A world of stories

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/11/2017 (3209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mike Spencer Bown not only wrote this book, he also owns the record for which it is named. And it is an impressive literary première.

Born and mostly raised in Alberta, Bown admits to having had a serious case of wanderlust and no fixed address for most of his adult life.

As the book’s subtitle warrants, he travelled to every country on the globe (195, all told).

He underlines that by the word “travel,” he means he actually traversed the landscape, met the people, sampled the culture and even tarried a while (sometimes months, if he liked what he found).

He’s at pains to distinguish himself, a “traveller,” from what he disdainfully calls “country-counters,” the archetypal example of the latter being “tourists with rail passes, who say they are doing every country in Europe — and they are now adding France, for example, because their train is passing through Paris. They are “passengers,” he adds, “and theirs is a transportation feat rather than a travelling feat.”

Bown backpacked across the globe, virtually non-stop, starting in 1990. He journeyed mostly solo, but there were five women (he doesn’t label any a girlfriend, or otherwise characterize the relationship) he periodically linked up with to roam particular points on the globe.

He’s a gentleman, discreet about his episodic journeys with the ladies. But what little he discloses suggests meaningful romance and sex can, and did, happen on the road.

The quality of the chapters varies. Most are terrific, many good, but a couple are clunkers. Where he engages with the landscape and locals, his writing is fresh and illuminating. His account of his travels in the countries of north-central and Central Africa is stellar, especially his intimate-yet-­dangerous escapades in the eastern Congo with rainforest Bambuti pygmies.

But where he travels cross-country lickety-split, you’re sometimes left with the feeling you’re reading buffed-up journal entries. The chapter recounting his frenetic spring 2008 tour of the “Stans” of the former U.S.S.R. and Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, plus Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia — suffers from an if-this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Kyrgyzstan feel.

He’s brutally candid that he has made a series of compromises to live life on the road.

By late 2013, when he makes it to his last country — Ireland, surprisingly — he’s weighing up his life choices. “My hair was greying on the sides and I was now in my mid-40s, with nothing in the way of possessions: no car, no house, no suits and no stuff, just a wealth of experiences, my family and friends on six continents.”

The book contains a surprising amount of story and detail about the “how” of seemingly perpetual travel — how to get visas, how to budge bureaucracies, how to charm (or bribe) customs officers and border police, how to safely and discreetly exit regions where civil or military violence is more the rule than the exception.

Bown often seems to have survived or succeeded by virtue of native charm. He displays an uncanny knack for nonverbal communication as he chronically finds himself in places and predicaments where he doesn’t speak the language and the locals speak not a word of English. Time and again, you’re impressed by his tenacity and sense of humour as he soldiers on despite a constant barrage of stresses, troubles and dangers.

These are great tales of travel adventure. And Bown’s writing, despite the odd miss, does justice to his tales.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.