Adventures in Africa

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2011 (5274 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOUNGING in a Muskoka chair at his cottage in eastern Ontario, Mick Wicklum plays the part of weekend warrior well. Wearing flip-flops and board shorts, he looks like the type of guy who gets his kicks from fishing and boating — not someone who just six months ago was hanging out with rebels in Libya.

“You’ve got to know your rebels,” he says, only half joking. After all, his Libyan experience wasn’t the first time he came across armed men in an unstable nation. There was the time he was plucked — at gunpoint — from a bus deep in Mali by a local security force who couldn’t believe he was merely touring around an area known for high rebel activity.

“They think you’re a journalist. Once you convince them you’re just on vacation, they look at you with a smile, as if to say ‘oh, this Canadian is clearly off his head,’ ” Wicklum says.

Wicklum is used to running into foreigners who think he’s a bit ‘out there.’

It was in March — while in Egypt to experience first-hand the post-revolution energy — that Wicklum decided to venture into Libya. At the time, the civil war was in full swing.

He smiles as he recalls taking a shared taxi to the Libyan border and having a group of Egyptian men ask him what he was doing.

When he told them his plans, they warned against it. One man pulled out his cellphone and called a relative who was more fluent in English. He passed the phone to Wicklum, and the man on the line reiterated what his relatives were saying. When Wicklum said he was going to continue on despite the warnings, the man gave him his phone number, and instructed him to call if he ran into trouble.

Luckily, Wicklum never had to use the number. He spent the day in the Libyan border town of Umsaad and discussed world affairs with rebels and locals. He wanted to venture further but his Egyptian driver, feeling responsible for his safety, refused and demanded they turn around.

“Libyan rebels are of the finest sort,” he says. “They wanted their picture taken with me because they couldn’t believe a tourist wanted to get into their country at that time.”

In the last few years, Wicklum has chronicled his adventures in Africa and penned a cheeky account of his travels in guide form. Just released, Wicklum’s Law and Other Tips on How to Survive in Africa (available on amazon.ca), includes such chapters as The Law of Maximums that touches on many maximums, including the maximum sickness level a person can endure (which usually happens after eating raw chicken in Namibia).

Despite all of these adventures, Wicklum, a small-business owner in Ontario, only recently became interested in venturing overseas.

In 2004, he says he began to hear an inner voice that told him to go to Africa, to go to the desert.

“Before that, I had no interest in foreign travel,” he says.

The voice kept getting louder. “It got to the point I couldn’t ignore it.”

So he packed a backpack and hopped on a plane. It took him five days of travel to reach the Sahara. When he got there, he had tea with a few Tuareg nomads, then turned around and came home.

“That began my love affair with the continent,” he says.

The first few trips he took were all to desert areas. He travelled through Niger, Morocco, Mali and Namibia.

“In the desert you hear the most deafening silence,” Wicklum says. “The desert speaks to everyone, but not everyone hears it, and only some of those who hear it listen.”

Listening to that desert voice has led Wicklum into some sticky situations, like the run-in with security forces in Mali.

Even stickier was getting turned away at the Mauritanian border at dusk. It was dark when he had to navigate his way back to Morocco through a five-kilometre wasteland of landmines and looters — a sort of no man’s land between the two nations. Luckily, a driver and guide agreed to taxi him across the perilous terrain. However, there was a catch. They dropped him off 300 metres before the Moroccan border, claiming it was unsafe for them to venture farther.

Wicklum got out of the taxi, only to be met by razor wire stretched across the entry. After determining he could jump the barrier, Wicklum tossed his backpack over, made the leap and began walking the last few hundred metres to safety. A border guard with a machine gun greeted him on the Moroccan side, and lucky for Wicklum the guard wasn’t trigger happy. He and the guard spent the rest of the night chatting in broken English and Arabic about their lives.

“I always carry a journal with me and write in it every night, really just a collection of observations,” he says.

While Wicklum is passionate about backpacking around Africa, he’s equally passionate about holing up in his cottage and writing.

“There’s nothing on this planet I’d rather be doing than travelling with a backpack around Africa, and nothing I’d rather be doing than spending my nights writing,” he says.

Even though many of his travels take him on wild adventures, he claims he doesn’t go looking for danger. “I’m not a thrill seeker, I’m a knowledge seeker,” he says. “I’d far rather talk to a Libyan rebel than jump out of a plane.”

To others pondering adventures in Africa, Wicklum has this advice: “If you have a desire to visit Africa but don’t think you can do it, know that — yes — it can be done.

“You can have the wild adventures just by visiting remote villages and seeing how the rest of the planet lives.”

— Postmedia News