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Irish LAD Travels To Every Single Country In The World

Irish LAD Travels To Every Single Country In The World

Gets some serious air miles.

Mark McGowan

Mark McGowan

There are 197 countries in the world, and Johnny Ward has visited them all.

Even the war torn countries that are almost impossible to get in, such as Yemen.

It's taken the travel blogger seven years to complete this epic quest, but when he landed in Norway he had managed to go to every country on Earth!

Stop... why Norway last? Keeping a nice location until the end? The safest, friendliest, most expensive place until the end.

Credit: Johnny Ward/Instagram

There are only a few other people who have managed it - Sascha Grabow, a Getty photographer, former ATP tennis player Artemy Lebedev and Graham Hughes, who managed to do it without getting on a plane!

And now Irish LAD Johnny Ward.

And even more surprisingly, he's not a rich trust fund kid. He grew up poor in a single-parent family in Ireland with no central heating (yikes) and after he got his degree, headed straight out to travel. He left Ireland in 2006 broke, taught English in Thailand and Korea, travelled A LOT, worked in Australia, started his blog, monetised, started more blogs, made over £1 million from his laptop, and decided to visit every country in the world...

Credit: Johnny Ward /nstagram

"I'm a little hungover," he told The Independent. "We had a lot of champagne." His flight attendant girlfriend Jaa made the last journey with him, and his friends and family flew in from Ireland to Norway to celebrate bagging every single country in the world.

It took him years to get into Yemen and Saudi Arabia. "Saudi Arabia doesn't even have a tourist visa and I spent nearly £1,000 on paperwork, and ended up getting sponsorship to visit, when I clearly wasn't there on business," he said.

"Yemen is in the middle of a full-on civil war. I'd tried and failed to get there five times. By chance I ended up meeting the grandson of the King of Socotra, who bribed Yemeni officials and I ended up hitching there on a cement cargo ship."

Sounds terrifying and dangerous.

Credit: Johnny Ward/Instagram

It's not been easy for Ward. He's lucky to have survived some of the situations he's got himself into and he's had a lot of injuries along the way!

"I'm quite a reckless person," he admits. "I broke an ankle in Korea, my leg in Thailand... and I've been in hospital about 20 times. I saw a guy getting shot in Angola when I'd only been in the country for 20 minutes. It was horrendous."

He's been a lot of war-torn countries like Somalia, where Al Qaeda were attacking Mogadishu. There were "bombs whistling overhead." But he doesn't consider himself lucky. "I always just put a positive spin on things," he said. "And it means I have stories to tell."

Credit: Johnny Ward/Instagram

He's visited all the countries on Donald Trump's travel ban and is angry at the misconception. "I was in Tunisia in 2015 when there was the terrorist attack in Sousse," he says. "I put up this blog post about how this didn't represent Islam. It's not them against us, it's all of us against these dickheads."

He also stayed with a family and fasted with them during Ramadan.

He's got a new challenge now. He's taking on Jules Verne's famous novel and is going to try and travel around the world in 80 days!

Featured Image Credit: Johnny Ward/Instagram

Topics: travel