Danish adventurer Thor Pedersen set himself the task of visiting every country in the world in one unbroken journey without using aeroplanes
The epic trip took him to his limits – he tells Graeme Green that it ‘really wasn’t enjoyable’, but ‘stressful and frustrating’
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Looking out at the ocean in the coastal town of Zuwarah in Libya, midway through his journey around the world, Thor Pedersen was disturbed by a strange smell. ‘It smelled like something rotting – I figured it was seaweed,’ he recalls. ‘I went down to the beach, turned right, and saw a body. I was frozen solid. I started to think, “Am I seeing something I shouldn’t see? Will someone come and shoot me?” My legs turned to lead. My heart started pounding. I turned around and there’s another body on the sand, so I’m standing between two bodies.’
Pedersen remembers being struck by the fact that, just a few hundred metres further along the beach, local people were relaxing on sun loungers, children swimming in the glistening ocean. ‘With the third body, I started to find life jackets and timber,’ he says. ‘In 2017, when I was in Libya, there was a lot in the media about 200,000 migrants crossing from North Africa to Europe, so I thought, “Okay, a ship was ripped apart and these people got washed up on the shore.” I found two more bodies, so five in total.’
The scene of ‘surreal horror’, which Pedersen describes in his new book The Impossible Journey, is one of many memories that haven’t left him from his ten-year mission to become the first person to visit every country in the world consecutively without flying – an adventure that made global headlines.
Though he has pleasant memories of the people and places he encountered, it’s also clear that the trip took a physical and mental toll on him – on several occasions, he nearly lost his life. What visiting all 203 countries provided, however, was a knowledge and up-close understanding of the world that you can’t get from books, newspapers or television. ‘I definitely gained a lot of first-hand experience,’ he says. ‘Whenever we’re challenged, this is when we gain life experience really fast.’
Born in 1978, Torbjørn – or Thor – Pedersen grew up in Bryrup, a small town in Denmark. ‘I’ve had a longing for exploration throughout my life,’ he tells me. ‘When I was a small boy, I’d explore local neighbourhoods. I had access to a canoe and I’d mentally map out the lake. I remember my mother telling me that one day we’d go around the world – a promise she never delivered on. But I had this idea that one day my mother and I would walk on the Great Wall of China and see the Sahara. All this stuff was planted within me.’
The impression Pedersen gives of himself in his book is of a lonely, angry child and young man. His father’s job with a bedding company meant moving to different parts of Canada, the USA and Denmark. His parents argued a lot and divorced when he was 16 – Thor had a troubled relationship with them both. He was shy and bullied at school, but had a fascination with explorers such as Hernán Cortés, Ibn Battuta and Roald Amundsen, and a belief that he ‘was born for something else’.
He wouldn’t be the first person to put a distance between themselves and home, feelings of trauma and sadness. Was there an element of that in his adventure? ‘I’m not conscious about that, but there might be.’
After school, he went to business school, worked as a ski instructor and completed his military service (including time as a UN peacekeeper in Eritrea and Ethiopia), then backpacked around Asia, before settling into a career in shipping and logistics. But he was itching for an adventure. When his father sent him an article in 2013 about the English adventurer Graham Hughes, who’d set a Guinness World Record as the first person in the world to visit every country without flying, Pedersen was ‘awestruck’.
But there were key differences between Hughes’s global travels and the concept that started formulating in Pedersen’s head – not least the fact that Pedersen planned to visit every country around the world in one non-stop journey, unlike Hughes, who’d flown home at intervals. Flying home also meant Hughes avoided the almost insurmountable task of securing every visa and permit along the way, as he could arrange many back in England, and that he could take a break from the project. Pedersen’s method seems to have had more suffering and hardship built in.
He set out from Dybbøl Mølle, Denmark, on 10 October 2013, aged 34, expecting his trip to take three to four years.
It took nine years, nine months and 16 days, or 3,576 days – the venture made more painful by the fact that he had fallen in love with a Danish woman, Le, a year before his departure. With a plan to spend at least 24 hours in each country, he operated on a budget of around US$20 per day, the trip funded by savings, sponsorship deals, public donations (his Once Upon a Saga blog gaining traction as he hit more countries), and work, and aided by collaborations with the Maersk shipping company.
He also served as an ambassador for the Red Cross, raising funds and highlighting its humanitarian work worldwide.
After breezing through Europe, he worked his way down through the Americas and the Caribbean, over to Africa and on to the Middle East, Asia and Australasia… There were many bright moments, especially ‘a tremendous amount of kind people’.
But an intense storm during a winter crossing of the Atlantic from Iceland to Canada was the first time of many that he questioned if he would make it home alive and if the entire trip was a mistake. ‘We weren’t far from where the Titanic sank, which was in the back of my head,’ he says. ‘The ship wasn’t in great condition. There was a huge ocean swell and I thought we were going to go down.’
‘Later on, I had cerebral malaria in Ghana,’ he adds. ‘In retrospect, I might have been really close to death. Le happened to be there and intervened – she got me to a clinic. If she wasn’t there, I think I would have slipped into a coma lying in a bed and no one would have tended to me until it was too late.’
The moment he really thought his time was up, however, was in Cameroon on the way to the Republic of the Congo’s border, where he was held at gunpoint by drunk, angry, volatile soldiers for nearly an hour. ‘That checkpoint still haunts me today,’ he says. ‘I was clear in my mind that “I’m dying tonight, within seconds.” There’s no “Rambo moment”, where you wrestle the guns out of their hands and start fighting them – that’s insane. I remember accepting that I made a grave mistake – “Here I am and it’s game over.” It was terrifying.’
Alongside life-and-death moments, the trip’s greatest challenge was the Sisyphean ordeal of logistical planning, paperwork and morale-sapping bureaucracy to secure visas, permissions, tickets and new passports – including a seven-month wait to enter Saudi Arabia, more lengthy delays in Syria, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Angola and other countries, and a paperwork issue in Mongolia that stopped him getting his visa for China, forcing him to take an 11,919-kilometre detour, backtracking through Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Iran to reach Pakistan. ‘If there were ferries connecting all the islands and continents, and if you could get every visa in the world and borders were all open, there would be no issues,’ he says with a laugh. ‘This is the “game” of reaching every country in the world. It’s about bureaucracy and logistics.’
Just two years in, the joy had seeped out of the experience and Pedersen wanted to go home – the next eight years of his journey becoming an existential challenge to determine what sort of person he was, to make his father proud and to not let himself or his supporters down.
‘There was more riding on this than me,’ he explains. ‘I was getting incredible messages from people who felt inspired and were telling me I was what was motivating them to do a million different things. A guy came out of hospital and had to retrain his body to walk and he wrote me a beautiful message about how he was going to put a poster of me on his wall to motivate him to fight until he could walk again. People wrote to me who’d lost their spouse and things were falling apart. I felt, “If I give up, what sort of signal am I sending those people? If I give up, who am I to myself?”’
The Covid-19 pandemic presented another huge obstacle. Pedersen was stranded in Hong Kong for two years, and considered quitting the journey altogether – especially as he had a nagging thought that he wanted to start a family. Le visited him 27 times during his ten years on the road. Pedersen proposed to her on the summit of Mount Kenya in 2016. In 2020, while he was living in Hong Kong and she was in Denmark, they got married using an impersonal online service so she’d be allowed, as his wife, to join him for a few months.
As restrictions loosened, he finally managed to visit the final few countries, ending with the Maldives, before travelling by ship back to Denmark, arriving into Aarhus on 26 July 2023, having covered 382,083 kilometres.
Pedersen’s proud and protective of his achievement, but he isn’t particularly celebratory. ‘It really wasn’t an enjoyable journey,’ he says. ‘It was often very stressful and frustrating. There was an abundance of work I had to deal with and I felt alone and misunderstood much of the time.’ He also seems bitterly disappointed by what he sees as a lack of appreciation, especially in his home country, with some people he meets suggesting he took a ‘ten-year holiday’. ‘I don’t want to be famous,’ he tells me. ‘But I do want recognition for what I did. It was downright hard. Most people do not believe it will ever happen again. It’s a truly unique project and I did a lot of good.’
His world has now changed. In December 2024, Le gave birth to the couple’s daughter, named Avi, ‘from Aviâja, a Greenlandic name meaning “a first.”’ Pedersen is currently ‘trying to work out how I can still do interesting stuff and be a father’, with plans to drive an RV in the USA for 40 days through 13 states with his wife and daughter, and ideas such as completing the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea and leading a caravan of camels across the Sahara from Libya to Sudan.
He has also initiated Project 773 to become the most travelled person from Denmark. A Danish school teacher had visited 772 regions of the world listed on the website NomadMania to gain the accolade. Thor hopes to visit one more – and unlike his previous journey, he can fly and return home between trips. He explains: ‘It’s a great way to revisit countries and see parts of the world I’ve never seen before.’ Hopefully, these less solitary adventures will be more rewarding experiences, as his ten-year journey seems to have left him far more world-worn than the smiling photos taken with strangers around the world suggest.
Was the whole thing worth the sacrifice? ‘It’s a paradox,’ he says. ‘If I could go back in time, I would do everything in my power to stop myself, and tell that person “You have no idea what you’re going to get yourself into.” But I would not want to be without the knowledge that I have today. This was an education beyond anything you’d get anywhere else. It came at a truly high price. I’m not going to get the time, effort and money back, so it has to be worth it. But I’m struggling with that question.’
The fact that he would tell his younger self not to even start the journey suggests that, despite everything he learned, the negatives outweighed the positives. ‘I live with trauma today from several things I might need more time to deal with,’ he says. ‘I have trigger points that get me now and again. I came out on the other side – I didn’t break any bones, nothing killed me, my wife is still here, and now we have a beautiful daughter. But I lost years with family and friends. It’s not just the hard times that people say you should be there for, but I also missed so many good times. That was also part of the price I paid.’
The Impossible Journey: An Incredible Voyage Through Every Country In The World Without Flying by Thor Pedersen is out 24 April in hardback, eBook and Audio (Robinson, £25). For more, see www.onceuponasaga.dk and www.thorpedersen.dk
