Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

B efore he be­came a cer­ti­fied glo­be­trot­ter, Dil­lon De­Coteau dreamed about work­ing with aero­planes, but nev­er imag­ined he would be board­ing them one day in­stead of guid­ing them.

“I want­ed to be an air traf­fic con­troller, so I sort of saw my­self do­ing some­thing in the trav­el in­dus­try, but not ac­tu­al­ly do­ing the trav­el­ling my­self,” De­Couteau said.

He said as a child grow­ing up in Ari­ma, the on­ly coun­try he had vis­it­ed was neigh­bour­ing Venezuela.

He has, how­ev­er, trav­elled a great deal since then and ear­li­er this month, De­Coteau, who now re­sides in Cana­da, was ver­i­fied by No­mad­Ma­nia, an NGO that en­sures peo­ple’s trav­el claims are true, as some­one who has trav­elled to all 193 Unit­ed Na­tions coun­tries in the world.

“I end­ed up do­ing this for me. I just want­ed to set a goal for my­self and see that I can ac­tu­al­ly see it through, I feel good that I ac­tu­al­ly ac­com­plished it, that I ac­tu­al­ly saw it through to the end,” De­Couteau said.

De­Coteau start­ed on his glo­be­trot­ting ad­ven­tures 15 years ago, when he had ac­cu­mu­lat­ed over one mil­lion Air Cana­da miles. He booked a ten-coun­try trip and over six weeks, vis­it­ed Chi­na, Japan and Aus­tralia.

“It was fan­tas­tic, the ex­cite­ment of go­ing from one coun­try to the next. Some peo­ple get tired af­ter a while when they’re trav­el­ling, oh they miss­ing their home, but for me, the ex­cite­ment of see­ing new places, meet­ing new peo­ple, it kept me go­ing,” he said.

De­Coteau con­tin­ued to book mul­ti­ple-coun­try trips un­til he com­plet­ed the en­tire UN map, doc­u­ment­ing the places he vis­it­ed and the peo­ple he met on so­cial me­dia and post­ing pic­tures in Oman, Iran, Chad, Por­tu­gal and many oth­er lo­ca­tions.

How­ev­er, while trav­el­ling the world has been a dream come true for De­Coteau, he has en­coun­tered some tur­bu­lence, es­pe­cial­ly on the African con­ti­nent.

“It was all about shake­downs, hav­ing to pay bribes,” he ad­mit­ted.

“I’ve had my pass­port and phone held hostage, threat­ened to be thrown in­to jail by army guys be­cause I was tak­ing pho­tos; they say I’m tak­ing it il­le­gal­ly, I had to of­fer them mon­ey.”

Those ex­pe­ri­ences did put a damper on his trips but De­Coteau would quick­ly move on to an­oth­er coun­try.

“I meet the nicest peo­ple. For ex­am­ple, in Afghanistan, every­one was lin­ing up, they want­ed to take pho­tos, to take me to lunch. It’s the nicest peo­ple. In Iraq, re­al­ly nice peo­ple,” he re­called.

De­Coteau said An­dor­ra was one of the most scenic coun­tries he vis­it­ed.

Through­out all his trav­els, he said, there’s one thing both he and oth­er trav­ellers agree on—giv­ing a high rat­ing to T&T’s cui­sine.

“I met one girl in Syr­ia and she was like, ‘I miss those dou­bles’. I think the food in Trinidad has every­body beat, every­body is talk­ing about the Tri­ni food—the roti, the dou­bles,” he said.