Arjun Malaviya is an overachiever and a planner. So, when he told his parents that he wanted to save up for a solo gap year to travel the world, they weren't all that surprised.
Now, at 19 years old, he's got five completely full passports and a slew of remarkable life experiences under his belt. Malaviya told NPR that he's the youngest solo traveler to visit 100 countries.
"I was 17 years and 228 days old when I reached my 100th country," he said, adding that he celebrated the milestone in Nadi, Fiji, by visiting the colorful Sri Siva Subramaniya, one of the largest Hindu temples in the Southern Hemisphere. Another superlative: Malaviya said, based on his research, he's also "the youngest person to visit every country in Oceania." (NPR has not independently verified these claims.)
The intrepid teen said he's hot on the heels of Lexie Alford, who holds the Guinness World Record for being the youngest person to visit every sovereign country in the world. By the age of 18, Alford had only visited about 70 nations.
Malaviya set out on his expedition on his 17th birthday in July 2023. Over 13 months, with occasional trips back home — Westlake Village in Southern California — he sojourned through some of the world's most populated cities and its most remote islands. He spent time in Bali's rice paddies, sipped tea with a Taliban guard in Afghanistan and bathed under the green skies of the aurora borealis in Norway.
All the while, Malaviya said he had one goal: to meet the locals and make a genuine connection. He preferred visiting small villages rather than glitzy locales, wanting to see how people truly live.
"The big thing that I took away is that people are more similar than different," he said.
"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."
Building up confidence and life skills, from Seoul to Kabul
Malaviya launched his grand tour in Seoul, South Korea: From all he'd read, the country would be a safe and tourist-friendly launching pad with outstanding public transportation systems. He moved on to other Asian countries including Japan, Myanmar and India.
His lodgings included a mix of Airbnbs, hostels, hotels and family friends' homes. He traveled light, outfitted with an iPhone, a small gym bag and a standard-sized backpack. And though Malaviya is fluent in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and has studied Japanese, Malaviya said Google Translate proved to be one of his most valuable tools. Using the app on his phone, he said he was able to engage in deep conversations with strangers. It especially came in handy in places like Afghanistan, Venezuela and Syria, where people opened up to him about what everyday life looked like under authoritarian regimes.
He said they impressed upon him the idea that, while news coverage may dwell on the economic and humanitarian hardships of a place, there is still a lot of beauty and cultural richness that can be taken in by visitors if they give it a chance.
"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 said. " 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 still under Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship when Malaviya visited, he said he met with an impassioned bed-and-breakfast owner who spoke openly about his wish for Assad to be overthrown so more people like him could take in the wonders of his country.
Other highlights included a free Madonna concert on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, where Malaviya said he happily lost himself amid the enormous crowd of fans who showed 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 also got to bathe in the milky mud baths in Palau, an island in Micronesia.
The islands of Oceania as whole, Malaviya said, contained some of the most breathtaking and pristine landscapes he's ever seen. However, he said his trip to the island nation of Nauru — the third-smallest country in the world and one of the least-visited countries on Earth – was slightly depressing. "It was sad for me to see how much the country is struggling," he said, referring to the small republic's reliance on foreign aid to sustain its economy.
The most harrowing stop came in November 2023 as the war 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 said.
He scrambled to find cover in a nearby bomb shelter before fleeing back to Moldova, but not before taking a selfie.
The final region he toured was the Middle East, including Iraq and Iran, "which I actually loved," he said. Malaviya explained he'd waited to visit this 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 opposite of helicopter parenting
So how does a teenager persuade his parents to embark on such a daunting adventure? Research – lots and lots of research, Malaviya's mother, Anita Venkataraman, told 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 straightforward: He'd start off in easily navigated counties where communication home would be most reliable. He'd check in every two days. He wouldn't stay out past 10 p.m. if he could help it. And he'd finance the entire trip on his own.
Malaviya was just 15 years old when he initially proposed the idea in 2022, And despite some trepidation, both of his parents agreed to the odyssey within a couple of weeks. It took him two years of working a series of odd jobs — tennis lessons, a minimum-wage administrative assistant job and working at his parents' software company — to raise the funds to set off on his journey, he said.
"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 said. (All in all, Malaviya said he spent $22,500 on the entire voyage.)
Venkataraman said the isolation of the COVID pandemic is what really ignited her son's wanderlust. In her view, Malaviya has always been an intuitively curious and independent person who craved social interaction. Being cooped up for much of his adolescence was frustrating for him, she said. But he took advantage of the situation, graduating a year early from high school in 2023 and getting a two-year head start on university by completing all of his general education coursework at a local community college.
"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 said. "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 responsible and knowledgeable about the various visa and documentation requirements for different countries. That's why it was easy for her to be his "cheerleader, offering "support with a little bit of caution."
That support did not waiver, even when Malaviya called to notify his parents that he'd been "sort 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 of course," his mother said, but she and Malaviya put the incident in a more comprehensive context. "I understand that there are people with so little, that they resort to things that perhaps if they had some, they wouldn't, normally resort to," she said. Plus, she added, the experience made Malaviya even more careful and aware of his surroundings.
Encouraging other young people to take up travel
Malaviya is currently a junior at University of California in Santa Barbara, studying engineering. Although he's not traveling at the moment, he's still committed to meeting people from backgrounds different from his own— on and off campus. And he's planning future trips to squeeze in during vacations. He's now up to 118 countries.
He hopes to be an inspiration to other curious young people who may be apprehensive or fearful about being on their own in a new place where they may not speak the language. Malaviya has a mantra for that: "Get comfortable with being uncomfortable."
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