In 2013, a Danish man set out to visit every country without flying; nearly 10 years later, the Maldives was his final stop

In 2013, a Danish man named Torbjørn "Thor" Pedersen left home with an unusual goal: to visit every country in the world without ever getting on a plane. According to the ABC, which interviewed Pedersen after his journey ended, he spent almost 10 years crossing oceans and borders by train, bus, boat, and on foot, and working through wars, malaria, gunmen, and endless visa fights along the way. His final stop, after 3,512 days on the road, was the Maldives.

A four-year plan that turned into ten

On October 10, 2013, Pedersen departed from Denmark by train. Pedersen had set three conditions for himself on this trip, named Once Upon A Saga, that included no flights during the journey, not going back home until the journey was completed, and spending at least 24 hours in each country. Pedersen expected to complete the whole journey in four years, but it ended up taking him nine years and seven months. By the end, he had crossed 203 countries and territories in total, going beyond the 195 sovereign states recognized by the United Nations by counting several disputed territories too. Taxis and local transit filled in the gaps between longer legs, and he boarded 37 cargo ships to cross oceans that planes can cover in a few hours. He lived on about $20 a day, funded by his own savings, corporate sponsors and crowdfunding from people following his blog.

Malaria, gunmen and an Ebola outbreak

The road almost broke him a couple of times. Somewhere along his route through West Africa in 2015, during the same stretch of the trip marked by border troubles and the regional Ebola outbreak, Pedersen picked up a parasite and weeks later, doctors in Ghana diagnosed him with cerebral malaria. He hallucinated and struggled to function. He lost his ability to write. His hands shook for almost three months after. The following year he was in Central Africa, surrounded by armed, drunken men in what he later called the longest hour of his life. Pedersen faced setbacks: visa denials, detours caused by civil unrest, and delays from an Ebola outbreak that swept West Africa. "This is something which has never been done before, so it has been hard to foresee everything that would be coming my way," he told the ABC.

Stuck for two years, then a wedding, then Australia

The toughest thing Pedersen has gone through was in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down travel worldwide and Pedersen was stuck in Hong Kong for two years. “We didn’t know where it was going; we didn’t know how dangerous it was,” he told the ABC. He thought seriously of quitting. He took the break to marry his longtime girlfriend Le, who had visited him 26 times on the trip. When travel opened back up, Pedersen sailed to Australia, arriving at the Port of Townsville in April 2022, and staying for almost two months before moving on.

Kindness he could not explain

What kept him moving, Pedersen said, was the people. "I cannot remember a country I've gotten to where I did not receive some sort of kindness or support from people," Pedersen said. In a 2023 study in Scientific Reports by sociologist Giovanni Rossi, together with scientists from eight countries around the world, it was found that a small request for help is accepted much more frequently than it is denied, regardless of culture. It does not explain every traveler's experience, but it suggests that helpfulness is common across cultures.

Why going slow changes a trip

Slow travel is an experience in itself. In ‘Shaping tourists’ wellbeing through guided slow adventures’ published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, it has been suggested that the process of traveling at a slower pace and increased immersion in the environment can lead to higher psychological well-being than fast travel. The nine years spent by Pedersen in trains, buses, and cargo ships offered him this immersion whether he liked it or not, and access to a reality that the ordinary tourist flying in and out of airports often misses out on.

A trip that may never happen again

Pedersen believes no one will repeat what he did. "More and more ferry connections disappeared and were replaced by aeroplanes... It's getting almost impossible to come on board container ships as a passenger," he said. Flying, meanwhile, remains a growing climate concern. An analysis conducted by researchers in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment found that 27 million commercial flights produced 84.4 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger kilometer in 2023, while some flights generated as much as 900 grams. As flying replaces slower overland and sea routes, trips like Pedersen's are becoming harder to imagine, let alone repeat.

Home, and what comes next

On 23 May 2023, Pedersen visited his 203rd and final country, the Maldives. "It's just been a massive sociological experiment in a way and a successful one at that," he said. Later, he did the same trip back home to Denmark, without flying, arriving in Aarhus on 26 July 2023. More than a hundred people, family, friends and followers of his blog, came to greet him. In the years since, Pedersen has worked on a documentary about the journey, and has also published a book titled 'The Impossible Journey.' He also wants to get back to marathon running. "It's a lot easier to deal with running for four hours than it is to go through 203 countries over nine years and seven months, but I do see the parallels," he said.