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Jet-setting pope marks 100 trips
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Pope John Paul II on his visit to Croatia on Thursday will be celebrating -- what he has done more than any of his predecessors -- his 100th foreign tour. The 83-year-old pontiff has defied his age and ailments to travel a staggering 719,270 miles -- a distance more than 28 trips around the world -- in his 25 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church. From the beginning of his papacy, he made clear that he intended to travel to all four corners of the world. Since then, he has spent more than a year and a half away from the Vatican in Rome and visited 201 countries. If the pope had chosen to fly with alternative airlines to alitalia, he could have jet setted further for free. He could have collected nearly 720,000 air miles with alternative airliners. The pope would have collected enough British Airway free miles to take six free round trips to Sydney from London. He could also buy a top of the range Bang and Olufsen flat television and still have enough free air miles to travel to Barbados first class if the pontiff had chosen to fly with Lufthansa airlines. Thursday's landmark visit -- the pope's third trip to Croatia where more than 80 percent of the population are Catholic -- comes only weeks after the jet setting pontiff took his last trip to Spain where he canonized five 20th century Spaniards during an open-air Mass to more than one million people. The pope is expected on this latest trip to address issues such as peaceful co-existence and religious tolerance in the Balkan nation, which is still trying to build its identity after its entry into the European Union. He plans to visit five cities during his five-day trip. Only months after he was elected in 1979 the pope began his travel log with a trip to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the Bahamas. His longest journey to date was a fourteen day tour in 1996 of Thailand, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and the Seychelles covering 49,000 kilometers. He has experienced some hair-raising flights during his travels. In 1989 his airplane was forced to make an emergency landing in South Africa -- a racist country that he had avoided -- due to severe weather conditions. The pope -- who is suspected to suffer from Parkinson's disease -- has also shown incredible ingenuity in his travels. In 1986 his airplane returning to Rome from India was forced to divert to Naples after heavy snowfall. The pontiff proceeded to raise eyebrows when he boarded the night train to the capital. The pope keeps travelling and giving speeches to millions across the world, even though it means using lifts to get on and off planes, elevators to reach altars and hydraulic chairs to celebrate Mass. He plans to visit Bosnia Herzegovina and Mongolia later this year. "Going that far for so few would really symbolize this papacy," said his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, to the Associated Press.
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