Photo Credit: Vince Alongi / Flickr.com

One of our favorite blogs, The Adventure Blog, alerts us to the startling and quirky accomplishments of Graham Hughes, an adventurer with a dream and the drive to make it real.

Last Monday, the 33-year-old Brit stepped foot in South Sudan, the youngest country in the world, becoming the first person to ever visit every country in the world without flying. ”I started in Uruguay on Jan. 1, 2009, and I’ve been traveling pretty much non-stop since then,” Hughes told the Australian paper The Age. Over the course of nearly four years, Hughes put his feet on dry land in all 193 countries belonging to the United Nations, plus independent and disputed regions, such as Vatican City, Palestine and Western Sahara. All told, Hughes crossed 201 international boundaries using nothing but public ground and sea transportation.

“No planes, no helicopters and no hot-air balloons,” he writes on his homepage, The Odyssey Expedition, which hosts nearly 1,000 blogposts (nearly one for every day on the trail), in addition to passport stamps, a map of the full route and photographic proof that Hughes stepped foot in every country in the world.

“I wanted to show people that you don’t have to be a millionaire to do things like this,” Hughes tells The Mirror. “You don’t need a support crew or a jeep – just yourself.”