St. Thomas traveller embarks on risky African tour

If everything goes as planned, St. Thomas world traveller Syed Hasan will be in Nigeria now, beginning a six-country solo tour of the African continent, on his way to increasing his lifetime total for independent nations visited to 193.

Mr. Hasan is on a quest to visit all the countries in the world – 195 according to the CIA World Factbook – and there are myriad things that could have gone wrong already.

However, the proprietor at Moe’s Variety – who departed from Toronto on Sunday – is counting on an informal network of Facebook friends and fixers to help navigate his passage through nations too dangerous for conventional travel planning, and red-flagged by Canada travel advisories.

After a 20-hour flight to Nigeria, he planned to be in the overwater slum of Makoko on the edge of the Lagos Lagoon by now.

His three-week sojourn will also take him through the Central African Republic, Chad and Niger, with a stop-over in Burkina Faso to secure a visa to also enter Mali. Mr. Hasan had previously visited Nigeria and Burkina Faso.

“There are five countries left in Africa, I will try to cover four of them on this trip,” Mr. Hasan, 63, said in an interview the day before hopping on a bus to Toronto to catch his flight. “Only Sudan is left in Africa (although he has already visited South Sudan). It’s closed right now, so I will wait.”

For the full story, see the April 8 edition of The Aylmer Express. (AE/Joe Konecny)