Where on Earth is Matt?

Now don’t get too worried readers, this IS NOT an urgent appeal for a missing man named Matt. It’s more of a testimonial post to a highly amusing and entertaining post that I think people should find out alot more about.

It was my sister who actually pointing out this video to me one day, she was casually browsing throught the website and this one particularly grabbed our attention. So before I go into the story of how it came to be and all that, it would make more sense if every one watched it first…. (it gives you the option to watch it in HD, i’d recommend it although it does take longer to upload so depends on your Internet speed.)

 

 

So there you go, quite an amazing video, class to see all those places, especially Giants Causeway getting an honourable mention!! :D

So you may be wondering how this all came about, this young fellow named Matt Harding travelled to over 42 countries in the space of 14 months and despite jet lag probably taking it’s toll, it would have been an amazing experience. I was intruiged, and so after a couple of watches, I visited Matt’s website where it explains all about his amazing trip and all the incidents, however i’ve copied a section straight from this site to give you a brief run down of how this trip came about…

Matt is a 32-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he’d saved to wander around Asia until it ran out. He made this site so he could keep his family and friends updated about where he is.

A few months into his trip, a travel buddy gave Matt an idea. They were standing around taking pictures in Hanoi, and his friend said “Hey, why don’t you stand over there and do that dance. I’ll record it.” He was referring to a particular dance Matt does. It’s actually the only dance Matt does. He does it badly. Anyway, this turned out to be a very good idea.

A couple years later, someone found the video online and passed it to someone else, who passed it to someone else, and so on. Now Matt is quasi-famous as “That guy who dances on the internet. No, not that guy. The other one. No, not him either. I’ll send you the link. It’s funny.”

The response to the first video brought Matt to the attention of the nice people at Stride Gum. They asked Matt if he’d be interested in taking another trip around the world to make a new video. Matt asked if they’d be paying for it. They said yes. Matt thought this sounded like another very good idea.

In 2006, Matt took a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents. In that time, he danced a great deal.

Things settled down again, and then in 2007 Matt went back to Stride with another idea. He realized his bad dancing wasn’t actually all that interesting, and that other people were much better at being bad at it. He showed them his inbox, which, as a result of his semi-famousness, was overflowing with emails from all over the planet. He told them he wanted to travel around the world one more time and invite the people who’d written him to come out and dance too.

So there you have it, quite an amazing story and now this video has amassed a collossal 21,000,000 views, admittedly quite a few Britains Got Talent YouTube Video’s have collected quite a few more than this so come on, let’s pass on this video and show people how brilliantly diverse the world we live in is and how many cultures and peoples exist within it. If you’re like me, you’ll be watching this video with an open mouth for quite a while yet!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this, also, decided it’d be quite cool if you could leave a comment saying how many of the countries included in the video have you been too?!

 As St. Augustine said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”  (One of Joel Somerville’s t-shirt also says this….)

Thanks for reading, Ali