Sascha Grabow

Sascha Grabow in Miliana during his travels around Algeria in 2015.

Sascha Grabow (born January 15, 1968) is a German traveler, author and photographer who, between 1987 and 2016, visited every country in the world,[1] the last being Somalia. Grabow is considered one of the top three travelers in the world, and the top traveler in the world younger than 50 years of age, according to Jorge Sánchez's list of Viajeros Notables Contemporaneous (Notable Contemporary Travelers). He was an ATP world-ranked tennis player before starting to travel full-time. Grabow operates a website, greatestglobetrotters.com , which invites people to register their own travel histories. Grabow is a Getty Images Photographer. His work has been used by various UN and other well-known agencies.

Biography

Sascha Grabow was born in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, to an English & History teacher father and an acquarell painter mother. He spent his childhood in Waiblingen, Baden-Wuerttemberg and attended primary school in Untergruppenbach, later high school at the Herzog-Christoph-Gymnasium in Beilstein.

Growing up Grabow spent most of his free time on the tennis courts of Abstatt and Heilbronn, Southern Germany. Starting to travel more frequently for tennis turned into a lifelong obsession to visit every country on the planet.

Travels

Grabow first left home by himself in 1985, at the age of 17, hitchhiking to Southern Italy in order to be able to train tennis outdoors year-round. Realizing he didn’t speak any Italian once he arrived, he started focusing on learning the local language whenever he traveled to a new country during the next 20 years.

His level of tennis helped him securing coaching positions from time to time, as a way to finance his travels. He worked for SportScheck München and later Davis Cup Coach Stefan Schaffelhuber in Italy, and for Robinson Club in Fuerteventura, Spain. There, he met some sponsors financing him a tournament tour around the world lasting 4 months in 1992/93, where he also secured his first ATP points.

During his travels he was imprisoned several times, almost killed on one occasion, deported, robbed, etc. He spends an average eleven months traveling away from his base in Germany each year, and makes a point of staying at least more than one month in each country he visits, which so far he has done in about 80+ countries.

In 2016 Grabow completed his dream of visiting all 193 UN countries. Since then, Grabow has kept travelling to know more about the world, and newly tries cycling instead of his usual hitchhiking method.

Works

References

  1. ↑ "The Best Travelled - UN Master List", The Best Travelled Retrieved 21 June 2016
Sources
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