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In addition to speaking English and Spanish, Nguyen has taught school in French and speaks German with his wife.

“We’re cosmopolitan,” he said in his Burnaby home located near Lougheed Mall. “International, you know?”

By the time he was 26, he had been on the road since leaving home a dozen years earlier.

He has been interviewed and written about on his journeys by several publications, including one story in the Irish News and Belfast Morning News on Saturday, Feb. 19, 1996 as he was leaving for Iceland.

“I love Ireland very much,” he’s quoted as saying. “Is it always so cold?”

Photo by Gerry Kahrmann / PNG

He says he has visited the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations, as well as other territories and regions such as Palestine and Greenland.

This past summer, he completed his goal by visiting the South Pacific countries of Nauru, Fiji and Tuvalu. Along the way, he stopped in Wallis and Futuna and the Cook Islands.

Nguyen has kept meticulous records of his peripatetic life. As a trained teacher, he has recorded all the schools where he has volunteered and taught, and has dozens of albums with thousands of photographs of himself with fellow travellers and locals. Many are “selfies” before the term was coined.

They show him with his shirt off drinking beer with Ukrainians, standing in front of a temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, riding a horse in Mongolia, standing without a jacket in front of a pile of sea ice in Iceland, being served a lamb’s head in Sana’a, Yemen, and holding a couple of coconuts in Seychelles.