Man spends 50 years travellin to every country in the world

Firstclass newsline learnt that 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 toldDaily 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.
Firstclassnewsline.net