Adventure Capitalist

Adventure Capitalist

1
A Yellow Mercedes
 
I ENTERED THE INVESTMENT BUSINESS in 1968 with six hundred dollars in my pocket, and I left it in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven, with enough money to satisfy a lifelong yearning for adventure. As the comanager of an offshore hedge fund, analyzing the worldwide flow of capital, raw materials, goods, and information, I had invested where others did not, exploiting untapped markets around the globe, and it was a significant factor in my success. But what I wanted out of Wall Street, and ultimately out of long-term investing, was not typical of the business. I wanted to buy the freedom to taste as much of life as possible—I wanted to see the world. And I wanted to see the world that other travelers rarely see, the world that can be seen only from the ground up and truly understood only from that vantage point.
 
I wanted to see what I like to think of as the real world.
 
I have met people who have traveled to more countries than I, but in almost every case, it seems, they have flown from one place to another. You have not really been to a country, I believe, until you have had to cross the border physically, had to find food on your own, fuel, a place to sleep, until you have experienced it close to the ground.
 
In the late winter of 1990, I set out on a two-year odyssey to circle the planet on a motorcycle. That 100,000-mile journey took me across six continents and through dozens of countries; it landed me in the Guinness Book of Records and resulted in a best-selling book of my own, Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers. No sooner had I completed the trip and returned home to New York than I began thinking about something more. I was abetted in my quest to find it by a simple quirk of the calendar: the approaching turn of the millennium. My insatiable thirst to understand firsthand what is going on in the world, to be there, to see it for myself— to dig out the real story—was intensified by the opportunity to capitalize on a historical moment. My plan was to spend three years driving around the globe as the twentieth century came to a close, to take the world’s pulse at the end of one millennium and the start of another.
 
The trip would be both an adventure and a part of the continuing education I had been engaged in all my life, from rural Demopolis, Alabama, where I grew up, through Yale, Oxford, and the U.S. Army, and eventually to Wall Street, where experience taught me that the “experts” were usually wrong. My travels tended to be characterized by the slaughter of sacred cows, the puncturing of various balloons, and the laying to rest of preconceptions of the world held by certain “authorities,” many of whom rarely left home. My success in the market has been predicated on viewing the world from a different perspective.
 
While I have never patronized a prostitute, I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from speaking to a government minister. There is nothing like crossing outlying borders for gaining insights into a country.
 
Finding promising investment opportunities was not a defined aim of the trip, but just because I am who I am, it is something that happens when I travel. As an investor, I would seek to learn about the markets in China, Africa, and South America, and I would visit promising stock exchanges whenever possible. I had made money in the past by investing in sleepy markets, such as Austria, Botswana, Peru, and others, and would no doubt stumble on some again.
 
If the trip killed me, I would die happy, pursuing my passion. And that was better than dying on Wall Street someday with a few extra dollars in my pocket.
 
The trip took me through 116 countries, many of which are rarely visited: Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, East Timor, and the like. The journey took me down the west coast and up the east coast of Africa, through thirty-two countries there. (My previous trip had taken me straight down the center, from Tunis to Cape Town.) It took me from Atlantic to Pacific—out of Europe across Central Asia and China—and from the Pacific back to the Atlantic, by way of Siberia. From the northeast coast of Africa I traveled across Arabia and the Indian subcontinent to Indochina, Malaysia, and Indonesia. After touring Australia and New Zealand, I made for the southern tip of South America, driving from there to Alaska before heading home to New York. No one had ever driven overland following this route. The trip took me through approximately half of the world’s thirty civil wars, covered 152,000 miles, 50,000 more than the distance of my previous trip, and resulted in another Guinness World Record.
 
Studies have shown that traveling around the world is people’s single most popular fantasy; many people in many places around the globe approached and said, “You are living everyone’s dream.”
 
The trip began on January 1, 1999, in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland. I did not make the trip alone. I traveled with a beautiful woman, a blue-eyed blonde from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, named Paige Parker. I met Paige in 1996 during a speaking engagement at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. Paige, a fund-raiser at Queens College, had read my book on the recommendation of Billy Wireman, the college president, and come to hear me speak about my motorcycle trip. I tracked her down the next day and invited her to dinner.
 
“I’m thinking of going around the world again,” I said to her on our first date. “I haven’t told anybody yet. But I’m thinking of doing it at the turn of the millennium.”
 
She agreed that such a trip could be illuminating.
 
“Do you want to go with me?” I asked.
 
She was momentarily dumbstruck.
 
“Yes,” she said. “Sign me on.”
 
Of course, we both thought it was idle banter.
 
Who knew?