Latest news with #ImpossibleJourney
Daily Mail
18-05-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I visited every country in the world without flying - these are the surprisingly friendliest places
Travelling to every country in the world is already one of the globe's hardest challenges. But for Thor Pedersen, it wasn't quite hard enough. The 45-year-old Danish adventurer became the first and only person to visit every country in the world without taking a single flight in 2023. His mammoth voyage to 203 countries took him a decade (3,576 days) to complete. He spent at least 24 hours in each country and says that the challenging journey across 380,000km 'took him to the brink of his sanity'. Thor has now written a book about his adventure, 'The Impossible Journey'. In an exclusive chat with MailOnline Travel, the traveller reveals where he faced 'grave danger', the most logistically challenging country to travel to and the destinations which hold a special place in his heart. The idea for Thor's incredible voyage was sparked by an email from his father in 2013. He says: 'My father sent me a link to an article about extreme travellers who'd been to every country in the world. And I started digging into it and I found out that no one had accomplished a journey of visiting every country without flying and that struck me like a lightening bolt.' Once the idea was formed, Thor set out planning his route and admits that he was 'quite naive' about the difficulties when he left home. Of all the places he visited, he reveals that Equatorial Guinea, on Africa's west coast, presented the biggest logistical challenges. 'I had no idea that Equatorial Guinea was going to be difficult. I overlooked it in my research. It almost broke me,' says Thor. 'Equatorial Guinea is just notorious for not giving visas. It just didn't need tourists, it's a wealthy oil state and it's a paranoid dictatorship. The borders were shut and I went from one embassy to the next and got denied over and over again. Often in the most cruel and unnecessary ways with people screaming at me and belittling me. It took me three months before I finally had the visa.' That logistical nightmare occurred soon after one of the worst moments from Thor's trip where he reveals he felt 'certain he was going to die'. The traveller was accosted at a checkpoint in Cameroon by three drunk men armed with guns close to the border with Congo. Thor tells MailOnline: 'That was the only moment where I was 100 per cent certain that I was going to die. I had absolutely no doubt that it was the end of the road for me and there was no way out of it.' While the traveller escaped the encounter, the moment left an impression and came at a time when he was at his 'lowest point' on the adventure. Thor says: 'I spent part of my journey thinking "maybe I shouldn't be doing this".' Another challenging moment came while Thor was 'onboard a container ship in the North Atlantic during winter'. He says: 'The weather acted up to a degree where you couldn't stand on your legs without holding on to something. You couldn't lie down on the bed without ending up on the floor. You could barely eat a meal because you would be out of hands. And there was ice in the water and the ship wasn't ice class. We were also pretty close to where Titanic went down and that storm lasted for four days.' But despite the difficulties, Thor reveals that during his decade of travels the good moments far outweighed the bad. And while he met fantastic people everywhere, there are two countries he picks out as the friendliest in the world, which many may be surprised by. Thor reveals: 'I could single out Uganda. In Uganda, I found an openness and a kindness where I almost expected to get a hug just walking down the street. 'And in Pakistan, they have a saying that's something along the lines of "The guest is God". They don't mean that you're a god or anything like that, they just mean that the guest should be respected and treated with the utmost courtesy. If you're a guest you do nothing at all. They do everything for you and in many cases, you can find it hard to pay as well because you're a guest.' Despite having 203 countries and territories under his belt, Thor says that there's nowhere he wouldn't want to go back to. However, there are two countries that he's in 'no great hurry to return to'. He explains: 'I ended up spending two months in Tuvalu (in the Pacific Ocean) because I couldn't leave. I really feel I've seen that country. But on the other side of that, I'd like to go back and meet some of the people I met the first time around. And the Vatican is not high on my list. I spent 24 hours in the Vatican and I really don't have a good reason to go back.' After reaching the Maldives, the last country of his decade-long journey, Thor is now back in Denmark and lives with his wife and daughter. He jokes that his family are now 'having to deal with having him around all the time'. While the traveller learned many lessons over the course of his trip, it's the kindness he received that's stayed with him the most. He reveals: 'I look at the world map and I realise that I haven't been to a single country in the world where I didn't receive some sort of kindness or support from local people. 'In a conventional lottery, you buy a ticket and your chances of losing are almost 100 per cent, you expect to lose. But when you're dealing with people, it's reversed. You're winning, of course it's possible to lose, but the odds are overwhelmingly in our favour. You'll find kindness in all the places you wouldn't expect to.'
Daily Mail
27-04-2025
- Daily Mail
The Impossible Journey by Thor Pedersen: After 3,576 days of travelling, I know the world's a safe place
The Impossible Journey Thor Pedersen Robinson £25, 308pp As a child growing up in Denmark, Thor Pedersen dreamed of being a great explorer, his mind filled with images of tangled forests, abandoned temples and lost empires. After a spell working as a United Nations peacekeeper, he started a career in shipping and logistics. In 2013, his father sent him an article about an Englishman who had gone to every country in the world, travelling by land and sea, although he had paused his trip several times to fly home. Bored with his job, and eager for adventure, Pedersen, right, decided he would do similar, but with no interruptions and definitely no sneaky flights home. Armed with a modest amount of sponsorship, and having been appointed a goodwill ambassador by the Danish Red Cross, he set off in 2013 with a list of the 201 countries he needed to visit. His plan was to pass through a country every seven days, and he calculated the journey would take no more than four years to complete. Looking back, he writes, 'I was delusional from the very first seconds of the project.' He criss-crossed Europe before travelling on a container ship from Iceland to Canada, and then journeying through North, Central and South America. In each new country, he noticed, he would be told he was lucky to have survived the place he had just come from, and how dangerous his next destination was. His real problems started in Africa. He contracted malaria in Liberia and found it almost impossible to get an entry visa to Equatorial Guinea, 'a tiny, paranoid petrol state'. When he finally got there, he was bitten by chimpanzees. A part of the journey that should have taken six weeks had lasted nine months. On the top of a windswept Mount Kenya, he proposed to his long-suffering doctor girlfriend, Le, who was visiting from Denmark. By now, his enthusiasm for his journey had waned, but he ploughed on through Asia, before gearing up to tackle the far-flung Pacific islands. Arriving in Hong Kong in January 2020, he was puzzled to be handed a face mask. Pedersen spent the pandemic years in Hong Kong; with only nine countries still to go, he refused to give up on his quest. Finally, in May 2023, he made it to Sri Lanka and then the Maldives, the final countries on the list. After 3,576 days and having covered 380,000km, he could go home – by boat, of course. The Impossible Journey is never less than entertaining, but gets bogged down in endless struggles with unyielding bureaucrats for the visas he needs. When he does write about watching hundreds of dolphins frolicking off the coast of the Solomon Islands, or wild days drinking vodka with the locals in Turkmenistan, the book really comes alive. Now married to Le, and with a baby daughter, he is proud to be the first person to visit every country in the world without taking a flight, but admits: 'The project damaged me, and I cannot be sure I'll ever be right in my head again.' What he remembers most about his travels are the people he met, and the kindness they showed him. His conclusion is that 'the world is far safer than people realise'.
