A Briton on Monday claimed to be the first person to have visited every sovereign nation on the globe without flying, after he crossed into the world’s youngest country, South Sudan.
Graham Hughes, 33, took almost four years to tick 201 countries off his list, including all 193 members of the UN, as well as destinations including Taiwan, Kosovo, Palestine, Vatican City and Western Sahara.
“I’ve been traveling now for 1,426 days, that’s 203 weeks, almost four years,” the cowboy-hat-wearing globetrotter said as he quaffed warm fizzy wine in the tropical heat, soon after crossing the border from Uganda.
Photo: AFP
“I started in Uruguay on January 1, 2009, and I’ve been traveling pretty much non-stop since then to try and be the first person to visit every country in the world without flying, and today, I just have,” he said.
Hughes based his journey on four key rules: He could not fly, must not drive his own transport, must take “scheduled ground transport” and to qualify as a visit to a country he “must step foot on dry land.”
“The main highlight ... has been the reaffirmation of my faith in humanity and the fact that people I’ve met on the road have been so friendly,” he said.
Hughes, who comes originally from Liverpool and who also raised money for WaterAid, a British charity that works to provide clean water, had already visited northern Sudan.
South Sudan, which won independence from Sudan in July last year, was not a country when he started his travels.
“Most people thought that I was a bit mad, a lot of people thought it was impossible,” he said in Juba.
Many were concerned as to how he would visit conflict-wracked nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia, although few border controls meant that “those were the easy countries to get to,” he said.
Instead, the real challenge proved to be “those tiny island nations out in the world ... the guys that turn up to the Olympics with a flag and two athletes,” and where perhaps only one supply ship visits each month, Hughes said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema