From Chicago to the Congo, Nate Fluellen is sharing his experiences in the Urban Movie Channel’s new travel series

When Nathan Fluellen’s international economics professor at Tennessee State University (TSU) challenged him to travel to more places than him, he accepted. Professor Galen Hull had visited more than 80 places around the country, and that concept intrigued Fluellen.

The ideology was not new to him. He grew up in a household where his mother embarked upon mission trips abroad, and his cousins spent time working and living overseas.

“She had been in Brazil four or five times, South Africa, Italy and Egypt,” Fluellen said.

So he set out to travel the world, documenting his experiences and branding himself as World Wide Nate.

Now he has landed a 13-episode reality travel show on the Urban Movie Channel (UMC). In World Wide Nate: African Adventures, a crew follows the Chicago native as he hikes the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mountains, cruises the world’s largest lava lake, rappels alongside a 600-foot-tall waterfall in Lesotho and treks through the Rwandan jungle alongside silverback gorillas and more.

“Me, a kid from the South Side of Chicago, was walking in the footsteps of my ancestors seeing the same majestic mountain ridges. I was speechless,” Fluellen says in the first episode, with more new shows to return in the spring.

Fluellen’s exploits include food, culture and fun, and he offers viewers the opportunity to experience Africa through his charm and adventures.

According to his website, in March 2016 he became one of the first sponsored U.S. tourists to visit Cuba in more than 50 years. His adventures have been sponsored by Chase Bank, Marriott, Time, Fortune, Travel + Leisure, Ford and Lincoln Motors, Essence.com, Ebony.com, Mensfitness.com, AOL.com and the South African Tourism Board. He is a three-time winner of LAWebfest’s most outstanding series and series host.

After graduating from historically black TSU in 2004 with a degree in economics, Fluellen decided to take his first trip, recalling the challenge from his professor. He set his sights on Barcelona, Spain.

“It’s the city that’s romanticized about, and just being a Michael Jordan fan growing up, and the Barcelona Olympics, it was exciting,” he said. “I’m an adventurous person. I’ve always been an explorer. Prior to me going, I had started taking Spanish classes at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute. I met new people from all over the world, and other professional athletes. I’m meeting them and they’re just happy to see another black person. It was an eye-opening experience. I felt like I was finally living my dream of being an international man of leisure.”

Fluellen’s vision initially was to write a book capturing his travel experiences. He thought he would create a book that would include the push of a button to play a video — but then came the iPad, he explained.

So the 36-year-old opted for an online blog experience and started chronicling his journey on MySpace when the social media forum was most popular.

“I would just write, ‘Day One, this is what I did, from sunrise to sunset,’ and people would just read it and be like, ‘Oh, that was tight. That was dope.’ So I had bought a better camera, a digital camera, then I bought a camcorder, then bought a better camcorder, and I started recording my videos and taught myself how to edit on Final Cut Express.”

A friend from college who had a knack for editing videos reached out to Fluellen, and they founded his webisodes. Fluellen’s cousin introduced him to the digital director at Ebony, who hired him as a travel editor on a gig that took him to the Bahamas to cover the 2006 Miss Universe pageant. This is when his journey took off in the paid space.

“It was superfun, and that’s when I met other travel people and learned about press trips,” he said. “I was just really learning the game, as far as how people are making it into a career, and this is like my passion.”

Fluellen said the hardest part of his journey was lack of financing.

“It’s like when people ask you, ‘Pick something that you love so much that if you didn’t get paid, you’d do it every day,’ ” he said. “There’s been days I ain’t get paid, and I’m still doing it. There wasn’t always a lot of money in the industry. And then it was like the cat-and-mouse game, where they understood the value but then they kind of wanted to see how much experience you had, to see if they wanted to pay you your value or not. And then now, people understand the value of video content.”

The most interesting place Fluellen has visited is Rwanda.

“It was so clean, and the people were just so brown and chocolate. And the landscape was so green and lush. Rwanda was unique.”

Living in Los Angeles, he also has a passion for health and fitness. He trains six days a week and participates in boxing, body weight and core exercises.

“I’ve always played basketball growing up. I played a little football, did some track, some high jumps. I took weight training classes and always kept my ear to the fitness and the importance of diet [at TSU].

He does boxing training, yoga, surfing and rock climbing and includes eating a balanced meal as a core principle of fitness. His clean diet includes foods high in protein and low in carbs. He’s incorporated this lifestyle into his travels, sharing his Train Hard Thursday workouts and cheat day meals on Fried Chicken Friday with his social media followers.

“I have to have a cheat day,” Fluellen said. “I eat pretty healthy. I’ll usually cook some salmon, kale and some asparagus, avocado and tomato. I’ll eat that all during the week.”

Giving back is also at the top of Fluellen’s list of priorities. He joined RakLife, an organization that uses random acts of kindness as a mantra to help the less fortunate around the world on a recent trip to Paje, Zanzibar, where they helped feed 300 elderly citizens. He is also interested in starting a scholarship fund at his alma mater that will send students abroad to study in Colombia.