Sepp Kaiser
Sepp Kaiser - Austria
He visited all the 193 independent countries of the UN and all 7 continents, 266/330 countries and territories on the Travelers' Century Club list, 928/1 500 countries and territories on the MTP list, 919/1 301 regions on the NomadMania list and spent 11 years on the road.
Josef ‘Sepp’ Kaiser was born as the second of four boys on the 27th of December 1962 on a small farm in Austria. After an apprenticeship as a carpenter, he first started to travel at the age of nineteen when he left the foothills of the Alps on a moped bound for Canada. Returning after nine months for his oldest brother’s wedding, Sepp set out anew, criss-crossing Europe for fifteen months with his then Canadian girlfriend. When he returned to Austria, it was at the occasion of his second brother’s wedding.
On February 14th, 1985 the "Vagabond", as Sepp likes to call himself, took to the road for the third time and once again on his own. This time his escapade turned into a mammoth trip, which kept him on the move for more than a decade.
During this fantastic odyssey Sepp Kaiser was to become the first person in history to visit all the 192 countries of the world in one single uninterrupted journey, which brought him an entry in the Guinness-Book-of-Records.
Quite remarkably, Sepp Kaiser completed his adventurous Journey in the romantic manner with his backpack and guitar and hitchhiking most of the time. Having no sponsors to count on, he had to finance his travels with all kinds of jobs along the way, like kiwi-picking in New Zealand, waiter in Japan, busker in many exotic towns, gardener & butler in England, supervisor for the Swiss Disaster Relief in Bangladesh, tourist guide in Argentina and to the Antarctica, singing-Santa-Claus in Singapore, deckhand on sailing-yachts around the Caribbean and the South Seas, carpenter in Canada, entertainer in pubs and hotels and so on.
Naturally, the jovial wanderer also encountered painful setbacks. He was robbed several times, he also was stabbed, caught by guerrillas, troubled by very bad illnesses and had to endure many tough fights for visas.
But he also can look back on many highlights, like climbing famous mountains (playing his guitar and yodelling from the top of the highest peak in the Andes at 6959m), paddling alone in a dugout through the rainforests of New Guinea, sailing the Seven Seas (on yachts, cargo-ships, fishing boats, traders or submarines), crossing all the better known deserts, reaching very remote islands and living in the most modern cities, as well as among very isolated tribes and jungle nomads - from North Cape to South Africa, from Bhutan to Polynesia, from Mongolia to Fireland and beyond ...
In 1995 at the age of 33, Sepp Kaiser settled back in Austria, got married, started to raise a family and became a travel photographer and tour conductor. Thus, he never really stopped travelling and he keeps taking many tourist groups abroad. However, of all this commercial travelling he does not really keep records.
