How to become an explorer?

It seems like you have to be ridiculously qualified in some way to do anything fun as a career nowadays.

I don't want to go to college for four years to major in geography, or zoology, or any other of the myriad ologies out there just to be able to...

travel around and explore places.

I've explored basically everywhere within a five mile radius of my house, and now wish to actually explore somewhere relatively much cooler than the woods of Indiana.

How could I go about becoming an explorer?

you just go lol, once you put your mind to it, you might just be able to explorer all around cities, and what their about, but putting college out for exploring, what will that do for your career?

I think that a lot of modern-day explorers didn't do well at school at all. The sort of peronality which can drive you on to overcome the odds in a hostile environment doesn't tend to cope well with teachers!

This is not to discourage you from getting qualifications, which are a useful backup when you're too old/injured/poor to explore, but it's just an observation that some people who do badly at school show their true abilities in later life.

Good luck!

well there are actually still great portions of the andes and amizon not yet explored and africa is often a mestrrios land preferably centeral africa very tribal.

I would think a good way to start would a certificate in gis (global information systems) which is basically modern cartography, yes you would have to go to college but it would teach you the basics of mapping, (exploring) alternatively you could start getting training in mountaineering, scuba, caving something like that (all of these are things I've done and they're all very cool) then find somewhere you would like to explore and apply for grants, etc. to get there. National geographic has a good grant program for explorers, you might want to check it out. You might also look into getting into photo journalism, or regular journalism and working as a free lance photographer/ make documentary films for places like national geographic, the discovery channel etc. The bottom line is you need to get some experience and hopefully at least some certificates so you have more than your word saying you know what your doing. You can get certificates in rocking climbing, and scuba without ever setting foot in a real classroom, in fact the vast majority of things you learn in both focus on very hands on stuff. If you want to get into caving (there are a lot of unexplored caves left, in fact me and a friend just broke into one that had never had a person inside less than a month ago) go to the national speilogical societies website and find/join a local grotto (I believe the website is http://www.nss.org, but I could be wrong just google it if you can't find it) Good Luck!