Book Review - Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip by Jim Rogers

Jim Roger's Excellent "Guide to the World"
I have learned more about the world from Adventure Capitalist than from any other book I've ever read. In case you're not familiar with the author, Jim Rogers, he's an Alabama boy who moved to New York to become one of the most legendary investors in Wall Street history. He co-founded the Quantum Fund, one of the best-performing hedge funds of all time, in 1973 with partner George Soros and "retired" in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. The Quantum Fund gained over 4,000% during its first ten years. In addition, Jim Rogers and George Soros are legendary for making a billion dollars for the fund during a single day of currency trading. Jim is particularly famous for investing in stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and everything and anything else--long and short--all over the world. If a truck of coffee beans turns over in Columbia, Jim can tell you how it will affect pork belly futures the next day.

Jim chronicled his first trip around the world, on a motorcycle no less, in Investment Biker. Adventure Capitalist is his report of a three-year trip around the world at the turn of the millennium (1999, 2000, and 2001) through 116 countries. No motorcycle this time though. With his beautiful fiancee Paige accompanying him (they married during the trip), they traveled in a custom-built, four-wheel-drive, convertible, Sunburst Yellow Mercedes.

The book is non-stop adventure supplemented with Jim's excellent political and economic commentary. Here are some quotes that I highlighted in the book:

"Ulan Bator, the capitol of Mongolia, is perhaps the most technologically up-to-date city in the world, totally digital. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a free and independent Mongolia benefited from numerous sources of foreign aid, and with no infrastructure to upgrade, it leapfrogged about three generations of technology. The whole city is wired with fiber-optic cable, enabling you to jack into the Web from almost any phone in town... Everybody in Mongolia has a digital cell phone. The nation's nomads, crossing the country on horseback, carry them. There is a cell phone in most yurts."

"The liberator of the Ivory Coast and its first president was Felix Houphouet-Boigny... He was going to make the country's cathedral larger than Saint Peter's until the pope intervened. In the end, at the pontiff's urging, he made it two centimeters smaller."

"Tanzania, in my opinion, when it comes to tourism, is the single best country in Africa... it has not yet been overrun by foreign visitors... It has beautiful beaches on the Indian Ocean. It has the exotic, ancient island of Zanzibar... It has game parks that are unique in the world, teeming with animals... Tanzania is one of the safest countries in Africa. And it is cheap... There were animals everywhere. And no people."

"In India, self-described as a great incubator of information technology, we could not even use mobile phones universally. We had to buy a different phone for almost every city. A mobile phone in China works everywhere in the country. The Indians are extraordinarily resentful and jealous of the Chinese... China has grown far more than India in the last twenty years, and China has infrastructure--highways, telephones, mobile phones. India has virtually none of these."

"You will not find another city in the world that is as rich and as safe as Singapore."

"My chief impression of Paraguay today is that it should not exist. The place should be dismantled and sold for parts."

"In Buenos Aires I went to the bank, changed all my pesos into dollars, and got them out of the country. The banker handling the transaction scoffed at me, as did several politicians... in three months the collapse of the Argentine economy led the news all over the world."

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