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Mission Beyond 195 | Epic Travel

@missionbeyond195

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Czech 🇨🇿 on a mission to visit all 250 places from Countries Been (mobile app)
Not just 195 UN countries – I’m going beyond 🌍
48 / 250

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Iceland just said NO to restarting EU membership talks. 🇮🇸🇪🇺

I was in Iceland just a few weeks ago, driving around the entire country — and it made me curious about what really stands behind that decision.

For many Icelanders, it comes down to fishing, sovereignty, and keeping control over the resources that have shaped the country for generations.

Iceland already has close ties with Europe through the EEA and Schengen — without being part of the EU.

And this was another stop on my mission to visit every country in the world. 🌍

43/250 countries visited. Mission Beyond 195 continues. ✈️

Agree or disagree with Iceland’s decision? Want to talk about it? DM me or let me know in the comments. 👇

#Iceland
#IcelandTravel
#EU
#EuropeanUnion
#IcelandicPolitics by @missionbeyond195

Sarajevo survived the longest siege in modern European history – and today it feels like the most ordinary city in the world.

That contrast is why I drove back to Bosnia.

The war museums here don’t show you weapons. They show you what everyday life looked like when everyday life stopped. How people cooked without gas. How they carried water through streets watched by snipers. How children still went to school – underground, in basements, while the shelling went on above them.

1,425 days. That’s how long this city was surrounded.

And then you walk outside, and it’s just a street. Someone’s late for work. A dog is asleep in the sun. Somebody is arguing about parking.

Country 42 of 250. Bosnia is one of the very few I already know I’ll return to.

If you want to support this project, the best way is my ebook on how to travel efficiently – it’s in my bio. Every copy funds the next country. 🌍

Which place changed the way you see the world? 👇

Follow the mission → @missionbeyond195

#MissionBeyond195

#Sarajevo

#BosniaAndHerzegovina

#BalkanTravel

#TravelDeeper by @missionbeyond195

Ratko Mladić died today, 27 August 2026, aged 84, in a UN prison hospital in The Hague. He had asked to be released to die at home. The court refused.

The ruling said it was not in the interests of justice. So he died in custody, still serving the life sentence he was given in 2017 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He commanded the Bosnian Serb army that took Srebrenica in July 1995 – a United Nations safe area, full of people who had fled there because they were told it was safe. They separated the men and boys from their families and killed at least 8,000 of them. It remains the only act legally recognised as genocide on European soil since the Second World War.

Before that, his artillery shelled Sarajevo from the surrounding hills for 1,425 days.

He was a fugitive for 16 years before his arrest in 2011. His appeal was rejected in 2021. He never admitted responsibility for any of it.

I stood in Potočari and Sarajevo this summer. When I was standing there, he was still alive. Today he isn’t, and he died in a cell.

#MissionBeyond195
#Srebrenica
#Bosnia
#Sarajevo
#RatkoMladic by @missionbeyond195

Steel, sea and endless sky. 🌊

The Sun Voyager (Sólfar) in Reykjavík isn’t a Viking ship, as most people think. It’s a dream boat, an ode to the sun, to undiscovered territory and to the promise of freedom. Standing here at golden hour, with Mount Esja across the bay and the Atlantic wind in your face, you understand why Iceland makes every traveler feel like an explorer again.

Some places you visit. Others remind you why you started.

📍 Sun Voyager, Reykjavík, Iceland

Country 43 of 195

#Iceland
#Reykjavik
#SunVoyager
#VisitIceland
#TravelEveryCountry by @missionbeyond195

Standing at the foot of Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík’s towering basalt-inspired cathedral, with Leif Erikson keeping watch. A Viking who reached North America 500 years before Columbus, gifted to Iceland by the USA. Even the seagull wanted the best seat in the city. 🇮🇸

Iceland never stops surprising me. If you want to know more about visiting Reykjavík, drop me a message.

Country 43 of 195

#Hallgrimskirkja
#ReykjavikIceland
#IcelandTravel
#LeifErikson
#VisitIceland by @missionbeyond195

❄️ Diamond Beach, Iceland 🇮🇸

One of Iceland’s most surreal landscapes — where giant icebergs from Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon wash up on a black volcanic sand beach and sparkle like diamonds in the Arctic light. 🧊✨

The contrast between the black sand, crystal-clear ice and roaring Atlantic Ocean makes Diamond Beach one of the most iconic places to visit in Iceland. And no two visits look exactly the same — the ice is constantly moving, melting and reshaping the landscape.

📍 Diamond Beach, South Iceland
🌊 Near Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon
🇮🇸 Iceland

Would you visit this place? 🧊

#DiamondBeach
#Iceland
#IcelandTravel
#Jokulsarlon
#VisitIceland by @missionbeyond195

The stranded ship at Skápadalur, Patreksfjörður — silent, rust-eaten, and unforgettable. Garðar BA 64, Iceland’s oldest steel ship, built in Norway back in 1912, now slowly surrendering to the wind and the fog of the Westfjords. Standing beside this giant with my buddy Janek, wrapped in mist and silence, you feel just how small you are against time and the raw Icelandic wild. No crowds, no noise, just two travelers and a century-old ghost of the sea. This is the Iceland the guidebooks forget to mention: quiet, haunting, endless.

Country 43 of 250

#GardarBA64
#Patreksfjordur
#Westfjords
#IcelandTravel
#MissionBeyond195 by @missionbeyond195

Kosovo travel: this country is 18 years old. It’s the youngest state in Europe – and the youngest by the people living in it.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008. Europe’s newest country, and the second newest in the world after South Sudan. The median age is 32. In the EU it’s 45. Nowhere in Europe is younger.

It uses the euro, but it isn’t in the EU or the eurozone. It just started using the currency in 2002, without asking anyone. And it still isn’t a UN member – Serbia, Russia, China and five countries inside the EU don’t recognise it.

In the middle of Pristina there’s a monument that just says NEWBORN. Built in ten days for the day independence was declared. Every year they repaint it – one year in the flags of every country that recognises Kosovo.

A state younger than most of the people living in it, still arguing for its own existence.

It exists. I was standing in it.

Want to know more about travelling in Kosovo? Look it up, or send me a message. And if you want to support the mission, my guide to travelling further for less is in my bio.

43 of 250 countries.

#MissionBeyond195
#Kosovo
#Pristina
#BalkanTravel
#SoloTravel by @missionbeyond195

Iceland doesn’t whisper. It roars. 🌊

Standing at the foot of Dynjandi, the “Thunderous One” You feel it before you see it. 100 meters of raw Icelandic power cascading down ancient basalt steps in the remote Westfjords, a region most tourists never reach.

They call it the jewel of the Westfjords. I call it the closest thing to standing inside a cathedral built by glaciers.

No filter. No exaggeration. Just Iceland doing what Iceland does best.

Want to know how I got here without spending a fortune? DM me — happy to share the route, the tips, the hidden spots. 📩

If you want to support the mission, grab my e-book. Link in my bio.

Country 43 of 250 🌍

#Dynjandi
#Westfjords
#IcelandTravel
#HiddenIceland
#MissionBeyond195 by @missionbeyond195

Standing at Bjargtangar, the westernmost point of Iceland, where Europe supposedly ends.

Látrabjarg stretches 14 kilometres along the edge of the Westfjords, its cliffs rising up to 440 metres straight out of the North Atlantic. Millions of seabirds nest here every summer: puffins, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars. The white streaks across the basalt are guano, evidence of colonies that have held this rock for longer than Iceland has had people.

The birds here are famously unafraid of humans. For centuries local farmers lowered themselves down these cliffs on ropes to collect eggs, and the birds simply never learned to fear the men dangling above them. In 1947 those same farmers used the same ropes to haul survivors of the British trawler Dhoon up the cliff face in a rescue so improbable that a film crew reenacted it afterwards, and the reenactment itself became a documentary.

One correction: Bjargtangar is not the westernmost point in Europe. That title belongs to Monchique islet off Flores in the Azores, roughly seven degrees further west. Iceland’s claim also gets complicated by the fact that this cliff sits on the North American tectonic plate. Geography does not care about tourist signs.

Getting here means hours of gravel road through the Westfjords, the least visited region of an island everyone visits. That is exactly why it is worth it.

Country 43 of 250

Want the full story of how you get to a place like this? DM me, I answer everything.

And if these posts are useful to you, the e-book is how you support them: tinyurl.com/travelsmartspendless

#Latrabjarg
#Westfjords
#IcelandTravel
#Bjargtangar
#MissionBeyond195 by @missionbeyond195

Kosovo travel: in the mountain town of Peja, a group of young people started an animation festival with €500. It now brings 15,000 visitors a year.

A year ago I had lunch with a guy in Pristina. One conversation, and I moved on. Then he messaged me about Anibar – the only animation festival in Kosovo – and asked if I wanted to come. So I drove three hours west into the mountains.

Anibar began in 2010 with that €500 budget and 80 films, put on by a group of young people in a town most travellers skip. Their city’s cinema had been sitting dead for years; in 2016 they were given a 15-year mandate to run it, and they brought it back to life.

It now draws around 15,000 people to Peja every summer, from more than 50 countries. All of this in a country a lot of the world still argues about recognising.

I spent the week there with people I’d never met – in the cinema, in a bar, up in the mountains above the town. That week wouldn’t exist without one lunch a year ago with a stranger.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about travelling this way. The plan gets you to the country. Somebody else gets you to the good part.

Curious about Anibar or about travelling in Kosovo? Look them up, or send me a message – happy to tell you what it’s actually like.

And if you want to support the mission, my guide to travelling further for less is in my bio.

43 of 250 countries.

#MissionBeyond195
#Kosovo
#Peja
#Anibar
#BalkanTravel by @missionbeyond195

In 1998, Serbian forces set out to erase Kosovo’s Albanians. Villages burned. Hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. The world had already watched this playbook end in Srebrenica, where 8,000 men and boys were murdered while UN peacekeepers stood by. Now it was happening again, in the heart of Europe, and nobody was going to stop it.

Then NATO stepped in. 78 days of airstrikes, led politically by one man: Bill Clinton. The Serbs withdrew. The refugees came home. The killing stopped.

That’s why Kosovo is the most pro-Western country on the planet. 🇽🇰 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 NATO flags flying on the same street. When the West actually shows up for you, you don’t forget it.

Would I have expected to feel this standing in Pristina? Not a chance. This is why I travel. Country by country, story by story.

📩 Want the full story? Study up, or slide into my DMs.

📘 Want to support my mission? Grab my travel e-book (link in bio).

#Kosovo
#Pristina
#BillClintonBoulevard
#BalkanTravel
#Srebrenica by @missionbeyond195