World Travel

Paulo Mansur Raymundo has had the opportunity to explore cultural aspects of the peoples in over 200 countries where he lived, worked, studied or visited since the 80's. He has been to several of the most hostile territories in the world, visiting amazing places and getting involved in dramatic and sometimes hilarious situations. Hiring a guide or joining organized tour groups always sounded to him as an insult

"Traveling independently allows someone to absorb an extraordinary amount of cultural knowledge and self-knowledge that can not be bought", he says. "You experience situations that can not be found by reading a book, watching a movie, neither by attending an intensive course."

Paulo has stayed in all sort of places, from luxurious chain hotels to the most simple and rudimentary Buddhist Temples at the foot of the Himalayas. He has visited remote tribes in many countries and witnessed religious rituals in extremely remote islands. Either having three meals per day, or spending a week without eating any solid food, sometimes didn't make much of a difference. Crossing the Sahara Desert, leading scientific expeditions searching for oil in remote locations where almost nobody had ever been before, and getting used to extreme temperatures from -30ºC to +52ºC was part of his daily routine. At different times, Paulo shared his apartment with colleagues from 31 nationalities and directly supervised engineers and scientists from 58 different countries. He has visited most of the gigantic professional telescopes and astronomical observatories all over the world, often being invited to stay overnight to observe. He's also traveled solo overland across the whole African continent for almost a year, hitchhiking, taking local slow public buses and collective taxis, cargo trucks and canoes, having crossed eleven war zones unarmed and without a body guard, carrying only 8 kg of luggage, often documenting what he saw with tens of thousands of photos; all this was inexpensive and extremely rewarding at the end. He was in Beirut during the civil war, and visited most of the obscure Eastern European countries during the Soviet Union period. Paulo also became an eyewitness to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's assassination. He even discovered a new species of crab in East Timor, and took DNA samples from whale sharks in Mozambique. He was in Kenya during an earthquake, saw volcanic eruptions in Indonesia, Guatemala and Italy (a few kilometers away from Mt. Etna's mouth during its memorable 2002 eruption), devastating hurricanes in Barbados and in the Northern Marianas, a huge tornado in Georgia and even ran a Marathon climbing the Swiss Alps. However, his exploratory marathon throughout the world is far from over. Lately he has been revisiting places already familiar to him. At each visit he rediscovers new facets of cultures that if seen by untrained eyes, would go unnoticed.

Paulo has been a member of the Travelers' Century Club (TCC) since 1994 and has visited over 250 countries and territories; he is also listed in the Most Traveled People and Viajeros Notables Contemporaneos (Los 20 Principales Viajeros del Mundo) web sites, among others. Paulo's objectives as a traveler have never been to visit all countries in the world, but mainly to interact with foreign cultures and expose himself to different values as a way of self-knowledge, to research the genealogy of his ancestors and visit members of his family that spread all over the world long ago, to visit the greatest astronomical observatories everywhere, to see the underwater world in most countries, to lecture/visit/study at the main universities and learning centers in the world, to visit the main temples of every religion, to see the marvels of our times climbing the highest skyscrapers and crossing the longest bridges, to visit as many UNESCO World Heritage Sites and National Parks as possible, and so on.

Below are the countries Paulo has visited, following the TCC List. Click on the name of a country to see the photos. The number after each country name means 'how many times Paulo has visited', if he has been there more than once. Countries where he has lived are followed by *:

A few figures:
- Paulo has crossed the Equator 113 times.
- Crossed the International Date Line 8 times.
- Crossed 217 International Land Borders.
- Scuba dived in 79 countries on 5 continents.
- Over 300 sea days.
- Paulo flew over 4,000 hours with 177 different commercial airlines (nevertheless, he travels more often overland, crossing land borders and feeling how people change from one country to another).
- Most visited countries: USA (57 times) and Germany (17 times)
- Hours traveled by:
    Helicopter:             2,000+
    Train in Europe:      499
    Train in the US:      75

* For professional accomplishments and memberships, see Curriculum Vitae

Paulo has been featured in several newspapers and most Brazilian travel magazines.
Photos for each individual country will be added throughout 2009, my work load permitting...

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