Man spends 50 years visiting every country in the world

Albert Podell, 78, and a former Playboy editor, has travelled the world over
a 50-year period. 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.