James Wilcox and his small expert team at Untamed Borders specialise in taking group of tourists to some of the most interesting and hard to reach areas on the Planet
If it existed, James Wilcox would win the prize for the most outlandish destination wedding ever organised.
“It was a wedding ceremony on the side of a volcano in Congo,” he explained to the Mirror. “The groom had wanted to get married somewhere like the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, so I suggested the Nyiragongo Volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
The towering 3,470m volcano is one of the tallest in the world, and one of the most active. The main crater is about two kilometres wide and usually contains a lava lake. Every now and again, this is drained of its contents when Nyiragongo decides to erupt, as it has done 34 times in the past 150 years. On those occasions, great rivers of magma rush down its steep sides, scorching through any trees, villages and wedding parties that happen to be in its path.
“He didn’t have loads of people go,” James admitted, hinting at the logistical difficulty of organising a knees-up on the side of an active volcano in an active conflict zone. “We had some dancers, a couple of his friends, the minister and the rangers.”
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While the prospect of wading through the Ryanair website without accidentally booking a hire car is a holiday headache enough for most of us, James and his team at Untamed Borders relish the logistical challenges that come with travel. In fact, they have made a business of organising trips to some of the hardest-to-reach places in the world.
Since 2008, the crack team of professional fixers has worked out how to get war reporters, adventurers, intrepid families, and even nearly-nuptial happy couples into some of the world’s least trodden corners.
It is not, as company founder James points out, ‘dark’ or ‘extreme’ tourism. Adventure travel is a better way to put it.
“Most of it is curiosity. The privilege of visiting a place that is amazing or a UNESCO site that is hardly ever visited. It is not like visiting pyramids and being surrounded by people selling stuff,” he explains.
In recent history, that has included smoothing the way for Michael Palin during his Channel 5 travel series Into Iraq, in which the Monty Python star embarked on a 1000-mile odyssey along the Tigris river from its source in eastern Turkey to the Persian Gulf.
The company has also helped collect sand from 70 different deserts around the world on behalf of tech firm Apple, who had the particles sculpted into columns for its ‘Mirage’ artwork which currently sits at Apple Park.
Ten years ago, James helped organise the Marathon of Afghanistan, the country’s only mixed-gender sporting event. The race takes place in the Bamian province, starting at an altitude of 3000m and weaving through a landscape of dramatic cliffs and bright blue lakes that was known as ‘the Hippy Trail’ during the 1960s.
This race underlines the tension inherent in this kind of travel.
Each year, Untamed Borders took a group of intrepid runners out to Afghanistan to run the race. Following the fall of the country to the Taliban, this has been impossible. Runners such as Zainab, who produced a film about her clandestine efforts to take part in the event, have been sidelined in a society that now bans women from almost all aspects of public life.
Realising that the race could not be run “in the inclusive spirit it was founded”, Untamed Borders decided to “press pause on organising the event for now. We hope one day we will be able to run marathon trips again in Afghanistan and take part in this special race.”
While continuing the marathon seemed the wrong course of action, James is a firm believer in the positive power of travel as a means of cultural exchange, even when that means visiting and contributing money to societies run by cruel, authoritarian rulers.
“Any kind of cultural interaction creates a normalisation. A lot of these assumptions (about countries), generalisations, get broken down,” James said.
“We don’t have photos on our website of tourists with their arms around Taliban guys with guns. That normalisation can be a really negative thing. People want to come, not to fix a country, but because they find it beautiful and intriguing. But of course, (by travelling there) you also normalise the countries. No one thinks twice about going to Egypt or Dubai now, because it is normalised.”
Untamed Borders specializes in facilitating strange and particularly difficult trips. One customer was helped in taking their globetrotting father’s ashes to the few countries he had failed to visit.
Another, Michael Zervos, recently visited every country in the world in the shortest amount of time on record- just 499 days. He did so with the aid of Untamed Borders, which made an exception for the Detroit filmmaker.
“The idea of fast travel is not really how we view ourselves. But we liked his idea of asking people what the happiest day of their life was. Everywhere in the world, there are way more similarities than differences. For everyone, it is all about families and friends and overcoming adversity,” James added.
One traveller who loves to find these similarities is Didier, a lawyer originally from Lisbon in Portugal who now works in London. The 59-year-old, who says he is “interested in every country, everywhere”, was particularly intrigued by Afghanistan.
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“It is a country that has been through very difficult times. I wanted to see how the people live, and the landscape there is beautiful,” he explained.
Didier travelled to Bamyan to take part in an event few would associate with the largely desert-covered country—a ski race. The Bamyan Alpine Ski Club was established in 2023 by a group of experienced local skiers to build the sport in the mountainous region, with support coming from visiting tourists and Untamed Borders. Sadly, the company was stopped from entering participants last year, when women were banned from taking part.
While Didier’s experiences in Afghanistan have mostly been positive, he is conscious of the growing dangers visitors there face.
“There was an attack on a tourist group in May 2024. We knew some of the guys affected. Two Spanish ladies died. A guy showed up and shot at the minivan. One of the drivers had worked for us. He died. He was shot dead,” Didier explained.
As appalled as Didier is by the current treatment of women in the country, and aware of the risk he is taking to his own safety when travelling there, he is a firm believer in the positive power of travel.
“Any policy of isolating or boycotting a country never works. The money we spend (when we travel) goes to local people. We need drivers, we need guides, we come with clothes, skis, and boots, which we give to the local ski club. We buy souvenirs and go to restaurants.
“At the moment, the youth have no future. It is really sad to see. They are bright guys who have studied. If we isolate the country more, it will get worse. More Westerners going will help.”
