Megre

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After his recent trip to Haiti, Jose Megre is very close to his objective of knowing all the countries of the world, with 193 visited of a total of 194 (plus Kosovo which he visited some years ago). Jose Megre promises to complete his world travel soon, by visiting Iraq, which is probably the most difficult aim to achieve at the moment.

It is important to notice that, the trips of Jose Megre aren’t made with the sole objective of getting the stamp in the passport. His normal standard is to do, by car, the maximum milage in all of them, trying to have the best knowledge of the countries where he goes, having covered, so far, about a million kilometres outside Portugal. Even in the last visited countries, most of them under severe instability and traffic restrictions, he managed to drive several hundred kilometres in each of them.

Among the 20 he visited in the last two years, most of them closed to tourism, we can note Liberia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Nigeria, Zaire, Somalia, the very small Nauru and Tuvalu in the Pacific, Tajikistan and Saudi Arabia, where Jose Megre has been for three times last year, driving a total of 12 000 kilometres. This was his most recent and important discovery.

In 2007 he made his third trip by car from Portugal to the South of Africa, this time with destination Maputo in Mozambique. But, previously he had already crossed 15 times the Sahara desert in six different itineraries. He knows all the countries of Africa through these and several other trips that he made in this continent, always by road.

Jose Megre started to travel abroad, by car, at 13 years of age, first with his parents and, until now, he hasn’t stopped. Beyond the itineraries in the African continent referred, he crossed Europe and Asia for three times, making two connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific, one in the Paris Paris-Beijing Rally, another one in the Transiberian Train, and another that took him from Lisbon to India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet by car.

In the two American continents, he crossed for two times the United States and once Canada, both from coast to coast. He also covered all the countries of Central America and, for four times, South America, in journeys of about 15 000km each, always in different itineraries.

In fact, Jose Megre’s objectives as a traveller, are not limited to know all the countries in the world, but also, to do by car all the main itineraries of the seven continents, crossing them from North to South and/or from East to West. Thus, in 2005 he travelled to the Antarctica on the M.S. Explorer, a ship that recently sunk during an identical expedition. He also covered about 20 000 kilometres in Australia and, besides that, he visited all the independent countries of the Oceania-Pacific continent.