Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very
young age.
“Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps,
and where the other kids specialised in certain
countries, I wanted a stamp from every country
in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a
passport stamp from every one may have been
inspired by that.”
“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper
also instilled in me a fascination with travel
because I wanted to see the lands where all the
objects, people, and places depicted on those
stamps came from,” he said.
At 28, Podell led an expedition around the world,
setting the record for the longest automobile
journey ever made around the earth. But as he
grew older, he realised that he wasn’t satisfied
with traveling in bits and pieces.
“As I moved past middle age, I still wanted to do
one grand and glorious travel venture, to go out
with a bang rather than a whimper, and, after I
realized that I had been to 90 nations, I decided
that I just might be able to visit every one of the
196 countries during my allotted years,” he said.
Traveling has not exactly been smooth-sailing
all the time, but Podell has enjoyed every second
of it. With an accommodation budget of about
$10 per night, he has spent several nights in his
sleeping bag, “at border posts, roadsides,
jungles, glaciers, airport floors, and in hostels,
tents, trailers, trees, teepees, campers, cars,
caravansaries, desert dugouts, and flea-bag
motels alternately sweating and freezing;
dodging dengue- fever mosquitoes by day and
malarial ones by night.”
He’s also been through some truly terrifying
moments, like the time when he was unable to
provide proof of not being Jewish to the
Egyptian government, or the time he was unable
to prove that he was not CIA to the Cuban
secret police. He was also thrown in jail in
Baghdad, when a conman pretended that Podell
had hit him with a car. Some of his hair-raising
moments include being stranded on Kiribati,
robbed in Algiers and the Khyber Pass, nearly
lynched in East Pakistan where he was mistaken
for an Indian spy, and almost drowned in Costa
Rica.
No comments:
Post a Comment