Fabio Cao

Travel Is Easier Now — But There Are Fewer Surprises.

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I had a conversation recently that stayed with me, not because it was dramatic or overly philosophical, but because it was honest. The person I spoke to was Fabio Cao — the first Italian to visit every country in the world. What I liked most was that his story didn’t begin with a goal. It began with something far simpler: curiosity. Fabio told me he’d always been curious about geography and the world, even as a teenager, and the detail that made me instantly visualize his mindset was when he described sitting on flights back when there was no internet in your pocket. He said that on planes, “there used to be the magazine… and in the back there are the maps,” and he’d look at those maps, reading country names like they were mysteries. “I used to look at the maps and read the names of some of the countries and wonder… I wonder what Indonesia is like,” he said. There’s something almost childlike about that kind of curiosity.

And that idea of not knowing became the real theme of our conversation. Fabio explained that the older version of travel had a different energy because you didn’t arrive with certainty. You might have seen a few images on TV, but you couldn’t research everything in advance, so when you landed somewhere new, it felt genuinely new. He put it perfectly: “Before, I think there was more magic, because you don’t know what you’re gonna see… you get there, and everything is new.” Now, the opposite is true. You can “almost see the roads you’re gonna be walking,” he said, and although it makes travel easier, “it removes a little bit of magic from traveling.”

That line hit because it’s not anti-technology. It’s just accurate. We’ve traded uncertainty for efficiency. We’ve replaced discovery with previews. We’ve turned the world into a place we’ve already “seen” before we step into it. And it’s not just visuals — it’s the human part too. I brought up how earlier, travelers were forced to talk to people. You couldn’t land in a new city and silently “figure it out.” You had to ask where to eat, where to go, how to get somewhere, what was safe, what wasn’t. Fabio agreed immediately. “Right now, really, if you don’t want to talk to anyone, you can,” he said. “Everything is in your phone… you can actually avoid any, almost any human interaction.” And that sentence quietly describes modern travel in a way that no influencer reel ever will.

But Fabio didn’t romanticize the past either. He acknowledged that forced interaction wasn’t always comfortable, but that discomfort created something valuable: surprise. When you have to talk to people, you stumble into recommendations that aren’t on your screen. You find out what’s happening right now in a city rather than what was happening when a blog post was written. Fabio said only locals can really tell you, “this is what’s happening in this part of the city today.” And that’s when travel becomes real — when the experience isn’t something you downloaded but something you earned by being present and open.

At some point, I asked him when the travel changed from “going places” to “finishing the world.” And again, the answer was far more grounded than I expected. Fabio said the goal didn’t exist in the beginning. Around 2013, he randomly started counting how many countries he had visited and realized it was already around 130 or 135. It wasn’t planned. He was simply someone who kept going to new places whenever he got a chance. Then he watched a YouTube video about a traveler who tried something extreme — traveling all countries without flying — and Fabio said it made him think about legacy. Not in a dramatic way, but in a human way: “If anything happened tomorrow, as a legacy… to have set foot in every place in the world… it’s pretty cool.” That’s when it became intentional.

And even then, the idea of visiting all countries wasn’t just a bucket list. Fabio pointed out something obvious once you hear it: some countries don’t happen “by accident.” You’re not going to “end up by mistake” in places like South Sudan. Some travel requires deliberate planning and effort, and once he started aiming for the missing countries, the whole process became more complicated, more logistical, and honestly more tiring.

One part of the discussion that I’m glad we didn’t skip over is how Fabio views “fast travel.” Today, people love speed as if it’s proof of achievement — fastest to visit all countries, quickest to cover a continent, shortest time to complete a “world tour.” Fabio’s reaction was blunt: “To me, it makes zero sense whatsoever.” He wasn’t judging anyone, but he made the point clearly: why go as fast as possible through something that’s supposed to be a “massive life experience of learning”? You can technically pass through twelve European countries in a day by car, but what did you actually experience? What did you actually learn? That question is uncomfortable because it exposes what a lot of modern travel has become — movement without meaning.

In total, Fabio said you could count his travel journey as starting around 1998 and finishing in 2017 — nearly 19 years — but he clarified again that the goal wasn’t there from day one. And that timeline matters because it shows how slow, long-term travel builds depth. It isn’t just about collecting countries. It’s about repeatedly choosing unfamiliarity, repeatedly letting places challenge your assumptions, and repeatedly reshaping your perspective.

Of course, the part people don’t talk about enough is what makes travel difficult in the real world: visas. Fabio explained that he didn’t lose motivation, but there were “massive delays” and a lot of “headaches” with approvals, especially in parts of Africa in earlier years. He mentioned Equatorial Guinea as one of the toughest cases — visa refused three times — and also countries like Mali, Nigeria, Libya, and conflict-affected places like Yemen and Syria. Sometimes the requirements weren’t just difficult, they were absurd. Fabio said Equatorial Guinea demanded an invitation letter that had to be legalized by something like the “Ministry of National Defense,” and even he was like, how do you even get that done? It’s the kind of detail that makes you realize how different “travel the world” looks outside of the comfortable mainstream destinations.

Then he said something that flips a common belief: the most underdeveloped countries can be the most expensive. People assume they’ll be cheap, but the paperwork, fees, and logistics add up quickly. Fabio explained that in many West African countries there aren’t really tourists — the main presence is NGOs, UN agencies, and organizations with money — so hotels and services price themselves accordingly. He gave an example that sounded almost unbelievable: paying $150 per night in Monrovia, Liberia, while a comparable stay in Marrakesh might be $20. The logic is simple: in places where only organizations operate, the pricing is built for that market, not for backpackers. If you show up as the only tourist, you pay the same price anyway.

From there, the conversation shifted into what I think is the biggest issue with travel today: people are losing curiosity. Fabio said it’s “a shame” because the world is huge, yet people go back to the same places every year and repeat the same experiences. His metaphor was sharp and honestly hard to forget: doing that is like “reading the same page of a book over and over.” He wasn’t saying famous places are pointless — he acknowledged that many destinations like Machu Picchu, Petra, and the Taj Mahal are worth it — but he was saying the internet has made travel too copy-paste. People aren’t choosing places because they’re personally interested. They’re choosing them because they saw a picture and want to recreate it.

One of Fabio’s most interesting perspectives was that after traveling enough, your preferences flip. You stop craving famous destinations and start craving places without tourists. Not because you want to be “different,” but because crowds often drain the authenticity out of places. He said he enjoys traveling more when there are fewer tourists, because overly popular cities can start feeling like “a theme park.” Venice was his example — beautiful, but scaled for foreigners, designed to extract money. He compared it to the pyramids and places like Marrakesh too, where aggressive hustling can completely change the vibe. 

When I asked him about a region that was special to him, he said parts of the Pacific and Oceania feel “authentic” to him. He described it as remote, expensive, and not built for comfort — which is exactly why mass tourism hasn’t flattened it yet. He liked that there’s no McDonald’s on every corner, that people live closer to their roots, and that you actually have to make an effort to be there. And effort matters. Because when a place demands effort, it forces you to show up more seriously — not as a consumer, but as a participant.

That idea connected to another part of travel that Fabio values: how it builds you as a person. He said travel refines your problem-solving skills because you’re constantly solving situations on the go. You get better at reading environments. You develop a “sixth sense.” 

When I asked him what advice he’d give young travelers, he said “Don’t be scared.” Fabio said the world isn’t as bad as people assume, and that many fears come from misconceptions, headlines, and stereotypes. His advice wasn’t to be careless — he said be alert, don’t be naive — but to give places the benefit of doubt and stay open-minded. He also encouraged being adventurous with food and spending time around locals, because otherwise you miss the real experience of a place.

Fabio described tourists who fly to Jamaica or the Bahamas, stay inside a beach resort, interact only with staff, and then leave. “There could have really been anywhere else,” he said, because they didn’t actually see Jamaica — they saw a pool with a better view. And that’s not an attack on comfort. It’s a reminder that travel is expensive in time, energy, and money, so if you’re going to do it, it’s worth doing in a way that changes you, and I couldn’t agree more. 

His best examples of meaningful travel were moments that weren’t planned at all: getting invited to a funeral party in Congo, ending up in a wedding in Mauritania, wearing local clothing, being the only foreigner in the room, and still being welcomed into something real. Those experiences aren’t in any itineraries. They don’t show up on Google ever. They happen when you’re curious enough to say yes and open enough to trust people.

Before we ended, I asked him for underrated Italy recommendations, because honestly people do get stuck doing the same Rome–Florence–Venice loop. Fabio mentioned Tropea in Calabria, calling it a beautiful beach town in summer and “extremely inexpensive,” and he recommended Sicily as a whole — from Palermo to Catania — including the Valley of the Temples near Agrigento, and the baroque town of Noto with great food and lower costs compared to the mainstream tourist route.

When I think back on the conversation, the biggest takeaway wasn’t “wow, 193 countries.” It was that travel is slowly becoming too easy to automate. We can now book, plan, navigate, and review everything so efficiently that we forget travel was never meant to be efficient in the first place. It was meant to be uncertain. It was meant to have friction. It was meant to demand human interaction. And it was meant to surprise you. Fabio said it perfectly early on: travel today is easier, but there are fewer surprises. And maybe that’s the real challenge now — not reaching the next destination, but protecting that feeling of discovery even when the world is trying to hand you the experience in advance.

🎧 Listen to 193 Perspective on:

Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/3KE7f8AOpiQdCwQqqckfTG?si=4x89NKL8RQa_ChjMQMvRKA

Apple Podcasts : https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/the-193-perspective/id1858063638