Hi Everyone,

With our community continuing to grow, its exciting to see dozens of events & trips taking place all over the world every week. Last week, I co-hosted a HUGE travel meetup with Rebecca from Outsite and Harry from NomadMania.

The fully recap is below, along with my interview with NomadMania. All of this pushed me to set a new goal: visit every country in the world by 40. Ideally with as many of you as possible 🥳. More below 👇

We've got plenty more meetups planned which you can find on our new website, along with all of our favorite co-livings, nomad programs, & group trips.  

Upcoming Meetup Schedule:

Want to host a Pangea meetup somewhere in the world? Apply to be an Ambassador, or submit your travel program to become PangeaVerified and co-brand it with us. Please note, only people I've personally traveled with will be eligible to host events, but if we haven't met yet, feel free to join me on my travels and we can chat IRL. My full schedule is in Pangea.  

Our London meetup was co-hosted with our partners at Outsite & NomadMania. It was a great opportunity for more than 60 people from all 3 communities to attend and meet each other. I was joined by Outsite's head of Marketing, Rebecca, and NomadMainia's founder Harry at the event. We also had 5 UN Masters from NomadMania, each of whom has visited every country in the world. It was a great opportunity to bring the top Digital Nomad & Extreme Traveler communities together to share their adventures. If you weren't able to join, I hope to see you at the next one

Established in 2012 and rebranded as NomadMania in 2017, they are the newest player among three major organizations focused on enabling and tracking systematic travel, along with Most Traveled People (MTP), and Travelers Century Club (TCC). In May, I attended the NomadMania conference in Fergana, Uzbekistan, which was my first of many recent experiences getting to know these communities and some of their most traveled members. Each of the more than 2 dozen UN Masters I've had the pleasure of meeting have such unique and inspiring perspectives on the world that they've gained from visiting every country in the world. NomadMania goes beyond the simple definition of countries, further dividing the world into 1301 distinct "regions”. "When I first learned about this system, I thought they were a bit superficial - just an arbitrary tick-box exercise. However, this list of regions was thoughtfully and academically created considering cultural, political, religious and geographic factors within each country, and is continuously reviewed as the world changes by some of the most knowledgeable and traveled people in the world. These systems provide a way to better understand the various parts that make up each country - and when traveling, is a great guide to go deep and fully explore a country, rather than just tick the capital city off your bucket-list.  NomadMania has an impressive app to track your regions, with plenty of cool gamification, leaderboards, and statistics. They also have several ways to connect with other "super travelers" in cities around the world. Their founder, Harry Mitsidis (pictured above) is currently #1 in the world according on both the NomadMania and MTP leaderboards, having seen more of our planet than any other human in history. As travelers, its always a challenge to figure out if we want to see more places or spend longer in the ones you love - a balancing act that there really is no right answer for. Life is short, the world is wide, and no one can truly see and experience it all. All we can do is try.  I'll be joining Harry for the NomadMania trip through 🇧🇯 Benin & 🇹🇬 Togo in January for the Vodoun Festival, and expect that I'll join many more of their trips in years to come.  If you're looking for a group to go to some of the less traveled places (🇸🇾 Syria, 🇨🇩Democratic Republic of the Congo, 🇧🇮 Burundi, 🇷🇼 Rwanda, 🇺🇬 Uganda, 🇦🇴 Angola, or 🇨🇫  Central African Republic to name a few) NomadMania is a great place to start!

Meeting so many people in both the NomadMania and MTP communities has inspired me to set out to see every country in the world myself. But there's a catch. I want to do it with an awesome community. So, over the next 7 years, ahead of my 40th birthday, my plan is to complete my remaining 90 countries, working with the Pangea  community and our partners to ensure I share the journey with as many of you as possible. The plan will be to co-organize and curate epic experiences at the optimal times in as many of these countries as possible. There will be several formats, from organized months working remotely in places like 🇸🇳 Senegal, 🇬🇭 Ghana, 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan or 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan, to epic events like the F1 Grand Prix in 🇸🇦 Saudi & 🇧🇹 Bahrain or the 2027 Total Solar Eclipse in 🇩🇿 Algeria, to awesome one of a kind co-living villas in places like 🇲🇼 Malawi or 🇲🇿 Mozambique, and of course lots of interesting long weekend adventures to everywhere else in between...maybe even 🇰🇮 Kiribati for NYE one year (since it celebrates first).The loose schedule for 2026 & 2027 will drop next month along with our latest Pangea release.My full list of remaining countries is below.  If you're eager to go, have a group travel company that would like to collaborate, or any interesting tips on the ground, I'd love to hear from you!

Africa

Oceania:

Asia

North America:

Europe:

South America

I've written extensively about some of our favorite community partners the last few months, and in cases where I've traveled with them or met the founders personally, have arranged discounts for Pangea members.  We're in the process of adding all of these programs, and the long tail of high-quality smaller programs to our app and new search tool on our website. 🛳 NomadCruise by Johannes Voelkner

🦅 NomadNest by Walid Elshahed & Joanna Asiukiewicz

💻 WiFi Tribe by Diego Burke

🏡 Outsite by Emmanuel Guisset

In case you missed it, I'll be co-hosting the 2nd Annual NomadWeek in Cape Town (January 25-31, 2026) with the one and only Andrae Smith, a native Capetonian, long time digital nomad, and Founder of both NomadWeek & Work Wanderers- one of the world's leading communities for digital nomads. Many of you know that Cape Town remains my favorite place on the planet, and I'm excited to work together with Andrae to connect our community to Cape Town and the whole of South Africa in several meaningful ways during NomadWeek and throughout 2026. Join the waitlist below, and let me know if you're interested in any of the side trips we're in the process of planning: We're also discussing lots of epic group trips including some of last year's favorites (Garden Route Castles and Our Starlink Botswana Villa) plus several new ones including Mozambique 🇲🇿, Leshoto 🇱🇸, and Malawi 🇲🇼. Join the chats to stay informed.   

If you manage a Digital Nomad program that you think would be relevant to our community of 25k+ Digital Nomads & Solo Travelers, you can submit it here on our website.  We'll work through the large backlog we have to vet and get the best ones added to our website so our community can easily find them. PangeaVerified is our official stamp of approval, reserved only for programs our team has extensively traveled with, or where we have strong relationships with the founders.  The goal is to only showcase programs that I would personally endorse.  

I'm excited to see many of you tonight in Boston, along with some of the original Pangea supporters: Dan Fasano & Alen Arden.   If you're in town, be sure to stop by.   And if not, hope to see you in the next few months somewhere else in the world.  

We've got a lot in the works, and I'm looking forward to sharing several major updates in the weeks to come.  As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any ideas.  

Cheers,

-Matt

Founder & CEO of Pangea

104/197 Countries (125 UN+) & 7 Continents Traveled

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