See full and original article here.
After visiting more than 190
countries over the course of more than two decades, Mike Spencer Bown, the
world traveler, is ready to come home. And he has some stories to tell!
The 44-year-old might just be the
most extensively traveled person in history. The Calgary resident
left his town 23 years ago with a backpack and a goal: to visit every country
and region on Earth.
And we're not talking
flyby. Bown made sure to get to know each and every place he visited. "Some of the
least-traveled people I've ever met have been to 100 countries, or even as high
as 170 countries — what they do is fly between major cities and especially
capital cities, stop off in the airport or take a hotel for the night, and then
say that they've 'done' such and such country," Bown told the Sun.
"To my view, such
people are passengers, not travelers."
I do count my "flyby" landings as places I've been to...I mean I don't plan to go to places like Iowa and Ohio any time soon so why not count it when I have a layover?
Bown has had hair-raising experiences
that include "taking local transport across Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
and hitchhiking through Iraq during the U.S. invasion, including a visit to
Saddam Hussein's hometown," according to the Sun.
He also made it to
far-flung outposts like Antarctica, Greenland and Easter Island.
The intrepid adventurer
made headlines when he became the first tourist to visit Mogadishu, Somalia, in
more than 20 years. Puzzled officials at first tried to put him back on the
plane, mistaking him for a spy. But eventually they let him stay for a few
days.
"We have never seen
people like this man," Omar Mohamed, an immigration official, told the blog Middle
East Online at the time. "He said he was a
tourist, we couldn't believe him. But later on we found he was serious."
When it comes to
exploring new places, Bown is definitely serious. This kind of itinerary is not
for the faint of heart. As a guest blogger for the website Backpackology, the traveler told the
site he's been arrested "more times than he can count." He then
shared the top 80 highlights of his extensive trip. They included:
- Standing in the
graveyard of the blue whales, South Georgia Island, Antarctica (No. 79)
- Learning to drive a
reindeer sleigh while drunk with the Yakuti tribe, Yakutsk, Russia (No. 74)
- Getting lost on the
three interlocking subway systems in Tokyo (No.
71)
- Hitchhiking past
bandits, Central African Republic (No. 43)
- Avoiding capture in
the land of pirates, Puntland State of Somalia (No. 30)
According to NPR, Bown's idea for such a quest began all those years ago on
a mountainside, when he "wondered if it was possible to visit the whole
world ... (and) see everything of interest."
Bown told NPR that he
was able to keep up his travels by living frugally and staying at cheap hotels,
like one in Nicaragua that cost him the equivalent of just 3 cents a night.
As an importer-exporter
out of Asia, Bown had plenty of free time to travel, but even then it still
took him more than two decades to go everywhere. "I would never have
thought it would take so long to see it all. It's enormous."
Do you want to follow in his footsteps? I kind of think that people that travel to Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq for fun are kind of nuts...but that's just me.
.PNG)
