Mike Spencer Bown has been on the road since 1990. That's 23 years of constant travel, during which he has been to every single country on earth, traveling more and for longer stretches than anyone else in the world. We're not just talking putting his foot over the border and grabbing a passport stamp. Bown spends time in each and every one of the countries he visits, getting to know the local people and customs, poking around cities and backwaters until his curiosity is sated, vagabond style; no luxury hotels or guided tours for him. He's hung with witch doctors, hunted with Pygmies, sipped wine during a Taliban gunfight, inspected active volcanoes, mingled with penguins in Antarctica, been detained by the CIA in Pakistan, and immaculately contracted mystery herpes in South Asia, and that's just the beginning of the stories he has to tell. Now his journey is winding down, at least temporarily, as he returns to his native Canada to write a book and take a well-earned break. We caught up with Bown while he hitchhiked across Ireland to give us some of his hard-earned, well-traveled wisdom. Here are his words.

Sitting on the mountainside, in British Columbia, I was admiring a valley of lakes, connected like a string of pearls, and listening to the lizards scurrying under the orange puzzle-piece bark of the trees around me, and wondered how strange this normal place would seem to people of a frozen tundra, or tropical jungle, or shifting sand dunes. I got to thinking, had anyone ever set out to see the whole world? If not, then why not give it a go? This was 23 years ago, and I've since been taught why the deed was not done before. It takes 23 years, or maybe 20 if you were insanely driven and didn't mind being driven insane.

If you are the sort of person who will hitchhike through all the most dangerous countries on earth, you are also the sort of person who can see an opportunity to take a calculated risk. It's not hard to come up with the money to live by camping and staying in cheap hotels. The real trouble would be trying to come up with the $200-plus a day if you wanted to do the world on a vacation-sized budget. So give up the idea of a vacation, and live with the locals.

There are so many generous and friendly people around the world, in every country. If you are patient and friendly yourself, good karma will come to you. I've never had a problem with money, even if my travel account is running low, and money has never had a problem with me. If you dwell on how much it costs to travel the entire world, you won't be able to do it, even if you were given the money.

If it were not for the many lovely traveler girls out there, this trip would have been impossible. I've just come off five months of very Islamic Arab states, where the girls are going full-ninja (black abaya, eye-slit only). Thank goodness for Asian traveler girls, who have now discovered the region, just as the western ones are giving it a miss.

I wouldn't call the traveler community close-knit. It's kind of schizophrenic. The loudest 300 claimants to having seen the world, and all the most-traveled websites, are honoring country-counters, who are considered to be a joke among "real" travelers. They confuse travel with transportation.

It used to be that you would hardly ever see anyone you met ever again. With the advent of email, the half-life of a friendship was about a year. Keeping up with mail tended to fall off at that rate, but with Facebook it lasts forever. There is a dark side, however. Over the last several years I've often found entire hostel common rooms, with perhaps 40 backpackers, all absorbed in smartphones and tablets, barely aware of each other's presence.

Amazing things abound, off the beaten track. I've seen the glowing blue phosphorescence of diatoms on typhoon wave swells, while clinging to the gunwales of wooden junk in the sea of Sumbawa. I've seen a huge komodo dragon snap the legs off a deer. Blubbery elephant seals and rowdy 880-pound fur seals that came over to bite me, and I had to box them back, all frolicking in the ruins and rusting saws of the rendering factory that once reduced the blue whales of the Antarctic to near extinction and whose titanic bones litter the sand, skulls the size of trucks.

I was pretty darn thorough, and I'm done. Or should I say, I'd like to see me try to settle down enough to unpack my bag and hang it on the wall. Perhaps travel only two months a year.

When I was hitchhiking north from Baghdad during "Operation Iron Grip" of the second gulf war, the guy who picked me up was a keen fan of Saddam Hussein. When we were passing the town of Tikrit, he pulled over, saying, "Let's have some food in the president's home town." Soon we were eating chicken and rice in a big open-air restaurant with a hundred or more of Saddam's tribesmen around me. Here I was talking English with this guy, everyone giving me the evil eye. I wondered if they'd come over and cut off my head like they did to the Japanese backpacker who tried Iraq at the same time as me.

What you see on large news channels is not the only truth, or even the only news. In fact, often it is the bad news. If you want to hear the good news, then travel. People are basically good and worth knowing whatever the race or culture they hail from.

Remember that the most dangerous situations are not countries, but rather groups of people who are settled in an area, say, the outskirts of a city, but are not formed as part of a community. It does not matter if they are relatively richer or poorer: Beware in such areas.

Many of the most interesting places are wild indeed. But remember, aside from time you spend on a motorbike, these are the most likely to get you killed. Never forget that nature is fair to a fault: She will cut you down to size if you make a careless mistake.

I'm one of those people for whom ritual has no meaning. I've been known to forget my own birthday and only realize a week later that it had passed. Of course, they can be useful to mark important passages. Perhaps if I were more attuned to ritual, I wouldn't have woken up so many times, especially in the early years, thinking, "Where on earth am I?"

You've got to have a mosquito net, the kind you crawl under. Also, a backpack, the older and shabbier the better, so yours will be the lowest priority of bus-roof luggage thieves. A mango knife that can double as a blade to discourage muggers. A waterproof pack cover comes in handy, as do sturdy boots. Don't go the flip-flop route if you are passing through areas where malaria is rife. Don't forget your visa application kit, with lots of photos. You can never have too many. A metal cup will not go amiss, and keep one shirt with a collar for embassy visits, and another in a vaguely greenish-gray color with quick-dry fabric and lots of pockets. This is for impersonating a U.N. or government inspector to thwart robbery by corrupt police. You'll need a card, or several, for this. Don't worry too much about what it says on the card, as these guys are illiterate, just make sure you have a nice logo.

The first time I ever went to Nepal, and hiked the Annapurna, I'd arrived early enough to take bus one of the two that go to the trailhead. People on the bus were calling, "Get on, we're going." But I'd missed breakfast, so I waved them off and ate a snack as I got on the second bus. Lucky thing, as I saw as we rounded a bend in a mountain side bus number-one had plunged off a cliff, shearing off the rhododendron trees that grew from the rock, crashed through a foot bridge, and landed in a river. Mainly survivors were people who had been clinging to the roof or sides, and jumped clear before the bus toppled. That would not have been me.

I've seen practically all races and tribes, clans and ethnic groups, and since I travel by local means, I got to see how they get on. When I've been visiting primitive groups on various continents, often I've noticed that they resemble hillbillies or rednecks, but never have I noticed that a group is in any way inferior as human beings.

Cans of sardines. They are perfect if a day or two goes by and you can't find any food. Also, there are two fish in a can, so if you have been detained by police, or forced to sleep in their barracks, you can share one in a neighborly way, and be offered what the policeman may have, be it some bread, or cassava paste, or beans.

When I sampled little green and yellow "peaches" near a pagoda outside Hanoi, I spent the evening doubled over. But, when I saw them again in Bhutan, I laughed with my guide about what had happened last time I'd tried them, before buying some and having the same thing happen again. Third time? No.

If I have a guidebook, I don't read more than the bare minimum before I get into the country it covers. Countries are best done freestyle, where you just have fun, see who you meet, and where you end up.

Though I never wear any jewelry, and keep my watch in my pocket with the straps cut off, I collect little things that might be made into jewelry. Egg shells of giant extinct birds, solid white penguin bone, orange agate from the shores of the Antarctic ocean, shards of Neolithic pottery with fertility symbols on them... Just things found on the earth, the sort a magpie might pick up.

Now that I've got a good idea of what is what, the world over, it's time for a change and a rest. I'm choosing change, and I can't wait to start into writing. Stories are the most valuable souvenir you can glean. You can't lose them, they weigh nothing, and you can share them with everyone and still have them when you need them. I knew the skipper of a crab-fishing boat once who would recruit a crew, all else being equal, by asking them how many stories they had.

Never owned a camera myself. I'm not sure who I would have inflicted the millions of travel photos on. Imagine if I gave a slideshow and wanted you to sit through my photos, of every country on earth? If I were going to, say, Machu Pichu, the last thing I'd want is to see photos of the place before I got there. I'd prefer to see it for myself, for the first time.

If someone else wanted a trip like mine, I think they'd need a new technique. The golden age of travel is over, where the ridiculous exchange-rate gap caused by the collapse of the Soviet empire dumped millions of workers but little capital onto the world economy. It made it amazingly cheap for those with hard currency. The days of the three-cent hotel are over. Now, if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the way to go about it would be couch-surfing, or some social-media driven travel platform.

When I crossed by foot along the bridge from Herat, Afghanistan, to Turkmenistan, there was a pretty Turkmen girl with a team of eight men set to search me. They went through every seam of my backpack, and questioned me on everything I owned. Finally she took to asking me about my lifestyle, and a scowl came over her face. "Stop traveling, get a job, get married, and start a family," she commanded. "Yes ma'am, I'll get right on it," I said, and she stamped me in.

Learn to watch faces and expressions. Language is not all it's cracked up to be. Often you go wrong when you are struggling with dimly remembered foreign words and neglect the person or context. You'll need a bit of Russian, a bit of French, and a bit of Spanish, at least, to do the world. Sometimes it's better if you just use the international hand-to-mouth for food, or go into the kitchen to point.

Your ancestors were wiggling, burrowing, swimming, crawling, swinging through trees and walking for half a billion years over the face of this planet, and one of the forms they came to adopt is you. And you are here for some twirls around the sun, then you'll join the dead for untold eons after. So why not have a friendly look around now, while you have the opportunity?

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