British adventurer becomes first man to travel to all 201 'countries' without flying There were times, sitting in a bus station in Cambodia at one in the morning, riding some awful truck over bad roads, when I thought, why am I doing this? But there was always a reason to keep going. Highlights were swimming in a lake of jellyfish in the Pacific archipelago of Palau, watching one of the last Space Shuttle launches from Cape Canaveral, and dancing with the jungle tribes of Papua New Guinea. "People asked me how I was going to get to Afghanistan or Iraq or North Korea, but they were the easy ones, you don't even need a visa for Iraq, you just walk across from the border in Turkey," he said. The really tough ones were places like Nauru, and the Maldives and the Seychelles, island countries where there were also pirates. To cross oceans, Mr Hughes hitched lifts with cargo ships. He spent four days in an open fishing canoe from Senegal to Cape Verde, and was then arrested when he arrived. Later, officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo jailed him for six days believing he was a spy. The hardest point, "when I just wanted to give up," he said, was after his older sister, Nicola, died from cancer two years ago at the age of 39. Mr Hughes rushed home to see her before she died. She told me not to stop the trip, but I was at a real low point. I'd done 184 countries and had only 17 to go and I thought why not leave it there," he said. The memory of his sister spurred him on, as did the people that he met as he travelled and the money he was raising for the British charity Water Aid.