‘I feared for my life’: record-setting US traveler says he was held as possible spy

Nelson said he got the idea to set foot in every country in the world when he visited North Korea for his spring break. Photograph: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

An American man who set a world record while traveling to every country on the globe says he has been temporarily detained as a possible spy by four different nations.

“I feared for my life several times,” Indy Nelson told Guinness World Records in an interview the organization published on its website recently. “There were definitely several times that I did not think that I was going to get out of that country. [But] by the fourth time, it was like, ‘No big deal anymore.’”