James Willcox (How to travel safely to the world's most dangerous places)

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In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast James Willcox and I talk about:

• How James got into travel in the first place and why he started Untamed Borders?
• What is information arbitrage in travel?
• The best and worst of traveling to Afghanistan.
• Why 'post conflict' countries as so rewarding for travelers.
• Does Untamed Borders make use of armed guards for their tours? How does the travel agency manage security on their trips?
• Have there been 'close calls'?
• What are typical clients of an Untamed Borders tour?
• Has 'adventure travel' been getting more difficult?
• How is travel to Somalia like these days?
• What secrets does the Amazon still hold for travelers?
• How travel changed James views on religion?

You can watch this episode in Youtube - The Judgment Call Podcast Episode #33 - James Wilcox (Travel to the world's most dangerous places).

James Willcox is co-founder of Untamed Borders, a travel agency that can take you safely some of the most dangerous (and most beautiful places) on earth.

James has been an avid traveler for more than a decade and has been traveling to Puntland, Somaliland, Somalia as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan and many more destinations.

You may reach James via LinkedIn.

Apologies for the sound quality of this episode on my side - various improvements are on the way!

Welcome to the Judgment Call Podcast, a podcast where I bring together some of the most curious minds on the planet. Risk takers, adventurers, travelers, investors, entrepreneurs, and simply mindbogglers. To find all episodes of this show, simply go to Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube, or go to our website, judgmentcallpodcast.com. If you like this show, please consider leaving a review on iTunes, or subscribe to us on YouTube. This episode of the Judgment Call Podcast is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. For full disclosure, this is my business. We do at Mighty Travels Premium is to find the airfare deals that you really want. Thousands of subscribers have saved up to 95% in the airfare. Those include $150 round trip tickets to Hawaii for many cities in the US, or $600 life lead tickets in business class from the US to Asia, or $100 business class life lead tickets from Africa round trip all the way to Asia. In case you didn't know, about half the world is open for business again and accepts travelers. Most of those countries are in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. To try out Mighty Travels Premium, go to mightytravels.com slash mtp, or if that's too many letters for you, simply go to mtp, the number four, and the letter u.com to sign up for your 30 day free trial. We talked about what you do a little bit before, but obviously I'm still in the dark to my extent. Help me understand a little better how you got into extreme travel in the first place. How did your own travel story start? I mean, without wanting to take a sort of tangential view already, I'm not always desperately comfortable about the term extreme travel, to say this is what, you know, this is James Wilcox, this is Untamed Borders, this is extreme travel. So just in general, because what we try and do, as well as guide people and organize logistics in countries, is to try and show them in a much more nuanced way, to try and give people a kind of a bigger experience of the countries they're in, a cultural experience, the geography, the geopolitics, is certainly one part of that. But to then sort of pigeonhole that as extreme and being like, well, that's the reason why anyone's going to go to Afghanistan or Somalia or Ethiopia or anywhere we guide. It doesn't sit that well with us. I mean, if someone wants to call it extreme tourism, that's fine. It's not a big deal. I'm not so caught up on it. But it's not a term that I particularly like, but if you want to say, how did I get into like setting up a company that started off guiding in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Absolutely. I wouldn't use or think of it in any way as a negative thing. I think it's very courageous when you guys do it. It's very spectacular that you are able to put the spotlight on regions that are much safer, you know, undiscovered to the traveler. And I know you've done this through on time borders, the travel agency did to start it, but you also have done this probably before. That's what I wanted to get at. So I know not all of your travels are probably extreme, but I see extreme as extremely interesting, not in any way negative. Absolutely. And I think that's the thing. And I guess what I always fear is by putting sort of labels on things is that you feed into the narrative of the only thing about the countries that we work in is that they're, you know, there's a risk, and then you get the idea of extreme. But how I began with untamed borders, like you, as you said correctly, like I always, I love, I always like love to travel. I mean, in my 20s, I worked in different jobs in the UK and London, and I save up some money and then I'd go traveling either in the Middle East for a while and then come back or in East Asia. I mean, the kind of things that lots of people do, lots of people who are younger do that kind of thing. I don't know why. I mean, part of it is you don't want to do a normal job. You want to get away from it. Part of it is to see parts of the world, get different experiences, meet other people, like many people. It was great. And in 2007, I was on a trip through the Middle East and Central Asia, and I met two guys, one from Pakistan and one from Afghanistan. And they both primarily worked with professional people. So with researchers, with documentary makers, with journalists, with photographers, but sometimes with tourists as well. There's people interested in the region. And they wanted to work more with tourists. They, in the same way that I was talking about, extreme travel before, they wanted to kind of do less of this kind of showing the bad side of the countries there. And they wanted to show the positive areas and the beauty and the interesting things. And I liked that idea. And we talked about a three of us starting a company together, and I didn't really think there was a place for me in it. But what I did say is I would work with them. I built a website. It was the beginning. 2007 was then social media was just kind of getting big. Everyone was starting to get their Facebook pages, 2006, 2007. So suddenly, these two guys are the guy from the UK, who if they didn't, you know, suddenly you could have a travel company with a Facebook page, which had the same reach as any other company in the world. And so after six months of a year, we managed to get, you know, we started guiding people, people were interested, we managed to run some trips. And I was like, actually, I mean, this is what I want to do. This is an amazing opportunity for me. And we've restructured it, registered in the UK in 2008. And that's how we began in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And now, I mean, it's COVID, but we have worked in between 25 and 30 countries across the Middle East, Russia, former Soviet Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Central Africa. So it's just expanded partly due to the interest of the people that we guide and partly due to once you start working in regions that are quite interesting and less touristy, I meet people in the development world, in the conflict media world, in all sorts of areas where I can get contacts and find information and be able to operate in other areas. So that's in a nutshell is how untamed borders began. Yeah, I've been watching you guys for a couple of years. And I think it's a it's a fantastic story that you guys have created and what you've built. And this podcast is about risk takers. And the idea is to get a sense of how people perceive risk and how they deal with it and how they come out on the other side. And hopefully, they don't just learn from it. But that's obviously the most important part. They also create something interesting and sustainable in the process. And I've been always been mesmerized by the description of your trips. And you mentioned the countries that are very difficult to access. I have never been to. I've been to 130 countries, but I've definitely shied away from going to Iran by myself, Afghanistan. I want to go to Pakistan, actually. So I want to dive into this. And I've been to Ethiopia, but I haven't obviously been to Somalia. So there's a bunch of countries that that I think everyone who travels a lot is very curious about these war stories and they might be made up. And but there's always someone who flies into Somalia, who flies into Mauritius. And kind of it gives us a report of basically guns and steel and tanks. And he barely made it out or she and that's kind of what would you would you see and what's being portrayed even on the popular travel box and obviously also travel media. When I know your agency organizes trips and I just checked your your your website again, that's a lot of countries you guide tours to. Are you still active in going to these countries? And in which countries have you visited over the years? I mean, there's a fair few questions within there. So let me talk about, yeah, I'm still involved in I'll let you choose. Yes. Yeah, I'm still involved in working in and guiding in some of the countries. Now, from what you say on the website, just to give an idea of what we do as a company, we I'd still say 20% of what we organize is professional work. So sometimes for documentary makers, for researchers, for photographers, etc. etc. For the rest, broadly speaking, it's tourism. And we have a bunch of group trips that we have each year to the kind of popular places that we go that it's worth getting a group of six, eight, 10 people together to guide. And they will have usually an international guide. So a guide from you know, Europe or North America, accompanying them. And I used to at the beginning guide all of those kind of trips. But now it's pretty rare that I guide them. So I would generally go I'd be out of the country, if it's a specific project that we're working on. So one of the things that I help organize is a race in Afghanistan, the marathon of Afghanistan, it's the only mixed gender international sporting event in the country. And I go out for that group because we have a big group of people that run it. And also I help organize the race. So it's important for me to be there. I also occasionally, if it's a media, if it's a production, that, you know, they need some sort of specialist assistance, I might go out for that as well. But it's fairly rare that I guide a sort of general group, we have other people that do that. And as far as the countries that we guide, the majority of the countries that we guide in, I've visited. So I mean, it's a passion for me, it's interesting, I've got lots of friends in these countries. So when I go back, it's not just guiding a trip, this also catching up with people I've spent some days before, some days after, just checking out the operations that we've got and how things work. So yeah, I love to travel. And generally, I'm away from Europe, in the places that we work, maybe two to three months of the year, pre COVID, that is the normal kind of thing. So maybe, you know, two to three months is perfect for me, allows me to run the business, have the life I've got in Europe, but also I get to, you know, travel work, and enjoy those areas. You specifically kind of asked about sort of Mogadishu, and I guess the stereotypical travel blog, which is, or vlog or whatever, or someone who's an influencer and has a following, and they go to Mogadishu. And I think it's a bit what I was talking to before, a lot of travel feeds into, if you're not careful, it kind of has this sort of self perpetuating myth about it, wherever you go, if you want to go to, I don't know what a US equivalent is, you go to New York, and you're like, what am I going to do in New York? So you see, I don't know, eating a hotdog, or eating oysters at Grand Central Station, or go into this or go into that. So you do that, you take pictures of it, and everyone else sees the pictures, and you kind of do the same thing, and that's the story of New York, and that's kind of what you get. New York, fully a bad idea, because people have a lot more information about what they can do, but most people don't know that much about Mogadishu, and you're kind of limited to what you can do, and people need clicks on their blog, and it's famous for being dangerous. And so having a close call in Mogadishu seems like a good thing for a blog. So for sure, we've guided people whose depiction of their trip is different to how we would have perceived it. Certainly was suggesting the risk is higher, but on the flip side, there is risk. And if you're in a city where there is a bomb whilst you're there, you could easily describe that as a close call. I mean, if you're in a city in North America, or in Europe, and there was a building burnt down on the day you were there, you wouldn't necessarily call that a close call. But if it's a bomb, you kind of consider it a close call. So the idea of risk and sort of perception of risk and perception of having a close call, I guess, is something that, I guess, yeah, as you said, it's a risk is sometimes, and whether something was in the eye of the whole world. I think you're absolutely right with the observation you just made, is that these myths about this particular place, they become part of what people perceive about a certain place. And you know, in San Francisco, where I live, there was this story where, and it was a true story, we have a couple of dangerous areas here, and an Australian couple of us assaulted an event viral in Australia, and people realized how dangerous it is, or can be, in San Francisco, which is absolutely true, a lot of American cities have some really bad areas, we should never go. Definitely not at night, and definitely not alone, or even as a couple. And you almost guarantee it's going to get marked. And it's easy to not be aware of in a city like San Francisco that's so dense, right? One, a couple of blocks, it's fine, and then a couple blocks later, it's extremely dangerous. And I spent quite some time in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and it is in the dangerous town during the day, but it gets quite hairy during the night, and it's almost guaranteed local or not that you're going to get marked if you run around downtown without a car. But if you just jump over to Zanzibar, for instance, this problem doesn't exist. And there is really local pockets where people feel like they can target, there's a lot of targets for them. And the same is true for like in Lagos, right? And you have parts of Lagos that seem at least judging from local crime, pretty easy. And I walked around Victoria Island at night, and I never had any issues. But a lot of locals have a ton of issues that they have been robbed in Karjakt, just on the mainland, which is less than five miles away. So it's extremely localized, right? And that's obviously very, very difficult to make a judgment from a country of power or from a continent afar. So it really is something that travelers have to ease into, and that takes time, right? So you have to arrive there, you have to ask locals, you have to make, you have to have the own ability to judge a particular risk, to judge a neighborhood without having all the data, right? Because you never have enough data. Only the locals have all the data, and even they might have trouble seeing changes in their environment. And I think this is, this is generally a problem with the travel. When you think of it, a lot of tourism in every country is slightly different. But let's let's take Morocco as an example. I always felt Morocco and a lot of people in Morocco to specialize in misleading new arrivals, like tourists don't know anything, right? They overpay for taxis, they overpay for souvenirs. There's a whole industry that usually sprouts up, and not every country is as guilty of that. And obviously, 99% of the population is not involved in this. It's a small percentage of the population, wherever we look. And they kind of take advantage of this informational arbitrage, right? They have way more information. They know the local prices. They know everything about the local setup. And they mislead the newcomers, so to speak. It's a bit like in a prison, right? So the newcomers probably don't have it the most comfortable, but the people who've been in prison for 10 years, they've established themselves. And I think the same is true for tourism. So there is this informational arbitrage, and the internet has helped. But it's only partially solving this, because there's just so much information. There's so much overgeneral rarity. And I think you guys see this with security. But everyone who travels a lot sees this just by arriving at the airport, right? It's sometimes 10 times the expenses to get a taxi than when a local gets a taxi. And that's something people are worried about, right? That really definitely increases the anxiety before they go to a new place in the same country or in a different country. Yeah, that's true. And I think I've always tried to look because I see it as well. I mean, you use Morocco as an example, but there are places all over the world where you've got, you know, there's a kind of product for sale, whether it's a tour to somewhere or handicrafts or this or whatever. And there's money to be made and there's commission to be made and there's helping people in the shops or, you know, the free tour to whatever and you get taken to a rug factory or all of those kind of things. And part of that, I've always looked at it from the other angle. I mean, yes, you can look at it from the tourist angle. You're coming in and there's this information disparity and that's where the money is being made. But you see it from a local shopkeeper's angle. You've got a crew. I mean, the cruise boat is the classic example. The cruise boat comes in, people, they're just trucked straight into a city or a town and have no idea what the price is, no idea really what the money is. Probably have US dollars anyway or euros, don't even have the local currency, don't even know what anything costs. And people are selling things. Now, if there's four of you selling the same thing and one of them, there's almost, the temptation is too much to not take advantage of that situation. It's not that people are necessarily ripping off, but if someone's willing to pay something and the shorter period of time someone has in a town, so if a cruise boat is stopping for the day, the harder the sell has to be because you've got these guys, you've got someone there for like a minute to try to sell them something. You've got another town where people stay for like three, four, five days. It's a much easier sell. No one's necessarily buying something the first day. There's more of an interaction, there's more of a tale. So I've seen this in different places, how tourists visit a town or a place, how much time they spend there. You go to Egypt and if people have trucked off a tour bus and there's a 50 meter walk between the tour bus and the site and it's lined with people selling stuff, they've got three seconds to try and attract someone's information. So it's all about a hugely hard fast sell. Whereas you've got somewhere else where people are spending a week, there can be a soft sell. You meet someone on day one and you can sell something to them on day three. So I think I know this is getting a little bit off the track, but there's also, I work a lot with people in lots of countries. There's a perspective of the country that's being touristy as well. It's not just about people trying to rip people off. It's about doing business in the situation that you've found yourself in, I guess. Oh, I totally understand the individual who tries to make money and I think non judging is in a negative way necessarily. What you have to keep in mind too is it increases the anxiety on the other end. So if you have people swarming into a bus and I was at Taj Mahal 20 years ago, you couldn't even leave the bus because people were just pushing into the bus because they wanted to see what they have to offer. It seemed like a dangerous situation if you didn't know it was going on because suddenly hundreds of people stormed into already cramped bus. It wasn't dangerous, but I didn't know that in that moment. I didn't know they just wanted to sell me something. I thought I'm going to get crushed to death, which didn't happen. What could have easily happened, I felt. So what I think it increases the anxiety of people of taking that adventure and maybe in BC this is with COVID now. So people have this crazy anxiety and have taken it on a notch higher. So many countries in the world have no COVID restrictions, but they still have lost 90% or at least no entry restrictions. They still lost 90 or 80% of their business. So tourists are not going there. They might be worried about the flights. I mean certain age groups obviously have higher risk than others, but there is a level of anxiety that you create. And obviously the individual can't control this, right? For the individual, it's a red race. If I don't make a sale, someone else is going to make that sale. But it is making it harder to attract a wider audience. And we always feel like I don't actually know if that's true, but I always have that impression. Again, maybe not a good thing because a lot of tourists show shitty behavior, 100% true. But if you see that the development cycle, it seems like more developed countries are in a position to attract more people just because they're better infrastructure. There's less anxiety. There's no safety concerns. It seems it helps everyone. And it's a bit like a religion. It seems counterintuitive in the first place that you regulate yourself, that you kind of look for a higher being, right? But it seems like if everyone joins in or a critical mass joins in, then you create a better future. And obviously it's a high risk, right? So if something is wrong in that religious idea, then you're all in trouble and not just the individual. So I do see the incentives on the ground. They're quite tricky. But I always felt what do you think is this inflection point where suddenly a country moves away from this? Okay, let's make a quick sale, right? Like Egypt, so to speak. It moves into and has high barriers of entry. A lot of countries in Africa is very tricky to get in. Lots of paperwork, like Nigeria, you fill paperwork for weeks. And then they go to this inflection point and say, okay, now we feel like we want to change this. It should be easier. We want to have a certain kind of groups of people that we want to use safety has gone down. Do you think that's a conscious decision or it happens that some of these countries just advance a little bit? I mean, before I answer that, because it's two, it's both is the answer. But you talk about the anxiety. I guess the anxiety when you go somewhere is there's a lot of unknown. So there's an unknown because you go somewhere, there's no fixed price. There's no, you're going to go out to eat. Maybe you are vegetarian or vegan. You don't know whether you're going to get that food. You've got specific dietary requirements. All of this stuff is like this kind of unknown. And as soon as you take away, because this is the thing, tourism, when you become sort of mass tourism begins, you take away a lot of that anxiety because you want to attract more people. But taking away that anxiety also takes away sometimes the essence of what is actually happening in that country. So rather than in going to a traditional Chai Khana in Afghanistan, where you've got like three options, kebabs, palau and soup, which all have meat in them, you end up finding a tourist restaurant kind of comes up that has lots of different options and vegetarian options and seats rather than sitting on the floor. And all of this kind of stuff and proper toilets and all of that kind of stuff. And you don't have the same people who would go into that restaurant. You don't have the traders and all of these kind of people because you've created a tourist restaurant rather than a traditional Chai Khana. So as soon, and again, you end up with a tourist shop with fixed prices on goods rather than your haggling for stuff. And you create something that is not actually of the place you're visiting. You end up having a slightly diluted experience. And I think that's one of the things that Untamed Boarders always looks for because we work in a lot of places without a huge amount of tourism. Most of the places our guests visit, they don't see it through this prism of tourism. They go to Afghanistan, you see Afghanistan. Like no one's apart from us or a couple of guys are doing anything to try and change things to make it easier for tourists. Everyone's just living their life. So you get that authenticity is a strange word within tourism, but you get something that is more authentic. And then going on to what you were saying about, I mean, the classic example of a country that has decided to sort of set a level of tourism is Bhutan, isn't it? You pay this $250 a day in Bhutan. That's basically what you pay. It's very hard to pay any more than that. That's your kind of pay. And you can do what you want there. Like it's to keep out the kind of the riffraff. It's to have it so that it's kind of like exclusive. Somewhere like Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea or Saudi until recently. Extremely hard to get into, but that's due to geopolitical reasons rather than trying to control tourism, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it seems to be a convergence of at least pre COVID that people wanted to discover tourism and wanted to open up to as much tourism as possible. And I feel there's a reason why Thailand foreigners doesn't really reopen or that they've taken so much time to reopen. What would be the viral part? But the other part is I'm amazed that this population was able to be okay with the amount of tourism that they actually received. And that is a mental challenge and a mental toll I'm sure has taken on a lot of people in Thailand. And only a small percentage actually makes money off tourism and a bigger, bigger, there's a bigger mental challenge of that's where the whole population is exposed to. I want to dive a little bit more into specific countries and because the countries that you've been to, it's a pretty exclusive view that you've got. When you think of Afghanistan, a place that we know only from, say, war movies and SEAL team episodes, well, how do you describe Afghanistan or what's dear to your heart in Afghanistan? How is the city or the cities like, how is that mixed between people who live in rural areas and in those cities? My view of Afghanistan is different from, for a dozen years, traveling to Afghanistan two or three times a year and organizing tourism and events and generally positive things. I mean, I always see the first time I traveled through Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I mean, they're different countries, but there's a certain link in that there's a lot of conservatism in the countries, but people are very open about themselves, about talking about the country that they're in, their own country, geopolitics. Iran's slightly less about geopolitics, but certainly sort of Afghanistan and Pakistan, people love talking about how things are going, their perspectives on things. There is incredible scenery. You've got the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan, the rural scenes I just love, especially coming from somewhere like the UK, which is quite a green place. You've got Afghanistan, there's these two extremes. Most of the country is quite barren. It's not completely barren, but you can gray some sheep and goats on it, but that's about it. But these huge rivers run through the country. The irrigation channels run off those. You have these swathes of green within them, so it's either dusty and hard and inhospitable, or when you get into the irrigated areas, it's shady and cool and there's great fruit and all of this kind of stuff. And it's very typical of Afghanistan, these contrasts. It's very hard on one side, and on the other side, extremely hospitable and really pleasant and kind of like a paradise on the other side. And the only thing is these two things kind of run through the country and a little bit of the psyche. And I mean, for people that like historical places, Herat is an amazing city near the Iranian border. The center was built maybe 500 years ago, so it has all this sort of amazing sort of Bluetooth architecture. And it's constantly changing. I mean, any post conflicts country has a huge buzz about it. You have an idea and you go for it. Stuff is happening all the time, like restaurants pop up, ideas pop up. Someone just comes in five years ago with some Panini machines they buy in Italy, and suddenly it's like a huge thing and everyone's like, just new stuff comes all the time. I mean, when in London or New York, did someone bring in something new that everybody was like, this is amazing, it just doesn't happen. Whereas in Kabul or Bogot issue, new ideas, it's this kind of incredibly entrepreneurial atmosphere as well, which just gives a huge amount of energy. And I think people don't see that. I also don't see that necessarily in their own country because they know they're being held back by the violence and by other sort of political instability. And a lot of international people don't see that because they also just there, you know, people in Kabul or Bogot issue are there because there's lots of problems, they're working there. Whereas I come in and I do see these kind of opportunities in entrepreneurialism and energy, which I think is often overlooked. I was just checking my connection. Yes, that would have been my next question is how entrepreneurial these countries are because that would have been my expectation that entrepreneurship is something that is maybe broken, or it's just blossoming and most conflict that breaks entrepreneurship and then hopefully it comes back. And it's something I'm myself being an entrepreneur. I'm really excited to see places that are that entrepreneurial. I feel they generate a community relatively easily. And they definitely warm my heart if I find a country that's really entrepreneurial. And I've had a lot of countries in Asia, at least at the surface seem to be very entrepreneurial, that maybe isn't as much true anymore. There's definitely maybe just getting rich early opportunities have run out a little. When you go through Afghanistan or your particular tours go through Afghanistan, how much of a thought do you still have to give to security planning? Do you have to stop going out at night? Is it that easy or you just go on certain routes or you have maybe a military patrol? I ended up in Lagos to have a police escort that I recruited for myself that I felt was necessary when I left Victoria Island. How many efforts do you actually have to still do in Afghanistan? When we guide trips there, there are restrictions with our guests. We're constantly reviewing the security situation. We have our setup, we have our procedures put in place. When we're talking about risk before, everyone with anything you draw up an assessment of risk, it's likelihood multiplied by severity. Trying to make sure people don't get sick, get gastroenteritis, this kind of stuff. It's not quite likely, but we guide 100 people there a year, someone's going to get some stomach bite. What can we do to reduce it? We tell people to wash hands, drink bottled water, etc. Even if it does happen, the severity is not that bad, so it's fine. Whereas in Afghanistan, we were talking about muggings in San Francisco and all of that kind of stuff. To be honest, the thing in somewhere like Afghanistan is there's not many near misses. It's not like people go traveling in South America and come back with a story that their shoes robbed at knife point or gun point or something like that. You don't really get anything like that in Afghanistan. If something goes wrong, it's going to go really wrong. We just have to spend a lot of time reducing that. In most of the places we guide in Afghanistan, the group cannot leave, can't do anything outside of the guest house or hotel without us. I can go into it a little bit. We look at risk in two ways, generally. In Afghanistan, there's a risk of preplanned attacks and there's opportunist attacks. Like Afghanistan, the risk of an opportunist attack is very small. We're talking about muggings. We're talking about someone seeing the group and acting and things like that. It's almost nonexistent. The risk is a preplanned attack. We put in a lot of effort to make sure that our company is very unlikely to be the target of a preplanned attack by lots of methods. By having an extremely small footprint, changing how we work, changing how we have groups, we're lucky that we don't have anyone based full time in Afghanistan that's non Afghan. When people come in, nobody really knows. We keep it to a very small number of people. There's the risk of us being in somewhere which could be an attack. If we stay in the best hotel in Kabul, which is the Serena, that's where other high profile people stay. We just avoid staying there. We avoid the kind of places that are likely to be attacked. Because there is this risk in Kabul, we don't let our guests wander around by themselves because they don't know what people are saying. They don't know if and they can get into all sorts of other trouble. If they start taking pictures of military buildings or ministries or things like that, they can get arrested and all of that kind of stuff. Generally, we keep them on a fairly tight leash. In some like Afghanistan, there's a couple of areas, the Wachan Corridor in the Far North East and Bamiyan in the Central. For geopolitical reasons, basically they're rural areas where a minority ethnic group, ethnic and religious group live. There isn't any kind of Taliban. There isn't any Sunni extremism there. Therefore, we give the guests a bit more freedom. That's where we do things like skiing and hiking and the marathon race and things like that. It depends on the region and then we base our security risks on that and then we implement certain procedures and we inform our guests. With the guests, you can't give them too much information to begin with. People just don't take it in. You give information before they arrive, you give some more at the briefing and we guide with small groups. If people are acting in a way that's putting the group at risk, we can have a quiet word with them and give information as it goes on. This is constantly updated when we get there can be some huge attack in Kabul, which looks like, oh, is that going to change how we work? We're expecting huge attacks in Kabul. We're planning for that. Then there can be something that doesn't even make the news, doesn't even make the wire on a road that we might use and we're like, okay, that's changing. We're going to fly there now. We're not going to drive there. There's some small incident that can change how we work. When we get news in and we speak to it, but as you said, the team we have in Afghanistan, the team we have on the ground, they know what we're doing and they understand what is going to change. We also get information from other sources. In Afghanistan, for example, there's an organization that provides security reports for international organizations. We get reports from them and that's a useful overview, but it's not as useful perhaps. It's good to work side by side with the information we get from the drivers, from the guides, just from local people. That's a bit of an overview about how we see security and the things we have in place. I'm subscribed to a couple of those country reports in terms of security. I do read them before I go to a country. They help me certainly a little bit, but it's a country report. It has nothing to do with the city or the neighborhoods or the region you're in. That's always the trouble I have with those. One thing that really worries me, and I've been to so many different countries. I've been in every situation, but one thing that still worries me is the opportunity to be singled out simply because you're foreigner or you're perceived as an American or you're perceived as a threat, which is relatively easy to see by skin color. You ask people a couple of times, okay, people you talk to, you stay in a hotel, they're foreigners. Those things are relatively difficult to shake off. I feel like for locals, it's very easy to target this if they have those bad intentions. Very few people have those. Those are very few terrorist groups in terms of, fortunately, in terms of sheer manpower, but they are brown. I'm actually never really worried about random bombings as terrible as they are, but if you're not specifically targeted, I felt the risk of actually being a victim of those is relatively low from my personal perspective. Others would make a different judgment, but in many countries, I feel like I'm literally the only person who looks like a foreigner. Let's put it this way. It looks like an American. I feel like if someone wants to get at me, it's so easy. They don't have to look at my passport, so they just bring out the machete. That's the end of it. There isn't much to do unless you go with an armed guard security, which I feel is a bit of a help, maybe not against Arkaida, but if you have a, there was an attract more attention, but on the outside, you do have guns, right? And you do have people who've been in these situations before, and you have bulletproof vests, and you have maybe armored, but at least a vehicle that can make a quick escape. So I've been looking into these options. Obviously, if you go to this level of personal security, if it's worth it, would you still do a tour like this? And B, maybe you attract way more attention, maybe in some, you actually make your own situation more complicated and more dangerous. Absolutely. So for us, generally, as a general rule, if we feel we're in a place where we need armed security, we generally are not going to guide there, because it puts a, there's various reasons. There's a, one, it makes things a lot more expensive. So, you know, there's a price kind of issue. And secondly, it puts a huge gap between you and the people that you're, the people of the country that you're visiting. I mean, you know, if you were walking through Miami, and there's a guy going down the street, and he's got four armed guards creating a safe space for him to walk through, you don't feel like he's part of the community. He's completely separate from the community. So it's not ideal. But we do use it. We do use armed security in Mogadishu, in Somalia, and in Puntland, in Somalia. They're the only places that we generally use it. And the point you were saying about the armed, having a, you know, four six man armed security team, they are there predominantly to prevent a, an opportunist attack, there to stop someone saying, look, we've got a couple of guys with guns, we're going to rob him, we're going to do this, we're going to take some of that. Now, you're right. If it's Diash or the Taliban, and they really want you, six guys is not going to do much. In fact, it might make things worse because you might get in a firefight and then the things could be in a worse situation for you. Of course, having an armed security attracts more attention. So we, you, the way we look at it, we look at the risk. If there's a major opportunity, if there's a major risk of an armed opportunist attack, and the having an armed security is going to minimize that, then having an armed security is, is a good thing. If we don't see that as a major risk, and we don't see us as being a particularly, a particularly high profile preplanned target, which is the case in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, there's loads, especially like Kabul, there's loads of great targets. There's loads of government, military, police, embassies, international people. And these are the places that are targeted. Diash target the Shia communities. There's so many great targets out there. We feel the way that we work, we can come in and do our work and not be a major target and be able to operate in the way that we do by working in a very low profile way. But something could change. I mean, that can change. The one thing with any assessment of risk is that we assess it on the data that we have. That can change just because it didn't happen yesterday doesn't mean it can't happen tomorrow. So it's not a foolproof system, but we feel that in Afghanistan, yeah, there's two ways of working that way that we work or, you know, get a couple of bulletproof cars, loads of guys armed with guns, drive around like that. That's also a really good system. But if we're going to be organizing the stuff that we do, we think that our system of working and the profile of the clients we have, the fact that in the country for a short period of time, reduces risk to an acceptable level. So yeah, armed security work is good in the situation. And it depends who you are as well. If you're working for World Bank in Kabul, I'd want to stay in a compound with loads of security because I'm going to be targeted. I think that's a smart way to describe it. I think this is a way to deal with security. I felt for my personal use, I always felt it's the environment is so fluid and so changing, there is really no one solution. And as you said, in Afghanistan's places, we don't even have to worry about that. And then 20 miles a layer, and you're on the wrong road, and there's an ID, and there was just an attack, picture will completely change. Out of your experience with untamed borders, how many close call security incidents did you have? Stuff were either there was an immediate threat or there was a bombing that dated before the bombing that day, after somewhere where you personally would feel, oh my gosh, we have to actually review the rest because it's bigger than we thought. I mean, look, we've had groups in cities where there has been a bomb. I mean, that's, I mean, we probably guide, I don't know, it's COVID now. But before COVID, we'd guide 800 people in Afghanistan a year. So it's just the odds are that there'd be, Kabul is a city of 6 million people. There being a bomb in the city when we've got guests in the city is not an unusual, it's not a situation that's so unusual. We've changed and stopped working in countries and regions on a regular basis. We used to guide through the central route of Afghanistan from Kabul to Herat. And it goes through a place called the Minaret of Jam. It's this sort of single standing minaret that's 55 meters high. It's quite incredible. We used to guide there until 2009. And then without too much detail in Ghor province, one of the routes through, it was kind of government controlled. And then it became Taliban controlled or a guide that's aligned to the Taliban controlled it. And we stopped going there. So, I mean, things happen on a fairly, not a regular basis, but things happen in the countries that we work in where we're just like, look, we can't guide in this area. We used to guide to more places in the north of Afghanistan to these Turkmen, ethnically Turkmen towns of Akca and Anhui, and we don't guide there anymore. So, things change. Generally, security starts to deteriorate, and we avoid it, and then it gets better, or it just gets worse, and we stop doing it. I mean, we used to drive between Kabul and Mazhar issue. If we used to drive between Kabul and Bamiyan, and now we fly between the two because the security and the roads is not good enough. So, things change, and we have to adapt. I mean, generally, the issues that we have with people is the usual things after a dozen years of organizing these things, road traffic accidents, people breaking limbs, falling over, trekking, or getting a tooth kicked out by a horse, or things like that. I mean, we've had guests, I guess, not, how can I put this? Yeah, there was, you know, I think one time in Afghanistan, a compound was attacked that was maybe 300, 400 meters from where one of the guest houses we were using. So, probably something like that is the closest that something has been. But, ultimately, we've put in the procedures to mitigate the risk. And what I always say is whenever we do that, how would I feel if something happened to this person, I had to, you know, I've got my day in court, what did you do? Would I feel we reduce the risk to a reasonable amount? Yes, I did. This is what we did. These are the reasons behind it. And you can't predict any, you can't completely eliminate risk. That's just the way it is. Yeah, I guess, from the other side, going to destinations that are more risky is something that appeals to a small minority of travelers, but they are extremely interested in it. There's a reason we like skiing, there's a reason we like fast cars. So, it's something in our blood. And I think this is a small percentage of the population where we feel like there's no risk and there's no fun. And that sounds silly, but to an extent is you have to push yourself to the borders of your own being, of your own comfort zone in order to learn about yourself. And that naturally involves risk. If you're paragliding, that's really risky. We had the Xavadilla route on. He basically jumps off, helicopters off cliffs, sheer cliffs, and goes 180 degrees. That basically flies with the snow we're done. And that's a lot of risk, but he's very, very cautious in terms of how he plans these routes. But he still thinks can go wrong in two seconds and he can go off the wrong cliff. There's no rope. I mean, that's the only good one chance at these lines. That's what the particular, your ski, I probably know, this particular path that you go down a hill is called a line. If you miss it by a little bit, there's no second chance. That's it very often. So, you're going to be very cautious on one side, but also extremely interested in risk on the other side. And I think this is a wonderful opportunity that you guys make it less dangerous or so more accessible. And I think this is where you come in, right? I think this is something that wonderful that you open this up and give people the ability to see a country are quite different. But it brings me to your guests. I would think and stereotype, you're going to be like, this is American stereotype. But I would think those are guys with the primary military training that have been in pretty heavy situations and then they sign up because they feel like it's just going to be a little easier, maybe cheaper to go with you guys, but they're already really interested in risk. Is that true or is it really the average traveler signs up with most of these tourists that you do, especially to Afghanistan and Somalia? Yeah, what you're saying is not the profile of the people that come with us at all. We have guided a few veterans, which has always been an amazing experience, to be honest, to guide people that had served in Afghanistan and have gone back and seen a completely different side. I mean, there's been like half a dozen, I think, in the years. But I mean, some of that's been amazing. There was one guy, he had spent the best part of three years flying over Afghanistan, identifying, basically identifying targets to bomb. And he was a skier, he was a snowboarder, actually, and he would fly over these mountains in the winter and he would promise himself every day one day he'd go back to Afghanistan and snowboard these mountains. And he never really thought he would do it. And then he found us and was like, this is amazing, I'm going to do it. So to be able to bring somebody's kind of crazy dream alive is an amazing feeling. But the majority of the people are people that like to travel. And that's it. And you were saying, it's men and women as well. I think the group trips are usually 50% women. I mean, women, this is a big generalization, but the group trip, I think, partly because women are generally a bit more social, and also perhaps the idea of just spending 10 days or two weeks with one Pakistani or Afghan man guiding might not appeal as much as it might to a man. But I'd say the group trips are about 50% women. And generally, people that have traveled a lot, that's what it is. It's enjoying travel. And usually at some stage in their life, I'm sure you've found it as well, Torsten, they've gone a little bit off the beaten track with their travel and found this kind of, I was talking about it before, this kind of authenticity, something about a place where it isn't seen through the sort of prism of tourism and have really enjoyed it. And have really enjoyed, it might be a bit selfish and a kind of exclusivity, but enjoyed being the only kind of tourist around and being a bit, it being a bit special in that way. And I think that's the majority. And it's not about risk risk. There is definitely a, and it's a bit old fashioned to say, but people like a bit of an adventure. And if we, if you're going to go on a trip with us, you know, there's always a chance that something's going to change slightly, we might not be able to do this that day, or something might happen, there might be something really cool, like a festival or a marriage or a wedding or a funeral or something that one of our friends is involved in, that we can go and see. So the trips are, the trips are, you know, we have an itinerary for them, but if there's something small happening that we can change, that's great. And honestly, the trips that people enjoyed the most have often been the ones where it's not gone to plan, but we've managed to kind of change it and come up with something and alter it. And they've left and been like, I've just had like 10 days and this has been like, it's been, it's been, it's been an adventure. And like you, I think in, you know, in Europe, in the US, so much kind of risk is mitigated, so much has things have to go to plan, you know, we have to be here at this time, you've got to make appointments, you've got to do this, everything's got to be ordered, that to go somewhere in a small group of like minded people and have a bit of an adventure, and there'll always be a slight risk that it's not, you're not going to see what you plan to come and see, you know, you're not quite sure exactly how it's going to go, but you've got a company behind you who is experiencing this and have seen a lot of these things and they can anticipate things and come up with a plan B. I think that's the appeal, to be honest, but it's not about people who have been in the military. I mean, it's about fairly normal people who just like traveling to unusual places which you can relate to. Yeah, absolutely, I think this is, I like how you describe this, and I think your heart is right there, how you describe the sense of adventure, and that is totally my experience, I've been trying to teach this to my children, I talk to them before in different countries by now, and the idea is that I really try to show the sense of the journey is actually the destination, and you want to try to find this this crossroads where you do something, where you know what you're doing, but you're still exploring and you find something new in your life, and there is, I think psychologists do a lot of research into when are we ready to explore, and then they do this with animals, and it's typically in a state when we feel like our downside is covered, and then we go out to explore, we try to find things that could improve our life, that maybe it's better food, that is better opportunities, that you know in a modern life this is where we make more money, but it's also where we see life, how it really is, and it's not the streamlined set of emotions that we see, for instance on social media, but also I think it's changed people's brains by now, it's also in real life you have this now, and I think you're absolutely right, when you are somewhere where you're the only tourist, the amount of curiosity that you have, but also is reciprocated by the locals, at the amount of attention you get, it's something very special, I think this is, if you never had this experience, if you can do one thing life changing, then this is one that would definitely be high on my list, and it usually means you have to go pretty far in places you're really uncomfortable with in the first place, my first thought would be Bangladesh, it is a dangerous country, but it's still quite different and it isn't well traveled, especially if you go outside of the cities, it does have some terrorist problems, but I don't think there is widespread from what I know, so I did have this also, and it's always easier to say, I don't know, when we ask our grandparents, they would probably say the old times were always better, but I do remember it was relatively easy to go to Thailand 25, 30 years ago when I was really young, and there was literally just a few huts, a bunch of cool people with a good community, like in the movie The Beach, and they were on The Beach in Kopey Pee, and there were like the two places to eat, and there was an only clear water, and I went back 20 years ago and was all speed boats and streamlined, right, everything was streamlined, there were luxury hotels, there were chain hotels and chain restaurants, so things have really, the progress that we made, I think this is the difficulty in human development, we make this progress, but it makes the individual maybe more soft, it's harder to get to those experiences that make yourself confident, right, that where you show yourself, yes, you can do it, and you can kind of conquer the world, those experiences are pretty rare now, I think that was different 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, and when people went to Africa, literally, you know, just I had to deal with malaria and just there were not even a map around for most places. Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I remember I was talking to a friend of mine, and we both are on a, it's like a Facebook group from the, it's called like the Hippie Trail, so it's got all the, you know, people that were, you know, traveled across Iran, you know, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India to Nepal, 60s, 70s, I know a few of these, you know, I've met a few of these characters on the way, you know, used to whatever, be gem dealers out of Kabul or smuggle hashish or all of these kind of things, and there's a lot of this talk, it's like, oh yeah, I feel bad for like people today, they don't have the opportunity, you know, it wasn't like it was in our day when, you know, you can, there's not so much a journey of discovery, but I think, I think every generation just has its own type of discovery, you know, you, of course, you can look on Google Maps, you can find kind of every village and all of these kind of stuff, but you can still go out, there's still some amazing places in the world to go and, and, and visit and find yourself alone in and, but it's about, it's about, yeah, it's about searching for that though, it's, I mean, it shouldn't be easy, it shouldn't be an easy thing to, to take that kind of path, to take something into the, into the unknown, I mean, the trip to Thailand now is a bit like, you know, when I went to Thailand in 1998, so similar time to what you're talking about, and it was an adventure, I didn't really know anything, I didn't bring a guidebook or anything, I just, I really had no idea what I was, what we were doing, even though it was like lowly planets and all these kind of like information about places, but nowadays that's like, you know, going to Spain for someone in Europe or going to, you know, Cancun or something for someone from the US, but there are still parts of the world that are less visited and you can, you know, get off the beaten path and have adventures, but you've just got to make an effort, and I think that's the, that's, it was the same whether it was in the 60s or the same whether it was in the 19th century or the same now, if you make an effort, you can find some really interesting stuff and, and really push yourself and really, yeah, find more out about yourself and about the world. Talking about making an effort, I saw your, your video presentation that you did about your relatively recent trip to, I think it was Pondland, and from what I know, Somalia itself has kind of split up into three different regions, more or less recognized by different countries and by the UN. Maybe you can help us understand a little more how does this work and working your way into Somalia and finding a way how to deal with the perceived danger or, and then recognizing and finding the real beauty of it. Um, yeah, so Somalia and it's, it's, it's quite fragmented. Um, and depending on your, and it all, like most of these things, it depends on your perspective. The main sort of breakaway is, um, is Somali land, which used to be British, it used to be a British colony, whereas the rest of Somalia used to be an Italian colony. Um, and Somali land isn't recognized by the UN, it's not recognized by, it's, it's recognized by almost nobody, but it is effectively independent. It has its own currency, it has its own, um, government, it has its own military, it is effectively an independent country, um, but it's, it's a funny place. I mean, if you take off from Somali land and fly to Somalia to fly to Mogadishu, you take off and it's an international flight and you land and the people in Somalia call it a domestic flight because they still claim Somali land as part of Somalia. So it's very much dependent on your perspective. And print land, so Somali land, it wants independence. That's quite clear. Print land, which is on the tip of the Horn of Africa, um, they want a kind of federal state. So they want, they don't want complete independence, but they want, uh, um, a federal system, whereas the government in Mogadishu, which is the main part of Somalia, they want it to be kind of, you know, what Mogadishu sort of ruled over. And because the country is so weak, Mogadishu has no power to tell print land really what, what it wants to do. So it's kind of quasi independent. Um, but to organize, and again, like how to find reliable people in different parts of the world, there's all sorts of ways to do it. So as I talked about before, working in the, you know, conflict journalists sometimes, people in the development world sometimes, um, as it was in print land, people that work in, um, oil exploration, um, you know, they need, people need guys who are reliable, who can organize stuff, who have access to security reports, things like that. Um, I've worked with really remote areas, the people that put in mobile phone antennas, because as you know, there's mobile phone antennas in all over the world, in the most remote parts of the world that you can imagine, there's only a few small villages, there's a mobile phone. Someone's put that up. Someone relatively, um, relatively skilled, perhaps speaks English, works for big organization, has probably some kind of security information about what's going on in that area. Um, so there's all sorts of ways to kind of build up a picture of what's going on. But the trip to print land, um, yeah, when you talk about adventure, yeah, what, what is, how do you go somewhere, you know, there's no blanks on the map anymore. How do you go somewhere that's interesting? And sometimes, yeah, it's a case of, with the talker on, on print land, I had spoken to a guy years and years ago, who's in the merchant lady, and he told me that with this lighthouse on the very tip of the Horn of Africa, which apparently was the worst posting in the British empire, and people would be dropped off there for, I think, two years at a time to serve at this lighthouse. And it was basically inland from it. There were sort of wild tribes and all these things. They had food dropped off every six months. And that, that was like considered to be the worst posting. The story was completely untrue, I later found, but it intrigued me. It was like, what is this lighthouse? And I think years later, I found it on Google Earth. I could see the shadow of it. And then when I had some guests who had traveled with us to Mogadishu and had traveled to us to Somali land and said, where else can we go in, in Somali? Can we go to print land? That's another kind of region. I got in contact with the guys that had made some connections there and then mentioned the lighthouse. And that's how that kind of, that kind of trip happened. So, yeah, it's just trying to, and it's, again, it's an adventure. It's, it's a story that, although it wasn't true, yeah, is it, it's exciting. I mean, it's a bit like, you know, a bit of a finding, being told about a treasure map or something like that and having to find it. And it feels like in the modern world, everywhere on the map is kind of covered and there's cameras and there's information and all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, this is an area of the world that even sort of only a couple of years before we went there, you know, there were huge oil tankers were taken by pirates and grounded and nobody could do anything about it. So, I mean, there are parts of the world that are hard to reach. And yeah, there's always a bit of an adventure there, I guess. I can imagine, I can imagine. That's, that's, I think, one of the, the, the ultimate journeys as long as we are not able to go to Mars. So, I think Elon Musk is working hard at that. So, we can, can just cover some more, more maps. And it's, it's, it's even our brain to, to explore and find, like I said earlier, they did these experiments with cats and they even had cats partially injured brain and they would explore even more. So, making, making maps of your territory around you that provides opportunities is, is an extremely deep desire that I think all mammals and probably all, all animals have. And we, I think we're struggling more to, to find this in the real world, but it's obviously the digital world, the cloud world, where there's a lot of this going on right now. This is where the kids are really drawn to because it's easily accessible. But in the real world, we kind of have run out of places to do this. One other place, I don't know if you guys travel there or if you have done a trip there personally, that's really mesmerizing to me is the Amazon. Because this big, this huge forest that takes up probably 60, 70% of Colombia the same amount of Brazil's landmass. And I went to Manaus in the middle of it, which is kind of an industrial city. And they take you out to an Indian village and you can, it's kind of, it's, it's, it's quite amazing to see people who could still live negative stone age and five miles away. There's a big Nokia factory and an iPhone and an Apple factory where, where you make high tech. I find this really strong contrast, but it is just, like I say, a 20, 30 mile radius around that city that's easily easy to explore. But there's this massive rest of the Amazon that seems to get no coverage. I don't see a lot of tours. I don't see anyone really making that trip. Maybe I'm just missing that part of the information. I mean, look, South America is not my area of expertise. But I mean, there's, I mean, I know for a fact, because I've been to Bolivia, I mean, there were, there's tourism within Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, the visit parts of the Amazon. But it's, I guess, like saying, yeah, there are trips that go to the Antarctic. I mean, people go to like half a dozen places within it. But then there's this vast expanses where nobody has set foot ever. And I guess the Amazon is a similar kind of situation. Yeah, you can go so far. And then, yeah, you can keep going, but it kind of looks the same. I mean, it's, you know, we literally have to land. So you only have the rivers, they, they work like