{"id":4175,"date":"2018-07-23T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T16:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/the-man-whos-been-everywhere\/"},"modified":"2025-05-28T14:27:19","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T21:27:19","slug":"unesco-site-champ-bill-altaffer-world-traveler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/unesco-site-champ-bill-altaffer-world-traveler\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who\u2019s Been Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n    \n                                          \n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--article-hero \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--article-hero\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n<div class=\"inner-wrapper\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--image\">\n\n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n              \n      <img\n                            data-src=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-2842-768x432.jpg\"\n          data-srcset=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-2842-768x432.jpg 768w\"          data-sizes=\"(min-width:1200px) 75vw, (min-width:768px) 83vw, 100vw\"          class=\"lazyload\"\n        \n                  alt=\"The Man Who\u2019s Been Everywhere\"\n        \n        \n                                      \/>\n\n    \n    \n  \n  \n\n<\/div>\n  \n      <div class=\"image-caption\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  Bill Altaffer\u2019s travels have taken him from the world\u2019s iconic landmarks to the most obscure corners of the planet, from the Great Wall of China to the fabled Mount Athos monastery in Greece; from witnessing thousands of butterflies in the Gobi Desert to eating baked crocodile in Nairobi. (Illustrations by Matthew Savino for <i>USC Dornsife Magazine<\/i>).\n\n\n<\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  \n  <div class=\"text-wrapper\">\n          <nav aria-label=\"Breadcrumb\" class=\"breadcrumbs\">\n        <ul>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\">News<\/a><\/li>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\/?category=alumni\">Alumni<\/a><\/li>\n                  <\/ul>\n      <\/nav>\n    \n              \n<div class=\"f--field f--page-title\">\n\n    \n  <h1>The Man Who\u2019s Been Everywhere<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n    \n          <div class=\"subtitle\">\n            \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  One of the world\u2019s most traveled people, alumnus William \u201cBill\u201d Altaffer has visited every country in the world \u2014 many not just once, but multiple times. From North Korea to the North Pole, Sweden to the Sahara, Tipperary to Timbuktu, he\u2019s seen it all.\n\n\n<\/div>\n      <\/div>\n    \n           <strong class=\"author-field\"><span >By<\/span><a href=\"mailto:communication@dornsife.usc.edu\">Susan Bell<\/a><\/strong>\n    \n          <span class=\"post-date-field\">July 23, 2018<\/span>\n      <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--social-share \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--social-share\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n  <div class=\"content-wrapper\">\n    <span class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list\" style=\"line-height: 32px;\">\n      <span class=\"title\">\n        Share\n      <\/span>\n                        <a class=\"a2a_button_copy_link\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"\/#copy_link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"Link\">\n            <span class=\"a2a_svg a2a_s__default a2a_s_copy_link\">\n              <svg 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cc--rich-text \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--rich-text\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n      \n<div class=\"f--field f--wysiwyg\">\n\n    \n  <p>In the 1990s, when alumnus William \u201cBill\u201d Altaffer hadn\u2019t quite finished visiting all the countries of the world, he traveled to French Guiana. After a trip to Devil\u2019s Island, he and a friend decided to check out the fiercely guarded Guiana Space Center, a French rocket-launching base at Kourou. Pulling off the main road, Altaffer turned down into a grassy clearing surrounded by impenetrable jungle. Looming up ahead was a guard tower topped by a machine gun.<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer, a retired high school teacher and movie extra who has appeared in more than 120 films, recounts what happened next.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI look at my buddy, Kevin, and say, \u2018Do you have a Costco card?\u2019 So, he gives me his Costco card and we pull up to the gate, and the guard comes down with the AK-47, sticks it in our faces and says, \u2018Yeah?\u2019 And I go, \u2018We\u2019re members of Costco,\u2019 and I hand him both our cards. And so he looks at them and then he turns them over and there are our names and our pictures. And I said, \u2018You know, we\u2019re both members of Costco.\u2019 Then he leans in and he goes, \u2018Pull on in.\u2019 And we went on in and we gave ourselves a tour of this missile base.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One of the world\u2019s most traveled people, Altaffer is an accomplished raconteur. He tells this story with polished insouciance at the slide shows he gives across Southern California to rapt audiences eager to hear the adventures of a man who has spent his life journeying to the farthest- flung corners of the globe.<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer has feasted on boiled cobra washed down with warm snake\u2019s blood from a street stall in Bangkok. He\u2019s polished off a plate of baked crocodile skewered on a Masai sword at the open-air Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi. And, he has sampled stir-fried dried yak with mint leaves, a local delicacy, in Shangri-La, Tibet.<\/p>\n<p>He has returned from dinner to his hotel room in the Gobi Desert to find it invaded by thousands of yellow butterflies, spent a wakeful night peering through slits in the walls of a cave to observe lions and elephants drink at a watering hole in Kenya, and been lulled to sleep by the sound of yak grazing outside a Mongolian yurt.<\/p>\n<p>When Altaffer\u2019s son asked him recently whether there\u2019s a country that he\u2019s only been to once, Altaffer said he had to think about it. During the last century, he visited every country. Since then, he has been to every territory, enclave, exclave, colony and disputed area, as well as more than 900 islands. He has surfed and skied on all seven continents and has exhausted 12 passports and 130 visas. He\u2019s been to North Korea a dozen times and has visited all 92 of Russia\u2019s states, made three trips to Antarctica and voyaged to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe world\u2019s my house,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I can\u2019t imagine somebody having a house where they haven\u2019t been up in the attic or down in the cellar. But now I\u2019m getting into the closets. I\u2019m getting into the drawers. I\u2019m going into all the little nooks and crannies of the world.\u201d<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/migration-uploads\/BA_Img2_450x521-2842.jpg\" alt=\"Photo collage depicting travel scenes\" width=\"450\" height=\"521\" \/><br \/>\nA longtime member of the The Adventurers\u2019 Club of Los Angeles and the Travelers\u2019 Century Club, Altaffer has twice topped <a href=\"http:\/\/mosttraveledpeople.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MostTraveledPeople.com<\/a>\u2019s list (he is currently ranked fourth) and holds the world record for visiting the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody\u2019s even close to this,\u201d he boasts of the latter achievement. \u201cI think that shows more of how much you\u2019ve traveled the world than if you just hit an airport and left.\u201d Altaffer frowns on those who he says \u201ctreat travel like a grocery list,\u201d just checking countries off.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUnfortunately, these country collectors, or \u2018touch-and-goers\u2019 as they\u2019re sometimes called, just put their foot down from a train and then say they\u2019ve been in Mongolia,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty pathetic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Altaffer visits places repeatedly, meeting people, writing articles about his experiences and trying to hit every UNESCO site, until, as he says, \u201cI get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer says the initial inspiration to become a world traveler came from his father, an L.A. dentist beset by wanderlust who took his family on world trips.<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer\u2019s first taste of adventure came at age 6, when the cruise ship on which he was traveling with his parents hit an iceberg in fog and sank off the coast of Alaska.<\/p>\n<p>Such a disaster at a tender age failed to deter him from a life of travel, however.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt didn\u2019t bother me much,\u201d he says phlegmatically about the doomed cruise, in which all passengers and crew were safely rescued from the shipwreck. \u201cWe just got into the lifeboats.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The following year, at age 7, he sailed down the Panama Canal on a freighter.<\/p>\n<p>By the 1960s, he had traveled to Russia. In the \u201970s, he was one of the first tourists admitted into China. In the \u201980s, he landed on the Forbidden Isle of Niihau in Hawaii. In the 1990s, he was the first American, he believes, to lead a tour to the remote Yemeni island of Socotra, a tiny prehistoric archipelago that shelters 700 species found nowhere else on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>In 2005, he made the front page of the <i><a href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2005\/nov\/11\/world\/fg-extreme11\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/i> as one of the first five American tourists to enter North Korea.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, he traveled to Mount Athos, site of a Greek Orthodox monastery from which women have been banned for more than a thousand years.<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer says he doesn\u2019t have a favorite country, but he does have two lists of favorite places. One he dubs \u201cThe Swim-Up Bar List.\u201d It includes Mauritius, the Maldives, Thailand, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. His \u201cHistorical\/Cultural List\u201d includes Russia, China, Libya, India, Peru, Egypt, Greece, and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n<p>Despite all the traveling he did as a youngster, Altaffer says he didn\u2019t really appreciate travel until his late teens. By then he was majoring in history at USC Dornsife, where an anthropology class he took with Professor Ivan Alexievich Lopatin inspired him to travel the world.<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer was so inspired by Lopatin\u2019s tales of living with indigenous tribes in Siberia that he has made 25 trips of his own to Russia, visiting every tribe featured in his professor\u2019s lectures.<\/p>\n<address><em>\u201cWe all have something in common. People just want to feed their children, give the best they can to them and take care of the Earth.\u201d<\/em><\/address>\n<p>Another mentor was USC Dornsife alumnus and legendary traveler John Goddard \u201955. The anthropology graduate was the first man to explore the entire length of the River Nile and the River Congo. The pair met when Goddard gave a talk at Altaffer\u2019s high school. At USC, Altaffer joined Sigma Chi, Goddard\u2019s fraternity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGoddard would come down to the fraternity house and climb this 100-foot-tall palm tree in the backyard with his bare hands, and then he\u2019d sit there in the fronds at the top, swaying about,\u201d Altaffer said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe guy was amazing. He went down the Nile for a year in a kayak by himself. I\u2019m a tourist compared to him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After earning his bachelor\u2019s degree in <a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/hist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">history<\/a> in 1967 and his master\u2019s degree in 1970, Altaffer moved to Mammoth, California, where he taught skiing for three decades and joined luxury L.A. travel agency Hemphill Harris as a tour manager.<\/p>\n<p>Now, Altaffer creates his own tours. His \u201cHero Cities of the Soviet Union\u201d takes World War II buffs to all 13 so-called \u201cHero Cities\u201d of the former Soviet Union (\u201cI don\u2019t even think Putin\u2019s been to all of them,\u201d he says). He escorts lovers of the bizarre to Tuva, Russia, the site of a national throat-singing contest and offers a trans-Pacific trip on a Russian freighter from Chile to New Guinea, while his journey across the North Caucasus takes travelers on a pony express of 30 taxis from Sochi to the Caspian Sea.<\/p>\n<p>The only travel-related jitters that Altaffer will admit to are triggered by the parking at Los Angeles International Airport.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you\u2019re afraid of traveling somewhere, well then you might as well just stay home,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you\u2019re scared, a dog will bite you, but if you\u2019re not afraid, it won\u2019t. That\u2019s the way you\u2019ve got to be with people. You can\u2019t fake it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Altaffer believes that working as a teacher in inner-city schools in L.A. while attending USC as a graduate student helped him develop the street smarts he uses when traveling.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI could probably walk into a group of ISIS soldiers sitting around a campfire and make it work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The key is respect and recognizing the common humanity in people no matter where you are or whom you\u2019re talking to.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe all have something in common,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople just want to feed their children, give the best they can to them and take care of the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Travel, Altaffer says, broadens one\u2019s understanding and increases empathy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere isn\u2019t a person alive in the world today whose country I haven\u2019t visited. I could be at the supermarket checkout and I ask the guy bagging groceries where he\u2019s from and he\u2019ll go, \u2018Ethiopia,\u2019 and I\u2019ll say, \u2018Where in Ethiopia?\u2019 and he\u2019ll say, \u2018Gondar,\u2019 and I\u2019ll say \u2018I\u2019ve been to Gondar,\u2019 and suddenly he\u2019s got a big smile on his face.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot to travel is to miss out on the good fortune of being alive,\u201d Altaffer said. \u201cWe live on this Earth, we might as well go out and see it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/usc-dornsife-magazine-spring-summer-2018\/\"><em>Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine\u2019s Spring-Summer 2018 issue &gt;&gt;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the world\u2019s most traveled people, alumnus William \u201cBill\u201d Altaffer has visited every country in the world \u2014 many not just once, but multiple times. From North Korea to the North Pole, Sweden to the Sahara, Tipperary to Timbuktu, he\u2019s seen it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":4178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,9],"tags":[71],"class_list":["post-4175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-dornsife-global","tag-history"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Man Who\u2019s Been Everywhere<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of the world\u2019s most traveled people, alumnus William \u201cBill\u201d Altaffer has visited every country in the world \u2014 many not just once, but multiple times.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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