THE ODYSSEY EXPEDITION spanned 1,492 days and over 220 countries and territories. I did it alone, with no professional support (save that of my wonderful friends and family) and on a shoestring budget of just $150 a week.

In the first year of my adventure I watched one of the last space shuttles blast off into space, I had to sneak into Cuba from Key West without the American authorities realising, I was arrested on the Russian border for wading across a river and I was forced to backtrack over 2,000 miles through the Sahara Desert to get a visa.

I paid a group of local Senegalese fishermen to take me on their wooden ‘pirogue’ over 600km of open ocean to Cape Verde… no radio, no sat phone, no distress beacon, just an outboard motor and the good will of King Neptune… and was promptly thrown in jail for a week upon arrival on suspicion of people smuggling.

I braved the Mad Max-esque freeways of Nigeria, joined a tribe of hallucinogenic tree-bark worshippers in Gabon and found myself imprisoned again, this time in Congo.

I met the Nuns of Gabarone, grabbed a beer in the highest pub in Africa in Lesotho, won on the horses in Mauritius and reached Egypt at 6 minutes past midnight on New Year.