I have included an extensive biography of MSB. He interests me because of my personal interest in becoming Canada’s most traveled person. As of August, 2022, I still have 43 countries to see all 193 UN countries. By the time I finish, I will have spent the better part of 19 years completing the task. Simply because one says he is the world’s most traveled person does not mean it is true.
Mr Bown has written about his travels in his book but fails to use any visible “travel web site” to list all the places he has been to. To my mind, because of its verification system, region list, map, statistics and the series, Nomad Mania has become the gold standard.
As he considers his travel style unique, he has self-aggrandized his travel by labeling himself “The World’s Most Traveled Man”. I can think of many others who would disagree with this assertion. Many people in the world have traveled more extensively than Mr Bown.
He appears to most value stories and experiences with real people. That is admirable but there is more to spending a month in the bush as one’s only experience in a country (I have no idea if this in his book but am using it to show the other extreme).
I would encourage him to join Nomad Mania, go through his regions and become verified. Then fill in his World Heritage Sites (including Tentative) and the series. Let’s see how much he has really seen – the full range of travel experiences.
What follows are his Wikipedia post, an article in the Calgary Herald (his home town) and an article in a Irish website called Joe.
Mike Spencer Bown (born c. 1969) is a Canadian traveler who extensively visited numerous locations backpacking over a span of 23 years, and was said to have been the first tourist to Mogadishu in many years. He is a resident of Calgary, Alberta and has traveled for 30 years in over 195 countries. Until recently he has been unwilling to put an exact number on the number of countries visited out of a keenness to avoid arguments about whether some of them are independent nations. In 2020 he had to stop travelling and return to Canada when all of the international borders closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bown has written a book about his travels, “The World’s Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet” published by Douglas & McIntyre in October 2018.
Mike Spencer Bown – The Worlds Most Travelled Man
A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet
Mike Spencer Bown has been backpacking non-stop since 1990, and has visited all the world’s countries, and quasicountries, on all seven continents. His adventures include being “arrested more times than he can count,” hitchhiking throughout countries in a state of war; and hunting with the Mbuti pygmy tribe in the Democratic Republic of Congo while evading genocidal Hutu rebels.
Of the few people who have visited every country on Earth, Mike has been backpacking the longest, travelling light and living out of the same well-worn backpack. Though he calls no single place home, he was raised in Alberta, Canada.
The World’s Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet will be available online and in Bookstores in October 2017
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From The Calgary Herald Book Review Eric Volmers
December 8, 2017
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 three-week effort that included acquiring what he calls “fake documents.”
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.
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 years, he had accumulated hundreds of notepads where he had scribbled more than a million words. They were stashed in various locations. So when he signed a book deal with Douglas & McIntyre, he found himself poring over notes full of bad hand-writing and pages damaged by rain or too much time spent in the jungle humidity.
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 mind-boggling number of experiences. Some were treacherous, many were enlightening and most were eyeopening. 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 U.N. 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.
“I had done a lot of expeditions and wilderness living before I got into travelling a lot,” he says. “I felt like it was a big step down in danger. Even the most dangerous countries — like sneaking into Iraq and things like that — is less dangerous than if you’re doing extreme wilderness. The amount of danger I had in the wilderness from bears and mountain lions or even elephants was much higher than what I would get from the people. You can usually work around the people.”
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 traveler 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.”
For now, Bown is ready to get back at it. The book has apparently earned him some money to fund future travels. 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 onward 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.”
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After 23 years travelling the world, Mike Spencer Bown set to leave Ireland and return home. Mike Spencer left home 23 years ago to travel the world. Next week he leaves Ireland, his final port of call, to return home and JOE spoke to arguably the most extensively travelled man of all-time.
Back in 1990, the 21-year old Canadian decided to sell his manufacturing business that was based in Asia in order to travel the world. Now roughly 196 countries later – “I don’t want to say exactly as you might offend some people” – he has decided that he has come to the end of his mammoth journey. And what a journey it has been.
Not only has he travelled the world, he has immersed himself in communities, something he feels sets him apart from others.
“There are more than 300 people who have been to all the other countries, but they are what I consider not real travellers. They are like passengers, and it is a transportation feat rather than a travelling feat,” he argues
“When people say I wish ‘I had travelled more when I was younger’, by travel they don’t mean fly to a country and stick their foot on the tarmac and then fly to the next country having only stayed in a hotel, do they? I doubt it, but that’s what seems to happen in a lot of cases.”
While Mike had no travelling experience when he set off from British Columbia 23 years ago, he did possess skills that were to come in very useful during the rest of his adult life. He spent considerable time in the wilderness, so sleeping outdoors, hunting and fishing was nothing new for him. He felt comfortable around most animals having worked for a period as a bear barger [guides who ward off bears for tourists] and his navigational nous was already formed, which would later be put later to the sternest of tests.
He readily admits that travelling then was easier on the pocket than it would be starting out now. The exchange rate was particularly strong and many parts of the world had yet to be commercially developed. Hostels for as little as $0.30 a night were common.
After flying first to Costa Rica and tackling Central America, he spent a number of years in Asia which meant he could still dip into his old business for one week every six months to keep the income steady. By his reckoning, you would need eight years to see Asia properly, almost four for Africa and maybe two for South America at a push.
It would be a couple of years later before he completely finished with work, but says that money is grossly over-rated for such a trip.
“Money might not even scrape into the top five for skills you need to travel. Twice I was offered huge sums of money by high ranking officials to fund my trip as they were so impressed by my method of travelling, but I turned this down. But my costs were often low and I hitch-hiked some of the most dangerous countries.”
In all his time travelling, he was mugged just twice (in Angola and Algeria, though he is at pains to point out that these were some of the most hospitable countries he encountered), though in those early years he had to carry a lot of cash in a pre-ATM era, which meant he was even more vigilant and aware of his surroundings.
Incredibly, the traveller extraordinaire was arrested just once, quite the feat considering he was rambling around Iraq during the American invasion, spent time in Congo where tourists are arrested on average six times a day by various police forces and became the first ever tourist in Somalia after the 1991 civil war. The local officials were so stunned that anyone would want to visit Mogadishu that initially they were convinced he was some sort of spy, before finally realising his motives were above board, if not highly unusual.
Security forces in Mogadishu asked Mike to pose with their “favourite weapon”
At times, he could not have been much closer in times of conflict and recollects one hairy moment in Afghanistan.
“I was there when they raided a local restaurant, busting down the doors, turning off the electricity and they had their grenades and rifles,” he recollects.
“The command was to confiscate any private person who held firearms, which the owner had for his safety, and give the locals a lot of hassle. When they saw me, I was interrogated, but I tried to use humour to lighten the mood, telling them I was just on vacation, and I was told it was best to move on.”
Africa posed some of the biggest challenges, with not only the sheer scale of the Continent, but the in-fighting made some countries “undoable”. Not for Mike, who decided that hitch-hiking was the only way around this.
“You can’t be practical in Africa with visa restrictions and in-fighting. For example in Eritrea the only way to enter is by plane as they have disputes with every single neighbour.” Many other countries were navigated by using his thumb.
Luck too plays its part and he recounts going down one road where he was told there was a 30 per cent chance the Taliban would behead him if the vehicle he was travelling in was stopped and they discovered he wasn’t a Pashtun – an Indo-Iranian ethnic group belonging to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thankfully he made it through unscathed, and also considers himself fortunate never to have had a medical complaint other than two bouts of malaria, which only lasted a couple of days each. Coartem, which he could buy freely on the street, did the trick and he “just powered through it”.
One skill that stood him in good stead from spending so much time in the bush was his ability to read people and put trust in the right people. Just as well when you spend most of your life on the go.
“If you spend a long time in nature on your own, like I did when I was younger, when you come back and meet people, you are so interested in people you almost over-focus. You get a great insight and you learn a lot when people try to rip you off over the years.”
An understandable concern from such a huge undertaking would be the lack of personal relationships when your life is focused from moving from one place to another so regularly. While he admits family life is different to your average Joe – he did try to spend each Christmas with his mother where possible – modern technology has helped greatly.
“Facebook helps,” he admits. “You can actually meet people again. Pre-email even you would never meet anyone again, people didn’t even bother exchanging postal addresses. Then email came and while you would keep contact for a while, the conversation fizzled out after a while.
“With Facebook, you can keep up to date instantly. For example, there was one Finnish guy I met on Easter Island and I met him again later in Morocco, all through Facebook.”
In the pre-Internet days, or where technology was still in its infancy, the Canadian was reliant on fellow travellers for news which meant he would sometimes be a little late to the party for major events.
“When 911 happened I didn’t find out until almost three weeks later. I was out in the Canadian bush and someone hiked in specially to tell me.”
While it is just as well that Mike was not a keen sports enthusiast, he did decide that he enjoyed rugby after being exposed to the game in Yaounde, Cameroon of all places. And in rather unusual circumstances.
“The hotel in Yaounde was a brothel, ironically called the Ideal Hotel,” he begins. “All the hotels there were brothels and it was the only one close to the Embassy. I spent three weeks working on fake documents before the officials let me through, but rugby looked like fun and I saw plenty of it on the TV there.”
In fact excelling in forgery was a skill he had plenty of opportunities to develop over the years and says it was one of the biggest banes of his life.
“Sometimes they (border officials) are asking for things that don’t exist. I have been asked to show documents from the police of Canada to say I am an upstanding citizen. Given that Canada is not a police state, the police don’t have the right or responsibility to issue such documentation. Of course to get the visa I had to manufacture something.”
Strategically he picked Israel as his second last country due to issues a stamp on the passport may cause in other countries while Ireland was chosen “decades ago” as his final destination, as he couldn’t think of a better country to celebrate in. His two weeks in the country haven’t disappointed.
“I can’t believe the generosity of the people here,” he enthused. For example, I have spent a week in West Cork down to the generosity of Barry Looney, owner of the West Cork Hotel in Skibbereen. He put me up, showed me around the sights and all from getting in contact when he heard my story on the radio. The Irish welcome in all its glory.”
Finally, when asked how Ireland compares to other countries from a travelling perspective, Mike explains that it holds up well, with Irish food and Guinness real trump cards.
“Irish meals are really big, so two of those a day would keep you going, while a pint of Guinness is like a mini-meal in itself. And I would never grow tired of people buying me drink!
Mike’s immediate future is concerned with media work, guessing he has at least two months ahead of him with TV appearances, radio interviews and a book to write, not to mention a film in the pipeline.
While he adds that he has other challenges in mind, he is due a break. It has been 23 years since his last one.
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