Steve Booker is a travel blogger who was given the challenge of traveling pole to pole — the Arctic Circle in Svalbard, Norway to Ushuaia, Argentina (known as the “End of the World”) — using nothing but his PayPal account. Without carrying credit cards or cash as a backup, he started with dog sledding to chase the Northern Lights, he traipsed through Paris, Berlin, Spain, Russia, and Africa, and ended up walking with penguins in South America. And he did it all with prepaid flight and lodging arrangements and merchants that accept PayPal.
“I loved the challenge and thrived on trying to figure out how to pay for some things,” he told the Daily Mail.
With hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and YouTube, Booker documented his trip online through photos and videos. He managed to pack light enough that he could go from the extreme cold in the north to the summer-like conditions of Cape Town without a lot of baggage. The trip took him two weeks and he stopped in eight different places, including exploring the tunnels of Moscow, riding in a Gyrocopter over Table Mountain, and bicycling in Barcelona. The experience was entirely cashless, freeing him up from trying to convert currencies or worrying about his wallet getting stolen.
His website is filled with entries where he was “invited to try” this or visit places in partnership with major companies, so one would assume PayPal helped quite a bit in completing this challenge. It’s good press for them, as the journey seemed fairly painless despite the terrible idea of being stuck somewhere you don’t know anyone and can’t speak the language to explain how PayPal works.
Booker posted several vlogs to his YouTube channel and plans to release a video wrapping up the entire experience.
via Daily Mail
