The dancing globetrotter

Matt Harding was a game developer at Activision who eventually arrived at a conclusion familiar to anyone who has spent too much of their life staring at a computer screen: there has to be something else. So he quit.

Not to launch a startup, find himself at a yoga retreat, or write a manifesto about work-life balance. He simply bought a ticket and started wandering around the planet.

Somewhere along the way, in Hanoi to be more precise, a travel companion suggested filming Matt doing a little dance. Actually, calling it a dance may be generous. It was more of an enthusiastic, vaguely rhythmic flailing, the sort of thing normally attempted at weddings after several drinks. But it worked.

Matt kept doing it. During 2003 and 2004 he danced his way through one location after another, eventually stitching the footage together into Where the Hell is Matt? (2005). Set to Deep Forest’s Sweet Lullaby, the video showed him performing his gloriously terrible little jig in places all over the world. And because the Internet occasionally rewards exactly the right kind of pointless human behavior, it went viral.

Stride, a chewing-gum company apparently wise enough to recognize marketing gold when it saw a grown man dancing badly in foreign countries, sponsored another trip. The result was Where the Hell is Matt? (2006). Six months, 39 countries, countless landmarks and presumably a heroic amount of airport food. There are also some hilarious outtakes, proving that even professional bad dancing requires several attempts.

Eventually Matt was noticed by Swedish travel agency Ving, who put him in a commercial for a new service. It mixed footage from his earlier journeys with a few new scenes, including a moment in Istanbul with Matt dancing on a rooftop overlooking Hagia Sophia surrounded by fifty Turkish men in traditional folk costumes. There are worse ways to earn a living.

If you want more, Matt has a blog, and there’s an interview where he talks about the original Hanoi dance and (rather more intriguingly) deodorants on a bus in Africa.

Travel does that. You leave home looking for temples, landscapes and profound cultural experiences. You come back with stories about deodorant.

Update: Matt returned with a 2008 version and later gave a lecture explaining how the whole unlikely business happened.