Unpacking an Incredible Journey with Thor Pedersen

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Thor Pedersen recounts his nine-year journey to become the first person to visit all 203 countries in the world without flying, relying sole

Key takeaways

• Traveling without flying to every country required extreme planning, adaptability, and resilience through global crises.
• The journey was less about achievement and more about human connection, listening to people, and understanding diverse cultures.

Main topics

• Overland travel across all 203 countries
• Personal transformation through global exploration

Notable quotes

"I was trying to learn from people. I was trying to get an understanding about my environment as quickly as possible."

Conclusion

Thor Pedersen's journey reveals that true exploration is not measured by destinations

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Okay, let's say you have set yourself a goal. Like, an insane goal. That you are really determined to do. But then, a lot of really hard stuff gets in the way. What do you do? Do you quit? Do you keep going? And no, this is not a conversation about the Odyssey. Although, it is about an Odyssey. Speaker 1 (0:33) I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Most people look at a map of the world and think, maybe someday I'll make it to these places. Today's guest looked at that map and said, I am doing it all. Thor Peterson is the first person to visit every country in the world without flying. That is 203 countries by land and sea. He wrote about this journey in his book, The Impossible Journey. He tells the stories of swimming with jellyfish in Palau and proposing to his wife on the summit of Mount Kenya. And he is here with us now. Welcome, Thor. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1 (1:20) I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but we have to know, how did this all get started? Like, did you just wake up one morning and say, this is what I'm doing? How did the idea come to you? Yeah. Well, I was a different person back then. It all started in 2013. I was at the end of a 12-year logistics career. I spent two years in Libya. I spent a year in Bangladesh. I worked in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and the Arctic. I even came stateside for a bit and worked in Florida with cruise ships. I was quite lucky to see a lot of the world like that. In January 2013, I was back in Denmark, and I was just waiting for someone to reach out and say, we have a job for you somewhere. Speaker 1 (2:09) But the phone wasn't ringing. There were no emails, except an email from my father, where he shared a link, and I followed the link, and I was reading about extreme travelers. At that time, I was 34 years old. I probably didn't know how many countries there were in the world, but I certainly did not know you could go to every country in the world. I would have assumed you would have to be a millionaire and you would have to spend several lifetimes trying. But as it turned out, people had done it on shoestring budgets and in relatively short amounts of time. It was quite fascinating. And through that, I discovered no one had done it completely without flying. And that struck me like a sledgehammer. I thought everything. Speaker 1 (2:55) Everything had been done. People had been on the highest mountains, the deepest seas, the darkest forest. We went to the moon. What's left? But this was left. And it was so, so important to me. The thought of like the logistics of a trip like this was probably not super daunting for you or as daunting as it might have been for someone else, right? Like you can see systems, right? I just wonder if like your mind is already sort of attuned to thinking that way. I would agree. I do think that our vocations in life, they shape us. And yes, this was my logistics masterpiece. I'd have to say I was truly naive. I had no idea. I had no idea what I threw myself into. Yeah, I'm guessing things did not go to plan. How long did you think it was going to take? And how long did it actually take? Well, here's where logistics comes into play. So you look at the... Speaker 1 (3:53) world map and you wonder how many countries are there. And you find out that the United Nations recognize 193 countries. And then you can add a bit on top of that. So let's go with 200 countries. So then you do the math. You say, okay, if I spend a day in each country, it's a 200-day project. But a day in each country, what's that? That's useless. So how about seven days in each country? Okay, well, then it's close to four years. Well, that's... It is a lot of time, but, you know, it's sort of equivalent to an education or so. You can find four years if you are passionate about something. So maybe three and a half years if I was efficient. Right. And? But I was naive. Well, it took nine years, nine months and 16 days. Yeah. I had to travel through an Ebola epidemic. Speaker 1 (4:45) In West Africa, I've been held at gunpoint a few times. I was stuck in Hong Kong for two years during the global COVID-19 pandemic. And there really wasn't much I could do about that. That added time to the itinerary, yeah. I want to sort of break it down into smaller pieces just so we can kind of get a picture of how. The logistics worked, right? So let's take, like, South America. Yeah. And just tell me how you mapped yourself through that continent. Like, how did you do it? I was able to get to South America by a boat in Panama on the Atlantic side. and then went somewhere in a jungle where there was immigration and sat there for a few days and another boat picked me up and brought me to Turbo in Colombia. And then a bus got me through all of South America. Speaker 1 (5:45) Not one bus, but many, many, many, many buses. So I