Bill Wiatrak is an actor, entrepreneur, entertainer, magician, musician and traveling writer who has visited 82 percent of the countries in the world.
In our conversation, he shares some of his adventures, how he started traveling the world and how you can too.
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The Black Labrador
I travel as a lifestyle - I go anywhere I want.A donkey ran in front of the truck - donkey is dead in a ditch...they [natives] were all drunk...I used it as an opportunity.Thank God we had full insurance.I used that as a loophole to get into one of the hardest countries in the world - Angola.If I said, "Hey, you only have one week left to live, what are you going to do?" They never say, "I'm gonna get my statistics up at work." They would travel...So let's pretend - you've got one week to live.Make a list of where you want to go.I have a list of every famous piece of art left...countries, cemeteries with famous dead people.If you say someday, you're never going to get there.I refer to myself as the Richard Simmons of travel.Why are you selling off your life without any thought of what you want to do?Every time you're stuck somewhere, its an opportunity.I purposefully do bad stopovers.If they're [Saudi Arabia] not going to give me a Visa anytime soon, I'm gonna hang out in the airport for a while and I'm considering that I've been to Saudi Arabia.I have this background as a magician which has completely reframed my life. If someone tells me I can't do something - I think its a trick and I figure a way around it."No" doesn't always mean "no."Misconceptions [about travel] are exactly the same as the fears and the excuses and it doesn't matter.The world is not dangerous. I've been to almost every Middle Eastern country and they're just about the nicest people I've ever met.I've been to almost every country and nobody ever wanted to kill me.Your chances of eaten by a shark are greater than being killed by a terrorist.Even if you don't have any money or are a college student, you still have more money than a lot of people in the world.A hundred bucks can get you pretty far in Thailand.Its a mindset, you just have to reframe the way you think about things.Once I got there I didn't have enough money to stay so I got a job waiting on tables.Here's all the possibilities you've been ignoring because you're used to doing an American vacation.Where there's a will - there's a lawyer, I mean a way.Somehow, there's always a way.I think I deserve everything I want to do, maybe I'm narcissistic.