From distant islands to the DMZ, an intrepid teen hits 118 international locations earlier than turning 20

Arjun Malaviya is an overachiever and a planner. So, when he instructed his mother and father that he wished to save lots of up for a solo hole 12 months to journey the world, they weren’t all that shocked.

Now, at 19 years previous, he is bought 5 utterly full passports and a slew of outstanding life experiences beneath his belt. Malaviya instructed NPR that he is the youngest solo traveler to go to 100 international locations.

“I was 17 years and 228 days old when I reached my 100th country,” he stated, including that he celebrated the milestone in Nadi, Fiji, by visiting the colourful Sri Siva Subramaniya, one of many largest Hindu temples within the Southern Hemisphere. One other superlative: Malaviya stated, primarily based on his analysis, he is additionally “the youngest person to visit every country in Oceania.” (NPR has not independently verified these claims.)

The intrepid teen stated he is sizzling on the heels of Lexie Alford, who holds the Guinness World File for being the youngest particular person to go to each sovereign nation on the earth. By the age of 18, Alford had solely visited about 70 nations.

Malaviya set out on his expedition on his seventeenth birthday in July 2023. Over 13 months, with occasional journeys again house — Westlake Village in Southern California — he sojourned by way of a few of the world’s most populated cities and its most distant islands. He frolicked in Bali’s rice paddies, sipped tea with a Taliban guard in Afghanistan and bathed beneath the inexperienced skies of the aurora borealis in Norway.

All of the whereas, Malaviya stated he had one objective: to satisfy the locals and make a real connection. He most popular visiting small villages fairly than glitzy locales, eager to see how folks actually stay.

“The big thing that I took away is that people are more similar than different,” he stated.

“Even if it’s in Afghanistan and you’re sitting down and talking to a religiously devout Muslim goat herder, you’ll see that he still has a lot of the same desires and life that someone here might have; A better life for his kids, a consistent job, and education for his kids, and the ability to explore within his own country and just take vacations.”

Build up confidence and life abilities, from Seoul to Kabul

Malaviya launched his grand tour in Seoul, South Korea: From all he’d learn, the nation could be a secure and tourist-friendly launching pad with excellent public transportation techniques. He moved on to different Asian international locations together with Japan, Myanmar and India.

His lodgings included a mixture of Airbnbs, hostels, resorts and household mates’ properties. He traveled mild, outfitted with an iPhone, a small health club bag and a standard-sized backpack. And although Malaviya is fluent in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and has studied Japanese, Malaviya stated Google Translate proved to be one in all his most respected instruments. Utilizing the app on his cellphone, he stated he was capable of have interaction in deep conversations with strangers. It particularly got here in useful in locations like Afghanistan, Venezuela and Syria, the place folks opened as much as him about what on a regular basis life appeared like beneath authoritarian regimes.

He stated they impressed upon him the concept, whereas information protection could dwell on the financial and humanitarian hardships of a spot, there may be nonetheless loads of magnificence and cultural richness that may be taken in by guests if they provide it an opportunity.

“As a tourist when you go to a lot of these places you don’t feel all of the negatives that the government imposes on the people who live there,” he stated. ” So, just because we say that a government is bad, that doesn’t need to dissuade you from visiting that country as a tourist.”

In Damascus, Syria, which was nonetheless beneath Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship when Malaviya visited, he stated he met with an impassioned bed-and-breakfast proprietor who spoke brazenly about his want for Assad to be overthrown so extra folks like him might take within the wonders of his nation.

Different highlights included a free Madonna live performance on the seashores of Rio de Janeiro, the place Malaviya stated he fortunately misplaced himself amid the big crowd of followers who confirmed up. On the Korean peninsula, he fulfilled “a lifelong dream” of visiting the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that separates South Korea from North Korea. He additionally bought to wash within the milky mud baths in Palau, an island in Micronesia.

The islands of Oceania as complete, Malaviya stated, contained a few of the most breathtaking and pristine landscapes he is ever seen. Nonetheless, he stated his journey to the island nation of Nauru — the third-smallest nation on the earth and one of many least-visited international locations on Earth – was barely miserable. “It was sad for me to see how much the country is struggling,” he stated, referring to the small republic’s reliance on overseas support to maintain its economic system.

Probably the most harrowing cease got here in November 2023 because the battle between Ukraine and Russia raged.

“I was in Moldova and someone told me Odessa was just four hours away. I thought that would make a great day trip since, from what I’d read, most of the fighting was taking place in Kyiv and Lviv. But I get there and we start getting bombarded with [Russian] bombs,” he stated.

He scrambled to seek out cowl in a close-by bomb shelter earlier than fleeing again to Moldova, however not earlier than taking a selfie.

The ultimate area he toured was the Center East, together with Iraq and Iran, “which I actually loved,” he stated. Malaviya defined he’d waited to go to this a part of the world “because I felt like it was a build up where I had to use all my skills that I had gained in the first ten months of travel.”

The other of helicopter parenting

So how does a teen persuade his mother and father to embark on such a frightening journey? Analysis – heaps and plenty of analysis, Malaviya’s mom, Anita Venkataraman, instructed NPR.

“When he started speaking to us about what he planned to do and how we planned to execute it, it became quite clear that he had put more thought into it than the casual tidbits we had heard from him,” Venkataraman recalled.

The pitch was simple: He’d begin off in simply navigated counties the place communication house could be most dependable. He’d examine in each two days. He would not keep out previous 10 p.m. if he might assist it. And he’d finance your entire journey on his personal.

Malaviya was simply 15 years previous when he initially proposed the concept in 2022, And regardless of some trepidation, each of his mother and father agreed to the odyssey inside a few weeks. It took him two years of working a sequence of strange jobs — tennis classes, a minimum-wage administrative assistant job and dealing at his mother and father’ software program firm — to boost the funds to set off on his journey, he stated.

“That was one of the things I made clear to my parents; That I wanted to pay for the entire thing on my own. I didn’t want to ask them for any money,” he stated. (All in all, Malaviya stated he spent $22,500 on your entire voyage.)

Venkataraman stated the isolation of the COVID pandemic is what actually ignited her son’s wanderlust. In her view, Malaviya has all the time been an intuitively curious and unbiased one that craved social interplay. Being cooped up for a lot of his adolescence was irritating for him, she stated. However he took benefit of the scenario, graduating a 12 months early from highschool in 2023 and getting a two-year head begin on college by finishing all of his basic schooling coursework at a local people school.

“I think as parents, a lot of times we don’t want our kids to even fail. We just want them to be successful,” she stated. “But I do think there’s a lot that kids learn from failing at things. Doing things, taking a chance and then failing, but then picking themselves up and going for it.”

Venkataraman described her son as accountable and educated concerning the numerous visa and documentation necessities for various international locations. That is why it was simple for her to be his “cheerleader, offering “assist with slightly little bit of warning.”

That support did not waiver, even when Malaviya called to notify his parents that he’d been “kind of kidnapped” in Myanmar. A stranger had offered to show the boy around the town and offered him a home-cooked meal, but then refused to let him leave his house until Malaviya forked over $100.

“It was scary in fact,” his mother said, but she and Malaviya put the incident in a more comprehensive context. “I perceive that there are folks with so little, that they resort to issues that maybe if that they had some, they would not, usually resort to,” she said. Plus, she added, the experience made Malaviya even more careful and aware of his surroundings.

Encouraging different younger folks to take up journey

Malaviya is at the moment a junior at College of California in Santa Barbara, finding out engineering. Though he isn’t touring in the mean time, he is nonetheless dedicated to assembly folks from backgrounds totally different from his personal— on and off campus. And he is planning future journeys to squeeze in throughout holidays. He is now as much as 118 international locations.

He hopes to be an inspiration to different curious younger individuals who could also be apprehensive or fearful about being on their very own in a brand new place the place they could not communicate the language. Malaviya has a mantra for that: “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”