KarunaNews Story

Thor Pedersen, of Copenhagen, Denmark, has completed a remarkable feat: he visited all 203 countries in the world without boarding a single airplane. The journey, which he estimated would take 4 years, took just under a decade. All of this was done in a single, unbroken journey. When the journey got hard, Pedersen toughed it out, inspired in part by stories of adventurers he loved growing up, like Indiana Jones and Robinson Crusoe. Even when the trip took far longer than expected and it seemed all but impossible to complete, he kept going. He has traveled the distance to the moon, which is over 384,400 kilometers (about 238,855 miles) and has been around the Earth 9.5 times. Pedersen said, “There are three things you need to do something like this. One is social intelligence. Then you need to be stubborn, to a degree that when you don’t want to do it anymore, you keep doing it. You also need to be a problem solver…” During his trip he became the first goodwill ambassador for the Danish Red Cross, to promote the charity and raise funds and awareness for them around the world.