On the morning of January 1 2009 I took a ferry from Buenos Aires to Colonia in Uruguay. This would be the first of many border crossings as I embarked on what I knew would be the biggest adventure of my life: the Odyssey Expedition, the first surface journey to every country in the world. It would take me to more than 200 countries, 60 islands and six continents. I thought I could do it in a year. It took the best part of four.

I would be travelling alone, on a shoestring budget and with no professional support: no camera crew following in 4x4s. It was me against the world.

I undertook this challenge for many reasons: to set a Guinness World Record, to raise money for the charity WaterAid, to have great stories to tell the grandchildren. But the main reason was that I wanted to prove it was possible: to show that all the great travel adventures have not already been done; to show that the world isn’t the terrible scary place so often portrayed in the media; to show that, yes, with a British passport, a fistful of dollars and the right amount of tenacity, grit and patience you can – if you really want to – go anywhere.

The inspiration for this expedition came from two sources. The first was Michael Palin’s Around The World In 80 Days. I was about nine years old when it was first shown on the BBC. I loved it, but I always remember being a little bit disappointed that he didn’t go everywhere. The second was my father, Graham Hughes Snr, who – while other parents took their children to Spanish beaches – would drag the family on camping trips around Europe, popping into crazy places like Andorra and Liechtenstein just to say we’d been there. On one occasion we tried to get into East Germany, but they wouldn’t let us across the border. Then, in the summer of 1990, once the Iron Curtain had fallen, we headed back, visiting not just East Germany, but Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. I still have my piece of the Berlin Wall.

Fast-forward 19 years and here I was charging through South America attempting to be the first person to visit every country without flying. I got to all 12 countries in just two weeks. As I returned across Molston Creek from Surinam into Guyana, I remember thinking “This will be easy!” How wrong I was.

The idea of doing the trip without using aeroplanes came about chiefly because people had already been to every country in the world, but nobody had yet done it without flying. Plus, when you travel through a country on the bus or train, you get a richer, more rewarding experience and you can spend more time with local people. Furthermore, I would have felt dreadful visiting critically endangered nations such as Tuvalu in the Pacific – currently being flooded with salt water every year as a result of global warming – with 155,000 air miles under my belt. Incidentally, it worked out a lot cheaper to do it this way.

Crossing into Chad

The Caribbean was my first stumbling block. I thought it would take two weeks – the islands are incredibly close to each other, usually just an overnight journey on a sailing boat. It took two months. There were no ferries; small cargo ships would do crossings maybe once a week; and nobody wanted to take me to Cuba – the punishment meted out to US citizens by their own government put pretty much everybody off.

Using a combination of sailing boats, banana boats, container ships and cruise liners, I eventually managed to hitchhike my way around the West Indies.

I took a container ship across the Atlantic to Iceland and then headed down to Europe. Ah … Europe! The easiest place in the world to travel around. I bought myself an inter-rail pass and I got to all 50 states in just three weeks.

Then I hit Africa. I travelled down through Morocco and Western Sahara to the border of Mauritania. There I was told visa were no longer being issued on the border. So I headed 1,250 miles back through the Sahara desert to Rabat to get one. I returned to the border the following week. They were now selling visas on the border again. This was my first experience with African bureaucracy. It wouldn’t be my last.

After being told there were no other options, I paid some Senegalese fishermen to take me in a pirogue (a little wooden canoe) to Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa. On arrival in Praia, having survived four days at sea in a leaky boat with no radio, satellite phone or safety equipment, we were all put in jail for six days on suspicion of people smuggling.

Graham Hughes meets the Highlanders of Papua New Guinea (country number 184)

After it was all cleared up, I was stuck on the island for six weeks while I waited for a cargo ship to take me – and the fishermen’s pirogue – back. They kept telling me it would be ready to go the next day, then the next day. I ended up being rescued by a German called Milan who took me back to mainland Africa on his sailing boat. The cargo ship in question is now at the bottom of the sea somewhere off the coast of São Tomé .

Two months later, I was arrested again in Brazzaville, Congo. This time they thought I was a spy. I spent another six days in jail, this time in solitary. They deprived me of my shirt, shoes, socks, hat and glasses. It was the worst and most frustrating part of the journey. But once I got out, it just strengthened my resolve to get this damn thing finished.

By the end of the first year I had been to 133 of my (then) list of 200 countries – all of the Americas, Europe and Africa. With only 67 nations left to visit, I was fairly confident of being home for Christmas. Again, I was wrong. Asia was a pain to travel around, not because of corrupt policemen or islands that are difficult to reach, but because of visa regulations. I wasted six weeks in Kuwait waiting for a visa for Saudi Arabia (they wouldn’t issue me with a transit visa), then another four weeks in Dubai waiting for a ship to take me to Pakistan and India.

In December 2010 I reached Papua New Guinea: the 184th nation of the Odyssey Expedition. Asia was done and it was now time to turn my attention to the Pacific. I may have had only 16 countries left to go, but they were all islands. I had to think of a cunning way to visit them all. An Australian offered me a space on his boat which would be sailing to many of the nations I still needed to visit, but after he had kept me hanging on for six months, I realised it was not going to happen.

Then, in July 2011, South Sudan became a country. I now had an extra country to visit. I reverted to plan A: to get around the Pacific Islands using cargo ships. By January 2012 I had made it to New Zealand, where I originally planned to complete the journey, but I still had seven countries left to go: Nauru, Micronesia, Palau, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles and the aforementioned South Sudan.

I resolved to head back to my hometown of Liverpool and cross these final frontiers along the way. It has taken me most of 2012, but after 1,426 days on the road, on Monday I crossed the border from Uganda into South Sudan and my odyssey was complete.

It has been a hell of a trip. Highlights include watching one of the last space shuttles take off from Florida, dancing with the highlanders of Papua New Guinea, a close encounter with an orang-utan in Borneo and swimming in a lake full of stingless jellyfish in Palau. Obviously, being thrown into jail was a low point, but it was the loss of my sister, Nicola, last year to cancer that made me question whether I really wanted to continue.

One place that will always stick in my mind is Iran. Instead of the stern, joyless place I expected, it turned out to be the warmest and most hospitable nation in the world. I was treated like an honoured guest by everybody I met. On an overnight bus, an old Persian grandmother smiled at me and passed me her mobile phone. I took it from her, a little nonplussed, and put it to my ear. The guy on the other end told me in perfect English that I was sitting behind his grandmother and she was concerned about me. When I asked why, he told me that the bus got in very early the next day and she was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to eat. She wanted to know if she could take me home with her and cook me breakfast.

What I have learnt from this adventure is that there are good people all over the world; people who will go out of their way to help out a stranger in need. I have learnt that people wherever they live are not that different: we all just want a fair deal. My faith in humanity has been restored, although my faith in politicians is even lower than it was when I started. Finally, I’ve learnt that nobody knows what’s waiting at the end of the line, so we might as well enjoy the trip.