audience had come to expect, declined to compare the records directly and pointed out, in every interview that brought it up, that fast travel of any kind was not really about being first. It was about, in her own phrase, being awake. By the time she finished, she had crossed almost three hundred land borders, taken eight hundred flights, slept in something close to seven hundred different beds and accumulated a YouTube channel large enough that the rest of her career, whatever shape it would take, was financially decided. She was twenty-one years old and famous, in the small world of travel media, in the way she had hoped at sixteen she would be.

The years since have been, on the surface, predictable. Lexie has become a working travel host. She has fronted a Discovery Channel series on female-led adventure. She has narrated a documentary for Adobe. She has, at twenty-six, returned to most of the countries she once moved through in two days and stayed for a month each time. The reflection she keeps coming back to, in panels and podcasts, is that the record itself is the smallest part of what the project gave her. The larger part, she insists, is the recalibration of risk. Most of the things her parents and friends had been frightened of, the long flights, the unfamiliar streets, the visas, the borders, turned out to be manageable. Most of the things she had been frightened of herself, the loneliness, the boredom of long airport waits, the strange small grief of finishing, turned out to be the actual experiences. The world, she says, is the easy part. The traveller is the hard part.

There is one detail from the very last day of the project that she has rarely told in interviews and that surfaces, mostly, only in the longer YouTube cut. After the family hug at the airport fence, her father walked her back to the small van that would take them all to the beach resort. On the drive he reached into his rucksack and pulled out the original printer-paper sheet, the one she had taped above her desk in Northern California three and a half years earlier, with the number one hundred and ninety-six and the red-marker date. He had brought it with him from California in his suitcase. He handed it across. She held it on her lap for the entire forty-minute drive, looking out at the Indian Ocean. The country count on the paper was crossed out. The date underneath was a year and a half earlier than the date she had set. The piece of paper, she said in one of the few interviews in which she has mentioned it, is the only physical object she has kept from the entire trip, and it is now framed above her desk in California, on a wall that has otherwise no maps on it at all.