11 Months Traveling And I Never Left Azeroth

This post is going to divide people who read it into two groups: one will roll their eyes and say OMG, and the other group will laugh out loud and say OMG! The first group will have no clue what the hell I’m talking about, and the second group will know exactly what I’m talking about.

When you travel, especially traveling alone, you often have lots of time on your hands. You can’t always just being running around visiting things non-stop. That might work when you are on a brief vacation, but when you are doing long term travel, you can burn out really quick.

Before I started my trip I was an pretty avid World of Warcraft player. I was the leader of a raiding guild on Dark Iron (Djork) and was one of the first level 60 and 70 characters on my server.

When my trip started, I never canceled my WoW account. While I can’t really play seriously anymore, I have been able to log on every so often from different places. I can’t say I’ve spent much time playing and I wouldn’t even call what I do “playing”. I usually just log on and say hello to my friends in the guild for a few minutes. I’m basically using it as a glorified chat client. I have done some daily quests and simple things, but that is about it. Playing on satellite connections in the middle of the ocean doesn’t really make for an awesome playing experience. (Please, spare me the comments about how traveling and playing video games is a waste of time. I don’t play much and after you have traveled solo for a year, you can preach to me.)

To date, I have logged on from 23 different countries and territories. The only reason I am writing about this is that I think it is some sort of record. I have no clue and I am sure no one keeps track of these sort of things, but I don’t think the average WoW player does much international travel, let alone try to log on while they are overseas.

Here is the complete list:

  1. USA
  2. French Polynesia (a cafe in Papeete)
  3. Cook Islands (a cafe in Rarotonga)
  4. New Zealand (a Starbucks in Auckland)
  5. Fiji (an internet cafe in Suva)
  6. Samoa (with great difficulty from an internet cafe in Apia)
  7. American Samoa (Tradewinds Hotel)
  8. New Caledonia (Le Meridian Hotel. Very slow)
  9. Vanuatu (hotel in Port Vila)
  10. Solomon Islands (King Solomon Hotel)
  11. Guam (Days Inn near the airport)
  12. CNMI (hotel in Saipan)
  13. Palau (motel in Korror)
  14. Philippines (internet cafe in Makati)
  15. Taiwan (hostel in Taipei)
  16. Japan (several places)
  17. South Korea (hostel in Busan)
  18. Hong Kong (Chungking Mansion)
  19. Macau (McDonald’s)
  20. Brunei (internet cafe in BSB)
  21. Malaysia (hostel in Kota Kinabalu)
  22. Indonesia (restaurant in Bali)
  23. Australia (Hostel in Melbourne)

If I had been trying, I could have logged on in a few more locations. Easter Island and the Marshall Islands would have been possible if I made the effort.

7 thoughts on “11 Months Traveling And I Never Left Azeroth”

  1. It’s funny Gary aka Caesar is one of the hand full of players who log on when I do and I live in Germany, and previously Guam when Gary started traveling. Hopefully one day we can meet up.

  2. your brother says this is a big scam. This is Neil A. Bretl from the big ol’ city of Antigo WI

    You are a lucky bastard

  3. Haha another wow addict =). I still have my account active even though I rarely play anymore. That’s actually quite a list of places to try to log in from. I’m actually kind of surprised that they let ip addresses from foreign countries in that easily.

  4. Ahhhh, the good old WoW times. In Singapore and Thailand we used to play that day and night. That was before the expansion (Burning Crusade?) though. Server: Elune, my Guild was the “Temasek Rayas”. ;-)

    At the best of times we had over 120 members, but that was long long ago. It’s disbanded for 2 years now and I gave it up, mainly due to lack of appropriate bandwidth and sleep deprivation.

    One thing I want to add regarding traveling WoW members. We had 1 steward and 1 stewardess from Singapore Airlines in our Guild. They used to login every day from a different location around the world. The job at SIA comes with free hotel and usually internet, so they always had a great connection. Can’t recall the number of countries though, but it was plenty as well.

    Hm, reading your post makes me really a bit homesick for Ironforge, Stormwind and all the other beautiful places in Azeroth. ;-)

    Cheers from Bali,

    Chris
    http://www.nomad4ever.com
    Life is what you make it!

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