21 years, 196 countries traveled, a new Guinness World Record.
A 21-year-old American girl named Lexie Alford became the youngest person in history to visit every country in the world.
Lexie arrived in North Korea on May 31, breaking the world record.
Since childhood, Lexie began traveling the world thanks to her family owns a travel agency in California EE. UU .
Traveling to each of the 196 sovereign countries of the world is an incredible achievement that began working since I was a child.
Lexie did not plan to break a record, she simply traveled from one place to another with her family , from the island of Madagascar to the prairies of Mongolia, from Ushuaia on the tip of Argentina to the mystical city of Petra.
It was until 2016, when it was proposed to travel to each of the 196 nations of the world and thus break the Guinness world record held until now by James Asquith, who won the title in 2013 at the age of 24.
At the time of turning 18, Lexie had finished school and realized she had traveled to 72 countries so she decided to take a sabbatical to start visiting more places. Thanks to his savings saved for years, he began his journey.
With the savings she had, she was able to cover her first 18 months of travel. From that moment, she started working as a travel consultant in her family’s agency. He also began to document all his travels and tell his experiences on his blog.
Lexie says that the most impressive thing about her trips was going to unexpected countries, and generally dangerous ones. According to their experiences, the most difficult thing was visiting the countries of West and Central Africa, due to the complex requirements to enter, the little infrastructure for tourism, language barriers and the high cost of traveling safely during those countries.
It was in these countries that he spent the least amount of time of all his trips, from two to three days per country; for example in Chad, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
But the most complicated country to visit was North Korea. It is well known that this nation has no borders open to anyone, that is why it is so complicated to enter the socialist country. After years trying to avoid the prohibition of traveling to North Korea from the United States, finally had the opportunity to go to this country thanks to a legal loophole that allowed him to officially enter the country. According to the guidelines of the Guinness World Record, visiting the North Korean part of the conference rooms in the legendary “blue house” in the Joint Security Area in the DMZ qualifies as a visit to North Korea, making this country the last in your list
The young American will present almost 10,000 pieces of individual evidence to the Guinness World Record to demonstrate the visit to the countries.
