The Impossible Journey Thor Pedersen Robinson £25, 308pp
As a child growing up in Denmark, Thor Pedersen dreamed of being a great explorer, his mind filled with images of tangled forests, abandoned temples and lost empires.
After a spell working as a United Nations peacekeeper, he started a career in shipping and logistics. In 2013, his father sent him an article about an Englishman who had gone to every country in the world, travelling by land and sea, although he had paused his trip several times to fly home. Bored with his job, and eager for adventure, Pedersen, right, decided he would do similar, but with no interruptions and definitely no sneaky flights home.
Thor Pedersen at Machu Pichu in Pero
Armed with a modest amount of sponsorship, and having been appointed a goodwill ambassador by the Danish Red Cross, he set off in 2013 with a list of the 201 countries he needed to visit.
His plan was to pass through a country every seven days, and he calculated the journey would take no more than four years to complete. Looking back, he writes, ‘I was delusional from the very first seconds of the project.’
He criss-crossed Europe before travelling on a container ship from Iceland to Canada, and then journeying through North, Central and South America. In each new country, he noticed, he would be told he was lucky to have survived the place he had just come from, and how dangerous his next destination was.
His real problems started in Africa. He contracted malaria in Liberia and found it almost impossible to get an entry visa to Equatorial Guinea, ‘a tiny, paranoid petrol state’. When he finally got there, he was bitten by chimpanzees. A part of the journey that should have taken six weeks had lasted nine months.
On the top of a windswept Mount Kenya, he proposed to his long-suffering doctor girlfriend, Le, who was visiting from Denmark. By now, his enthusiasm for his journey had waned, but he ploughed on through Asia, before gearing up to tackle the far-flung Pacific islands. Arriving in Hong Kong in January 2020, he was puzzled to be handed a face mask.
Pedersen spent the pandemic years in Hong Kong; with only nine countries still to go, he refused to give up on his quest. Finally, in May 2023, he made it to Sri Lanka and then the Maldives, the final countries on the list. After 3,576 days and having covered 380,000km, he could go home – by boat, of course.
The Impossible Journey is never less than entertaining, but gets bogged down in endless struggles with unyielding bureaucrats for the visas he needs. When he does write about watching hundreds of dolphins frolicking off the coast of the Solomon Islands, or wild days drinking vodka with the locals in Turkmenistan, the book really comes alive.
Now married to Le, and with a baby daughter, he is proud to be the first person to visit every country in the world without taking a flight, but admits: ‘The project damaged me, and I cannot be sure I’ll ever be right in my head again.’ What he remembers most about his travels are the people he met, and the kindness they showed him. His conclusion is that ‘the world is far safer than people realise’.
