Where the man who’s been to every country in the world is going after coronavirus

I’ve come to terms with this period of not travelling,” muses Dr Jack Wheeler, an avid explorer who has been to every country in the world.

“This has been a time to just enjoy being apart from the world with my wife Rebel, who’s been my best friend for 36 years.”

The 76-year-old adventurer, who self-professes to being very bad at sitting still, is currently hunkered down in his home in Portugal amid the coronavirus pandemic – it’s the antithesis of his usual globetrotting lifestyle.

He was once dubbed “the real Indiana Jones”, a moniker he’s rather embarrassed by because, as he puts it, “he’s a fictional character who never loses his hat, and I’m real, very fallibly so”.

That may be, but it’s hard not to spot some similarities.

The American expat, originally from southern California, has been running his own expedition company – Wheeler Expeditions – since 1976, offering one-of-a-kind adventures to far-flung corners of the globe, spending most of the year on nonstop trips.

I was fortunate enough to catch him at his Portuguese home two years ago. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders, filled with everything from tribal spears and ceremonial masks to fossils and other trinkets from his travels.

The first thing to grab my attention was a giant world map on the living room wall, with lines resembling a tangled plate of spaghetti leading to past conquests.

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On another wall was a framed photo of him, at the tender age of 14, on the summit of Switzerland’s famed Matterhorn. There’s a shot of him breaking the Guinness World Record for skydiving above the North Pole in 1981, and one of him next to a tiger in south Vietnam when he was just 17 – he shot and killed the man-eater, which had been ravaging the local village.

But nothing was quite like being introduced to one of Wheeler’s favourite souvenirs: a shrunken head he was given after living with a headhunting tribe in Ecuador as an intrepid 16-year-old.

Despite being an adventurer since his teens, Wheeler didn’t set out to see every country in the world – at least, not at first.

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“It wasn’t until Rebel asked me, out of curiosity about 10 or 15 years ago, how many countries I’d been to and how many there were [in] total,” he reveals.

“Turned out it was some 140 out of then 192 UN member states, now 193 with South Sudan.

“‘So,’ she said, ‘why don’t you go for them all? Pretty rare achievement.’ After that, I made sure to explore a country or two on the way to or back from wherever I was running an expedition. My 193rd came in 2014 with a very cool experience in Sao Tome and Principe.

“To 193, I add the two UN observers – Vatican and Palestine – and three sovereign nations blocked from UN membership by a member state: Taiwan [by China], Kosovo [by Serbia] and Somaliland [by Somalia]. So, my every country count is 198. There are also many separate jurisdictions, but they are territorial or colonial possessions of other countries. I’ve been to a little over 100 of them, but not all.”

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His favourite? “There are too many marvellous places on this earth to choose from,” he says.

But there are five: Nepal for its “friendly people”, the Seychelles for its “endless run of stunning islands”, Indonesia for its “varied vastness”, Malta for its “fascinating history” and the British overseas territory of Tristan da Cunha for its “special and admirable people”.

He adds: “I’m not a country collector but an adventure collector, a life-memorable experience collector.”

Before coronavirus struck, Wheeler managed to pack in a trip to the Caribbean. It’s a little less intrepid than his modus operandi, with “mooring in secret coves, diving for lobsters and drinking way too much rum punch”.

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Now, due to coronavirus travel restrictions, all of the adventurer’s spring trips have been cancelled.

Wheeler has tried to keep himself busy with some of his favourite travel books, including My Life at the Limit by Reinhold Messner and Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. Sifting through mountains of photos and plotting future madcap adventures has also helped.

He is hopeful that his July excursion to Zambia, which he describes as the “best-kept safari country in all of Africa”, will still go ahead.

There’s also the helicopter tour of the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest and Annapurna – with passengers having to wear oxygen masks due to the altitude.

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Needless to say, the professional adventurer has a few enthralling travel tales under his belt.

“The most bizarre story from my travels wasn’t anywhere too exotic,” he says with a fond smile.

“I was in the Irish Times bar on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. I was with a US congressman, and ended up in an arm-wrestling match with his guest, the deputy mayor of St Petersburg in Russia, which I happened to win,” Wheeler says.

“That was in 1996. In 2000, he became president of Russia and still is today.”

But travel isn’t just a restlessness.

Wheeler explains: “The most important thing about travel for me is learning that beyond all the diversity of cultures around the world, it is our common humanity that binds us together as fellow human beings.

“Anthropologists have defined scores of ‘human universals’ that every group of people anywhere and through history exhibit – dancing, music, decorative art, death rituals, customary greetings. It’s a very long list,” he says.

“No matter where we’re from and what we have, we’re human at our core. That’s what I learned from being in every country on earth.”