COVERSTORY - PART 1 without limits
Seven travellers who lived for their travels and off their travels.
Matt Harding - Karl May - Laura Dekker - Freya Stark - Alexandra David-Néel - Alma Karlin - Isabelle Eberhardt
MATT HARDING BECAME A YOUTUBE STAR WITH HIS TRAVELLING AND DANCING
Matt Harding and Karl May have something in common – millions of fans and a soft spot for travelling, quirky travelling. Not the travels that interrupt your normal life, but those that are everything in life. In 2003, the Australian video game developer Harding had enough of his more or less middle-class life, and decided to go and discover the world until he had used up all his savings. But it never came to that. He became a YouTuber and a video star by always performing the same little dance at his travel destinations and posting a clip of it online. He got made fun of, but he also got many, many clicks. 138,000 people have subscribed to his YouTube channel, and over 50 million watch Matt as he flounders about to simple songs. Because he doesn’t do it in his bedroom, but in India, Bhutan, Zanzibar, the Australian coast, Kuwait, Mexico, Madagascar, Zambia and Yemen. And also in Dublin, Paris, London, Madrid, Istanbul, Warsaw and Cologne. Traditional media from the Hamburger Morgenpost to great US shows talk about him, and his travels are paid by sponsors. “I can live off the dance videos ...,” he said ina Spiegel online interview..
But, when it comes to numbers, he can’t keep up with Karl May. The latter can boast 200 million, not clicks, but books sold around the world. Despite the fact that the travel writer from the German Ore Mountains who died in 1912 published his “travel stories” – where he often played the main character of Old Shatterhand or Kara Ben Nemsi – before he could afford to travel. His Winnetou novels came out in 1893, while his six-week visit to North America took place 15 years later. May only vaguely conceded that his travels were fiction and that he was never appointed commander of the Apaches: “... no one can suspect that what I narrate is only parables and fables, because if that was known, I would never achieve what I intend to achieve”, he wrote in his biography “Mein Leben und Streben” [“My Life and Aspirations”, available in German].
THE GERMAN TRAVEL WRITER KARL MAY COMPLETELY IDENTIFIED WITH HIS ROLE AS OLD SHATTERHAND
