In his mid-fifties Hardie Karges suddenly finds himself at a crossroads in his life, career, and relationship, so decides to do (again) the one thing that he does better than anything else—travel. That means cashing in some frequent-flyer miles and heading to South America, specifically the four southernmost countries that he has yet to visit. ‘Ah, that felt good.’ So two months later, that crossroads is still there, but there is no obvious path, indeed more like a half-dozen of them, one for each continent. So he decides to finally put into action a plan he’s had for some time, to go to every country in the world. The result some two years later is a hundred countries visited for a personal total of 139, almost three-fourths of the world total.
Thus from this humble beginning, Karges’s desire to visit every country in the world, does this book derive, growing and expanding and taking on its full meaning only after most of the real work, the travel and simultaneous writing, had already been done. That’s when he realized that the entirety of all these episodes seemed greater than the mere sum of the individual parts. As a writer who decided only late in life to “get serious about writing,” it comes as something of a revelation that maybe his best effort so far came about only when he was doing something he loves, traveling, so that in effect two major facets of his life are coming together as one.
These are the tales of Karges’s travels in that intense period of “hyper-travel,” a combination guide and narrative, with only one qualification—he doesn’t tell how to do it. That’s your job. He tells how it’s done, by someone who’s done it for most of his life. This is a guide for people who hate travel guides. This is the one-stop guide that will give you both glimpse and insight into half the world’s countries, all recently visited, all applied to the same criteria of critique. This is the guide that tells you the cultural, geopolitical and historical context of a country, not where to eat or where to stay. This is the guide that tells you which countries
just plain suck. The happy ending is right around the next corner.
Veteran blogger and traveler Hardie Karges made his first trip out of his home country USA at the age of twenty-one, a trip to the neighboring country of Mexico in the winter of 1975-1976. The next year he went to Central America and stayed almost three months, the following year South America for almost four. He was hooked. Thus began a career in the import and export of folk art and handicrafts from around the world. He has now been to some one hundred forty countries, has published poetry, made videos, and writes blogs on travel and world music, in addition to his personal blog.
Hypertravel: 100 Countries in 2 Years is his first full-length book.