Albert Podell’s passport stamp collection probably trumps yours. The former Playboy editor, author and adventurer has travelled to each of the world’s 196 countries over a period of 50 years.
Podell, 78, has encountered everything from run-ins with guerrillas in Yemen to being attacked by flying crabs in Algeria and interrogated by Cuban secret police.
“Aged 6, 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. Getting passport stamps from every one may have been inspired by that,” he said.
“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.
“My parents were poor and could not afford to travel, which led me to resolve early on that there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”
The author has been driven by wanderlust ever since: When he was 28 he led an expedition around the world that set the record for the longest direct, non-repetitive automobile journey ever made around the earth.
And growing older spurred him on. “As I moved past middle age, I still wanted to do one grand and glorious venture, to go out with a bang rather than a whimper, and, after I realised that I had been to 90 nations, I decided I just might be able to visit every one of the 196 countries during my allotted years.”
His travels have taken him to the furthest flung corners of the globe, allowing him to meet some colourful characters: In his book, Around the World in Fifty Years, released last month, he fondly remembers a flamboyant camel driver; a voodoo priest and a deaf and mute Japanese badminton Olympian.
Podell’s adventures have seen him trapped by Cape buffalo and crocodiles in Botswana; unable to furnish the required proof to the Egyptian police that he was not Jewish; being unable to prove to the Cuban secret police that he was not CIA, and thrown in jail in Baghdad when a con artist pretended he had hit him with a land cruiser.
He lists the most hair-raising moments as: being stranded on Kiribati, pickpocketed in Tunis and robbed of equipment in Algiers and the Khyber Pass, nearly lynched in East Pakistan, almost drowned in Costa Rica, detained by the police in Kinshasa and Hargeisa, jailed in Baghdad, breaking three ribs and ripping flesh and tearing rotator cuffs in many lands.
With an accommodation budget of around £7 (R125) a night, the writer has unrolled his sleeping bag “at border posts, roadsides, jungles, glaciers, airport floors, and in hostels, tents, trailers, trees, teepees, campers, cars, caravanseries, desert dugouts, and flea-bag motels; dodging dengue- fever mosquitoes by day and malarial ones by night”.
Modes of transport have varied. Podell says he’s travelled by “ancient Third World aeroplane; leaky, overloaded foreign ferries; broken-down, jam-packed bush taxis driven on rutted roads at 160km/h by wild kids who never passed a driving test; pole-pushed canoes loaded with 40 people and 20 sheep”.
He’s ridden atop a cotton truck in Uzbekistan, camels, donkeys, horses, elephants, rickshaws, carts, wheelbarrows, and tuk-tuks, as well as motorcycles, catamarans, hydrofoils, dugout canoes and the Queen Mary. “In short, almost anything that transports people, except an ambulance, thank God.”
And of course, Podell has been privy to some of the world’s rarest - and sometimes unappealing - culinary offerings.
“Among the more memorable was an anteater Steve (his companion) and I found recently run over on a road in Panama. Not wanting to waste a good source of protein, we chopped it up, added salt and pepper, wished we had a box of Roadkill Helper, roasted it over a campfire, and it tasted… awful, like a burger marinated in formic acid,” he says.
“Rats are, in contrast - and after you overcome any squeamish cultural bias - rather tasty, especially the big boys eaten in Africa, where they’re called grass cutters, an appealing appellation doubtless bestowed by the branding consultant who renamed the Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass and the slimefish as orange roughy.
The locals skin the rodents, split them down the middle, spread them out flat, and roast or grill them. Each tastes exactly like what it ate. If it lived in a cane field, it tastes like sugar.
“Unfortunately, the elephant dung beetle I ate in Kenya smelled exactly like what it ate, but I overcame this impediment with a liberal application of insect repellant under my nose.
“And then there was the pulsating brain of that live monkey in Hong Kong…”
What did he learn on the road? “We all read about the economic inequality between the rich and poor nations, and about the great wealth gap between the rich and poor people within nations, but until you actually see people - one third of the world, in fact - trying to manage to live on less than two dollars a day, it does not hit home.
“Unless you are there, it is almost impossible for us to imagine what it is like to have to provide shelter, food, clothing, medical care, and all the other necessities of life on $2 (R24) a day.
“With the exception of the few truly weird countries (like North Korea and those in the midst of famine or war) people around the world are pretty much the same in terms of their love for their families and children, their desire to be happy, and their hope to live in peace and have a better life.
“The main differences I observed were that people in the very poor countries were far more able to get along on less than citizens of the rich countries ever could.”
Daily Mail