#TravelTuesday Odysseus completes his record-breaking journey

It really takes persistence to be the first man in the world to do something these days. This week a travel first came tumbling down off its plinth of seeming invincibility. Nobody had ever visited every single country in the world (that’s all 201 of them) without flying until Graham Hughes, a travel mad Scouser, entered the world’s newest country, South Sudan, yesterday after four years of non-stop border crossing.

The trip was named the Odyssey expedition from the very start and in every way it fulfilled the labour of Homer’s epic tale. Hughes endured African jail cells, pirate infested waters and the breakup of his relationship, not to mention a hell of a lot of border officials, to conquer every country in the world, all whilst blogging and tweeting his exploits to those like myself who could only revel in awe at his sheer audacity.

The full details of his incredible trip can be found on his superb website.

Although it’s fantastic that Graham can now return home as a travel hero with every passport stamp in the world spread across his four passports, from a personal perspective the end of the Odyssey is also a sad time as it means the end of regular emails finding their way into my inbox full of humour, riveting stories and travel anecdotes that have shocked me, educated me and often made me snort out loud with laughter in a public place.

I’m now steadily working back through his first Youtube videos and posts (back when he thought that the whole trip would last a year) and reliving his epic journey. He’s a very entertaining guy who seems to get himself in the most bizarre situations, but a running theme throughout is the difficulty of traveling overland. He has real problems arranging transport, getting visas sorted, communicating with the locals and dealing with the challenges of traveling within vastly different cultures at breakneck speed. He zooms through South America like it’s a county not a continent, barely with enough time to breath before taking on the Caribbean. Some countries he literally steps over the border, gets his passport stamped and then turns a 180 and walks out, but others he is forced to stay in, even sometimes against his will.

For somebody who dreams of gallivanting across the world without the cheat-aid of airplanes, Hughes is a massive source of inspiration. His budget was reportedly around £10 a day and his frugal living is another factor that makes this trip so impressive. It’s not as if he was taking fancy cruises around the Caribbean. He spent the bare minimum necessary to get him around the world and that must have been a challenge in itself. He shows you don’t have to be a millionaire to travel around, unlike those in a previous article of mine about others who have been to every country in the world. 

Let me leave you with one of Graham’s great videos about his talent for traveling on the cheap. The advice is top-notch, the style is inimitable and it’s highly entertaining compared to the million and one articles on the web about ‘traveling on a budget’. Thank you Graham!