#Index #Bootslist #age #pensioner #traveled #countries #world
He was seventy-nine years old when he jumped with a parachute in Dubai, climbed the mountains of Angola, and admired the stars from the top of a volcano in Vanuatu. Not many have had the opportunity to visit the 193 officially registered member states of the UN.
In addition to incredible determination, it takes a lot of money to complete such a mission.
Luisa Yu is all subordinate to her dreams. With intense effort, he took on two or three jobs at the same time in order to fund the expensive trips, he told Business Insider.
“It was a bit difficult and tiring, because I was juggling myself from one hospital to another with my car,” he said still enthusiastically, adding as an explanation: he was still young at the time, in his thirties, so he willingly took on and completed all the work.
At the beginning of November last year, he arrived in the last country on the long list, Serbia, and three months later his achievement was officially recognized, that he had been certified to have visited all the member states of the UN:
It was paved by more than half a century of careful and patient planning globetrotter, the travels of the world traveler. Among the Hungarians, Móric Benyovszky was perhaps capable of a similar performance, and András Földvári, who went to the world! he recalled his experiences in his book.
He slept in the bus instead of the hotel
Yu was born in the Philippines in 1945, and at the age of 23, he came to St. Louis, America, through an exchange program. After graduating, he found work as a medical technologist. In his spare time, he traveled the United States with Greyhound long-distance buses familiar from movies. In three years, he visited forty-five out of fifty member states.
He arrived in America with just a backpack and barely $300 in his pocket.
He couldn’t afford a hotel, so he took overnight flights, slept on buses, and then went sightseeing after a quick morning wash.
In the seventies, he began to dream of traveling abroad. She took another job at another hospital and tried to increase her savings as a part-time travel agent.
This time, however, he was hampered by a lot of work: he worked so much that he didn’t have enough time to travel.
It took him more than five decades to tick every country off his bucket list. It was not an easy task, because the work at the hospital was practically 24 hours a day, every day of the week, and Yu could not set his schedule as he pleased.
The situation was complicated by the fact that, as a single mother, she had to take care of her daughter, whom she could not take with her on her travels, so she had to find a nanny who was willing to take care of the child.
A blessing of fate
She was completely burnt out after the sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital, and the agent’s commission proved to be insufficient, so Luisa Yu founded her own travel agency towards the end of the seventies.
During the Gulf War, his business was already so successful that he sold it for good money. It was a “blessing of fate,” he recalled. He invested the purchase price in Miami real estate, which “paid off.”
I worked hard, saved money and planned to one day quit my job and do what I enjoy so much
Yu said.
A 79-year-old woman named Luisa Yu realized her dreams by traveling to 193 countries after her retirement:
“If I can do it, anyone can do it. Don’t be afraid! Go out and travel.” pic.twitter.com/cJUxRms5YN
— Leftist Newspaper (@solcugazete) February 7, 2024
In recent years, he has devoted most of his time to travel. He camped with the Mundar tribe in South Sudan and rested on the white sand beaches of Kiribati in the South Pacific.
“He got it,” he said laconically, adding that he lived his life but never feared it.
Yu is one of the fifty-one privileged world travelers who have visited 193 countries of the world by 2023 – as compiled by Nomad Mania.
It took the American woman 56 years to do this, but many people have done it before they turned 30. In December, a twenty-six-year-old Singaporean completed the mission in five years, and in 2017, a twenty-seven-year-old Connecticut man accomplished the feat in just one and a half years.
(Cover photo: A group of skydivers over Palm Jumeriah Island on February 15, 2015 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Skydive Dubai / Getty Images)
Comprehensive analyses, world-changing questions and visions of the future in one volume.
I WILL BUY IT
Follow Index on Facebook too!
I’m following you!
