The Errant Æsthete

“You never know where or when the magic hits.”

When Lee Abbamonte asked his audience whether any of them had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, he was surprised to see four older men raise their hands.

Abbamonte, a 29-year-old New York-based senior financial adviser for Merrill Lynch & Co., shouldn’t have been. He was showing slides of his trek atop Africa’s highest mountain (5,895 meters, 19,341 feet) to a London meeting of the Travelers’ Century Club, a gathering of the world’s top globetrotters.

The banker, like his fellow members, enjoys moving outside his comfort zone. “Travel humbles you,” said Abbamonte, who has visited 136 countries. “Travel also is the best education you can receive.”

To be a member of the Travelers’ Century Club, one must have visited at least 100 of the 317 places designated as TCC-approved countries, including islands such as Lampedusa and dependencies such as Greenland. That’s many more than the 192 member states of the United Nations.

To reflect political changes, TCC rules have been finetuned over the years by its “geographic maven,” California school- district attorney Sanford K. Smith.

Smith, 62, has visited 307 of TCC’s countries in a lifetime of wanderlust, triggered by a round-the-world solo trip at 17. To prove to detractors that he really saw the places he traveled to, he sent postcards from each of the U.S.’s 3,143 counties.

“Are we travel nuts? Absolutely,” said Susan Gibson, daughter of a former Bank of Nova Scotia president, who lives in Notting Hill, west London.

Off to Nigeria

In the space of a decade, the TCC has grown from 700 to 2,000 mostly American or British members. Founded in 1954 by two travel agents, the TCC is based in Los Angeles. There is a $100 initiation fee and yearly dues are $40 — $50 for those outside the U.S.

Gibson, a microfinance specialist who caught the travel bug after a Vienna-to-London bike trip, met a fellow voyager at the club’s second-ever international meeting. Within minutes, the women had planned a four-day visit to Nigeria. Why? They’d never been.

By contrast, Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. pilot Rowland Burley has been to all of the places on the TCC list except Wake Island and Cabinda, a hard-to-reach Angolan enclave on the west coast of Africa.

Burley, 55, has been living in Hong Kong for 19 years, after 20 years spent in Kenya, where he first took to the skies in a light aircraft. Three months later, he had a flying license and had given up a career in geophysics.

Cabinda Next Year

“I love the freedom, the views, and just being up high,” he said in an e-mail last month during a stopover in Bahrain. The long-haul B747-400 captain plans to visit Cabinda next year.

“I don’t think I’m obsessed with travel, although that might have been true in the late ’90s when I still had so many places to see,” he said. “I’m just very, very inquisitive and independent and love going to places that most people have never heard of.”

Chicago attorney Tom Flannigan, who has so far seen 185 TCC countries, says he’s not retired or well-to-do like many of the members, but makes up for it in persistence.

“I work on itineraries 365 days a year, including Christmas after the kids open presents,” he said.

Pam Barrus, a “travel junkie since birth,” is the same way. The tutor and author from Laguna Beach, California, just visited her 200th country and sailed to the TCC meeting on the Queen Mary 2 to complete her circumnavigation of the globe by surface.

Obsession

Christopher Hudson, publisher for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, came to London for the Oct. 26-28 meeting via Lampedusa, a speck of land off North Africa, and Russia.

Retired US Airways Group flight dispatcher Kevin Hughes, club president and a Phoenix resident who’s at 313 on TCC’s list, admits travel “can become an obsession — a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it sure beats washing one’s hand over and over.”

Hudson, a Briton who succeeds Hughes on Jan. 1, 2008, was asked his favorite place of the 240 TCC-listed countries he’s visited. France, he said without hesitation, citing its beautiful landscapes, food, wine and culture.

What sparked Hudson’s love of travel? “Poring over an atlas handed down by family from pre-1914, and being utterly fascinated by the ways seemingly exotic places like the Balkans had changed so much within a lifetime,” he said.

Flannigan said watching the old Frank Capra movie “Lost Horizon” sparked his wanderlust.

Barrus, who prefers to travel alone, last summer traveled the Silk Road through the five `Stans’: Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. “You never know where or when the magic hits,” she says.

Floating on the Irrawaddy

“It can be floating on a ferry boat down the Irrawaddy River with the sun shining on the gold Buddhist temples rising out of the jungle. It can be seeing the elusive green flash as the sun goes down from a cargo ship in the South Atlantic, sleeping in a yurt in the Pamir Mountains.”

Any low points? “Definitely retching in a few sinks and toilets and holes in the ground.”

Still, she is eager to get thousands of more miles under her belt. As she said after the London meeting: “In the end, I want to be the most entertaining one in the nursing home.” [Link]