(NewsNation) — A Danish man says he has traveled to every country in the world, and he did so without setting foot on an airplane.
Torbjørn “Thor” Pedersen visited more than 200 countries and some disputed territories over the last decade, traveling the globe without flying. Instead, he embarked on his journey on foot, taking boats, trains, cars and even a container ship to get to his destinations.
Pedersen said the idea came to him after he received an email from his father in early 2013 that contained a link to a story about people who had gone to every country in the world.
Before the end of the article, he realized that no one has accomplished it completely without flying.
“It sat with me as one of the last greats, that I could go and try to conquer that,” Pedersen said.
But Pedersen said when he initially dropped everything to pursue his goals, he didn’t know it was going to take him 10 years to do so. He thought — with his calculations — that he would be able to accomplish visiting every country in just four years. The goal would be to visit each country for seven days at a time until he visited them all.
He said one of the hardest things he had to decide was to leave his now-wife behind, and having to explain to her that he was going to be traveling the world on foot.
However, Pedersen said the happiest and greatest adventure was getting married to her.
The two got engaged on top of Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa. They thought it was going to be a beautiful day, but then a snowstorm hit when they arrived.
Pedersen and his wife ended up getting married online through an agency in Utah because he was stuck in Hong Kong during the pandemic, and couldn’t go back home. The coolest part about their marriage, he said, is that they were married on two different dates due to the time difference.
“That’s a pretty happy memory as well,” he said.
But now that Pedersen is 10 years older than when he left home, he is ready to settle down a bit and try to create a family with his wife.
And while it might seem like Pedersen has done and seen everything, he said there are still so many places he has yet to visit.
“There’s still a lot of the world I haven’t seen, to be frank,” he said. “I mean, if you go to New York, that doesn’t mean you’ve seen the United States of America. And you can say the same for a lot of countries around the world.”
He hopes that his future trips include traveling to Easter Island, the Galapagos and even the Arctic.