Thor Pedersen’s wedding day was a strange affair. Wearing a new suit he’d had tailored in Hong Kong, he was alone in his Kwai Chung flat while his Danish fiancée, Le, was more than 8,000km away in Denmark. Due to the different time zones, they didn’t even get married on the same day.
“It was lockdown in Denmark because of the pandemic,” explains Pedersen. “Le was alone in her apartment and couldn’t have any friends or family over. We were getting married through an agency in Utah, in the United States, who told us the only time they could do it was lunchtime in Utah, which meant it was 10pm for Le in Denmark and 4am for me in Hong Kong.”
It was 2020, and the couple originally planned to get hitched in New Zealand during Pedersen’s headline-grabbing quest to become the first person to visit every country in the world consecutively without flying. But when Covid-19 hit, the Danish adventurer was stuck in Hong Kong for nearly two years. The online wedding was the only solution available to allow Le to come and spend a few months with Pedersen in Hong Kong during lockdown. “The moment it was done, you switch off your computer and you’re alone in the darkness,” recalls Pedersen, “and now you’re married.”
Newly engaged Thor Pedersen and fiancée Le at Point Lenana, 4985 metres up Mount Kenya where he proposed in November 2016. Photo: courtesy Thor Pedersen
This isn’t how anyone imagines their wedding day. But very little about Pedersen’s adventure, as detailed in his new book The Impossible Journey, went as planned. He anticipated the whole trip would take three or four years. Instead, it took nine years, nine months and 16 days, or 3,576 days, Hong Kong having thrown a particularly large spanner in the works. Pedersen expected his visit here to last four days, but travel restrictions kept him in limbo, almost pushing him to quit his mission to visit all the world’s 203 countries altogether.
Born in 1978, Torbjørn “Thor” Pedersen grew up in the Danish town of Bryrup. He was a shy, troubled young man, bullied at school and having to spend a few years moving between different parts of Canada, the US and Denmark due to his father’s job with a bedding company. His parents divorced when he was 16.
After attending business school, completing his military service and backpacking around Asia, he began a career in shipping and logistics. In the book, he describes a feeling of not belonging in Denmark and yearning for adventure, like his globetrotting heroes throughout history, such as Roald Amundsen, Hernan Cortes and Ibn Battuta. Pedersen’s father sent him an article in 2013 about the English adventurer Graham Hughes, who had set a Guinness World Record as the first person to visit every country in the world without flying. Pedersen was consumed by the idea but he wanted to push it even further. Whereas Hughes had broken the trip into stages, flying home in-between legs, Pedersen planned to cover every country in one long non-stop journey – a tougher feat, especially as it meant arranging every visa, passport or ticket while he was on the road. This also made for a more isolating experience, spending years away from home, and Le, with whom he’d fallen in love in Denmark a year before his departure.
Thor Pedersen stands in front of Kamsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, North Korea, in March 2019 where he was required to wear a shirt and a tie while visiting. Photo: courtesy Thor Pedersen
Then 34, Pedersen set off from Dybbøl Mølle on October 10, 2013, moved swiftly across Europe, before making his way through the Americas and the Caribbean, then Africa and on to the Middle East, Asia and Australasia. With a budget of around US$20 per day and three cardinal rules – no flights; spend a minimum 24 hours in each country; no return home until the end – the trip was funded by savings, sponsorship deals and public donations to his blog, Once Upon a Saga. He also served as an ambassador for the Red Cross, raising funds and highlighting its humanitarian work worldwide.
