The first time I went travelling, I took three things from it. 1) Don’t drop your phone in Halong Bay. 2) Don’t travel to Vietnam with six vegans. 3) Don’t travel with six people, point blank. Lexie Alford, better known to her 1.2 million social media followers as @Lexielimitless, garnered very different conclusions from her first time backpacking: she wanted to travel to every single country in the world.
Making the impossible possible at just the age of 21, she set the Guinness World Record for becoming the youngest person to travel to the world’s 196 sovereign nations by the age of 21 (I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is yes, she did make it into North Korea). But why stop at one world record? Two years ago, she decided to take on the epic feat of circumnavigating the world by electric vehicle. Childsplay right? We caught up with her after her mammoth feat captured in Charge Around the Globe, which is now showing on Prime Video, to find out more about it.
Escapism: How did you get into travel?
Lexie Limitless: I started travelling when I was really young because my mum actually started a travel agency when she was only 19. So, I grew up with very adventurous parents who, thankfully, would take me on their adventures all around the world. I'd ended up travelling to around 70 countries with them by the time I turned 18. All the while, I had been saving up to take a gap year. I wanted to go backpacking and travel on my own. By the time I graduated college I had started backpacking, and it was only two months into that trip that I came up with the idea to travel to every country. At the time, I didn't even really understand how many countries there were in the world or what that would look like. I've always been a very goal-oriented person, so it just became this goal that I was trying to work towards every day in one country at a time, and I had to figure it out.
E: I’d love to ask about your latest electric car adventure. What spurred it on?
LL: The original inspiration for driving around the world in an electric vehicle was actually an explorer named Aloha Wanderwell, who, 100 years ago, set out to become the first woman to ever drive around the world in a car. She did it in about five years and also in an old Ford Model T, which is what sparked the idea to partner with Ford and do this massive undertaking by attempting to circumnavigate the world in an electric vehicle. It definitely took a lot of time, planning, and patience, and there was so much we had to figure out because this is something that had truly never really been done before in an EV.
On the road in Australia
E: How long did it take overall?
LL: So it took about a year of prep work to make the plans, figure out the routes, and work out the charging infrastructure. We decided to set off from Nice because Aloha Wanderwell also started her around-the-world adventure in the South of France. We actually left from the same hotel in Nice as she did. The whole endeavour took 200 days. We travelled over 30,000 kilometres across 27 countries and six continents.
E: Oh my god.
LL: It was quite the undertaking.
EE: How did you work out your route?
LL: So the route was inspired by the places that she had gone, but it wasn't exactly the same. We also planned the route according to the guidelines to set a new world record. There were a few different points that we had to hit, including a minimum of five continents. Off the top of my head, we set out to travel 29,000 kilometres as a bare minimum. We also had to cross something called Antipodean points, which are areas of the world that are basically equidistant to each other across the globe, exact opposites. So we had to piece together the route through that as well as trying to utilise the world's existing charging infrastructure.
In places like the US and Europe, we had a lot more flexibility in the connectivity that already exists there. But there were also so many places that we travelled where there was actually pretty much no infrastructure for charging. And so the number one question I get asked when I tell people about this journey is, ‘What happens if you run out of chargers’? And that was something that we definitely had to discover along the way. The number one solution that we had for when we were in the middle of nowhere, and there was, of course, no charging infrastructure in Zimbabwe, for example, we would have to use domestic charging, which is using household outlets to charge your whole car. And that can take anywhere from 30, 40, or 50 hours to fully charge the vehicle. So, at some points, it definitely felt like we were crawling to make the distance.
Finding a way to charge the car along the way was one of the biggest challenges
E: What was the longest you had to wait for it to charge?
LL: That's a good question. I think the longest was cumulatively two and a half days. So, 60 or 65 hours. That was in Zimbabwe and there were a few long waits in South Africa as well (although that had some really great infrastructure for charging sometimes). But in Zimbabwe, there's only one charger in the entire country, and I didn't use it. And there are also rolling blackouts from load shipping. So that was something that we also had to deal with, especially in South Africa and Zimbabwe, where there are times when the government will completely shut off the power sporadically through the night. And if that happened at 3:00 in the morning, then we'd wake up in the morning and see that the car hadn't charged, so it had to start over again.
E: Nightmare. Did you ever have to seep in the car?
LL: Thankfully, the only sleeping in the car was for taking naps in the middle of the day. I definitely slept in the car a lot in that way, but never overnight.
E: Were you with a team?
LL: Yes, I was with a team. I was the only driver of the explorer and for the world record attempt, but we also had a documentary film crew with me to document the entire process. We also had an EV expert, a mechanic, in case anything happened to the car. Also, I had my own personal videographer and editor, and he helped me capture and share everything on social media as we went through the journey. Over the course of the seven months we were on the road, we had upwards of 200 million views we garnered online from sharing all of the stories of what was happening along the way.
E: What was the highlight and lowlight of the trip?
LL: I think my lowest low and the highest high were actually right next to each other. When I was travelling in India, it felt like everything that could go wrong did. I got really, really bad food poisoning as soon as I arrived, even though I was being so careful. Iwas literally just throwing up at the Taj Mahal. It was so terrible. And it ended up delaying being able to start the drive in India. We were really stressed about making it to Bhutan in time for our visas because everything throughout this whole project was logistically a nightmare since if you missed one day of the plan, then the domino effect downward is always catastrophic for all of the visas and permits and everything. It's not easy to bring cars across international borders like this. And so I was sick for multiple days, which put our permits and visas at risk.
Alford captured next to the Taj Mahal before things went south
Also, we're driving across India, and it turned out that because this was a European model of the car it wasn't compatible with the charging infrastructure in India, which meant that even though India had fast chargers, we weren't able to use them. So, I had to go back to the domestic charging, which took forever. Also, in general, driving in India is like driving nowhere else in the world. It's the absolute most chaotic, just being serenaded by hundreds of honking horns every day. I feel like I still hear them in my dreams. That was definitely one of the biggest struggles and challenges along the way. But it was immediately rewarded by the time we made it across the border to Bhutan. People ask me what my favourite country in the world is, and Bhutan might be it. There's just nowhere else like it. It's just this hidden little country in the Himalayas, and they say it's where the happiest people in the world live. And it's the Buddhist culture, the temples that are hidden in the mountains that you can hike to. I met a Buddhist nun named Karma, who was living in a monastery…
E: Karma is a great name for a Buddhist nun.
LL: … So we met her, and she is featured in the documentary. I think the second episode is my favourite because we meet all of the most incredible people in this one. And being able to take a moment to be in such a peaceful place after so much chaos in India was my highest high and lowest low.
E: How did this endeavour compare to your first challenge, travelling to every single country?
LL: It was interesting because, given that I had already set a world record, I knew what I was getting myself into to a certain extent because you can talk about making these big plans on paper, but doing them, in reality, is always a totally different experience. So, even though I had been to all of the places and all of the countries that we had travelled to before, I was still seeing the world in such a unique way. I had never travelled so extensively over land before.
Going on road trips is one of the best ways to see a place because you're on the ground level. You're stopping at places that aren't necessarily on the tourist tracks, so you're getting those off-the-beaten-path interactions, and you're seeing places that are so normal to all of the local people, but it is totally something that most tourists never see. So, it was different in so many ways. When I was travelling to every country I did a lot of that solo, so having a team on this trip and filming a documentary and all of that was different. Also, before I set off on this trip, I had never actually even driven an EV before. So, there was quite the learning curve there as well.
E: What’s next? Is there anything else in the pipeline?
LL: Oh boy. Well, this took a little over two years from start to finish, and I'm really trying to take some time to enjoy the fact that it's all coming to an end now with the documentary being out. And I think for me, since the past eight years have pretty much involved full-time travel, I've gotten so used to moving and doing so much and having these big goals that one of the biggest challenges for me now is the ability to sit still and to be home, to have a normal routine. I've actually been trying to slow down more intentionally and figure out what it's like to get more into meditation and find some stillness because I've really been on the move for many years. The next challenge is within… the eternal journey, I suppose.
Charge Around The Globe is available on Prime Video from 18 November
