Tireless traveller is always in search of a good story
Enlightening chronicle of exploits in 195 countries
About seven or eight years ago, Mike Spencer Bown landed in the small and reclusive country of Equatorial Guinea.
The world traveller and author had spent years attempting to get into the oil-rich Central African nation, which was notoriously stingy with its visas. He was ultimately successful after a threeweek effort that included acquiring what he calls “fake documents.”
Yet despite all this effort, when he finally arrived he could hardly wait to leave.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why a person wouldn't want to stay in Equatorial Guinea. It's run with a strong arm by its president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, and is not particularly welcoming to most westerners. According to Bown, the only hotels that were even remotely affordable doubled as brothels. The country is also swarming with foul-smelling bats for some reason.
But this was not the worst of it for Bown. For him, Equatorial Guinea had one characteristic that was intolerable for The World's Most Travelled Man.
It was deadly dull.
“It wasn't worthwhile,” says Bown, in a telephone interview from Vancouver. “It's a tiny country and there was nothing to do. It's very boring and expensive.”
So he only stayed four or five days. For those whose idea of travel is limited to week-long stints at sandy resorts, the fact that Bown would describe his stay as being “only” four or five days may seem a bit strange.
But in a conversation with the former Calgarian, one thing becomes crystal clear: He may have visited more than 190 countries in a non-stop backpacking trek that began in 1990, but Mike Spencer Bown is no “country counter.” He says he can immediately tell a country counter from someone who has actually been immersed in a country and culture.
“I find they have no stories,” he says. “You know how some people say 'Pictures or it didn't happen.' I'm thinking ‘Stories or it didn't happen.' If you go to a country and your stories are all about the visa difficulties and how you were stamped in, that's not very interesting. What's the point of travelling if you don't have anything to tell other people?”
So even in a grossly over-priced location run by a dictator and infested with foul-smelling bats, four or five days may still be required.
Over the past quarter century, Bown has become an avid collector of stories. For 23 years he lived out of the same backpack and managed to travel to and stay in all 195 countries in the world. He had no possessions, but would intermittently make cash by finding unique import/export opportunities in countries where shoddy or corrupt banking made them unpopular to do business. He once made a “dogchoking wad of money” by selling wooden chickens carved in Indonesia at kiosks in Vancouver malls. About three years ago he decided he would bankroll his future globetrotting adventures by writing a book. There was plenty of interest, of course. He made international headlines in 2010 when he baffled immigration officials by landing in Mogadishu and declaring himself a tourist, making him the very first tourist to set foot in Somalia's war-torn capital. Three years later he was in the news again when he arrived in Ireland to finish his 23year journey and officially became what the media soon dubbed the world's most travelled man.
Over the years, he had accumulated hundreds of notepads where he had scribbled more than a million words. The resulting book, The World's Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet (Douglas & McIntyre,$29.95, 371 pages) is an eloquently written adventure story that follows Bown through a mindboggling number of experiences. Some were treacherous, many were enlightening and most were eye-opening. This became a much more important quest to Bown than the goals most people in the western world labour towards. He wasn't looking for a home or a career or stability. He was looking for stories.
“I'm more interested in figuring out the way things work,” he says. “I'm much more interested in reality. And moving around and seeing different things is the best way to gain access to it. You certainly couldn't get it by listening to CNN or something. You just get a distorted view of the world. You just have to go out and look for yourself. I just found that so fascinating that it kept me going for so long.”
Among other stories, the book chronicles Bown's adventures in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was warned to avoid a route near Lake Kivu due to corrupt police and bandits who would rob backpackers and send them back to the Rwandan border. Undeterred, Bown concocted a phoney UN card that worked surprisingly well, allowing him to travel deep into the country and eventually into a primordial rainforest of the Congo basin where he lived with the Bambuti Pygmy tribe.
Another tells how he was taken to a military prison in the decidedly unstable Nagorno-Karabakh, where he was interrogated in Russian for hours by angry officials.
In Puntland, Somalia, he was surrounded by armed men and put in detention. Once he convinced them he wasn't a security threat, he was invited to attend a poetry festival and eventually met the president.
So it's perhaps not surprising that Bown also has slightly different standards when it came to rating accommodations. When he was asked by a fellow traveller for a good hotel in Sahr in Southern Chad, for instance, he recommended a place but had one warning.
“If you're using the toilet you had to lunge up after flushing and slam the door,” he says. “There were these really big ants with really fierce-looking mandibles. They lived inside the empty porcelain of the toilet and when you flushed it they would all pour out and try and bite your ass. So you had to immediately lunge out and slam the door and you would hear them skittering against the door. The guy was saying ‘I thought you said it was a good hotel!?' I said, ‘ Yeah, I'm taking one point off for that. But other than that, the bed was really comfy.' I'd be the worst hotel inspector.”
He's not sure where he's going next, although will be back in Alberta for Christmas. After that, maybe the white sands of Zanzibar where he can eat “curried octopus” and easily travel from there to check out some African wildlife.
“Now I'm looking for value for money and also interesting people,” he says. “I collect interesting people as I go along. I have thousands of friends on Facebook. I see where people are swarming near to. I might go there or sometimes they might come visit me.”