Ash Bhardwaj | Author, Journalist & Adventurer On 'Why We Travel'

✍︎: The Curious Worldview Newsletter - the ultimate compliment to the podcast...

• Jon Lee Anderson
• Charlie Walker

Follow me on Instagram - @ryanfhogg

Why We Travel - Ash Bhardwaj

Ash Bhardwaj is an author, journalist, film-maker and former british army who amongst his many expeditions has ventured the likes of journeying 8500km along the Russian European border. Retraced secret missions of WW2 through Albania. Walked 800km through India and The Himalayas, meeting the Dalai Lama on the way. Walked 1100km through Uganda and Sudan with Levison Wood which included the first summer crossing of the Bayuda Desert. Trekked the Mt Everest Base Camp with wounded soldiers. Worked on earthquake recovery in the Philippines. Trekked through the Jebel of Dhofar in the footsteps of the SAS, and really he’s done a hell of a lot more as well. 

He recently published his first book titled Why We Travel, and in discussion of his life and worldview I was privileged to have gotten to sit down with him in his home in London to record this very episode - there is a video available on youtube if you are keen.

Ash really is my dream style of guest. He is a wonderful speaker, incredibly open and curious and has achieved many of the types of things, I wish to one day emulate. I am very grateful to have gotten to spend this time with him.

00:00 - Who Is Ash Bhardwaj
03:55 - Great Explorers From History
15:13 - Differences Between Australian & New Zealand Culture 
35:57 - Adventure & Travel
43:44 - Ash's Most Consequential Journalism & Ukraine
54:08 - Why We Travel
59:53 - What Makes Great Travel Writing?
1:13:43 - Publishing Market For Travel Books & Why We Travel
1:29:36 - What Eat Pray Love & Cultural Phenomenon Did For Travel + (New Unexplored Paradise?)
1:39:43 - Is The World Becoming More Dangerous?
1:42:43 - Changing Demographics Of Travel & Getting Deep Into Why We Travel
1:59:50 - Country Ash Is Bullish On

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Ash Badawaj is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and former British Army, who, amongst his many expeditions, has ventured the likes of journeying eight thousand five hundred kilometers through eleven countries along the Russian European border, retraced secret missions of World War II through Albania, walked eight hundred kilometers through India and the Himalayas, meeting the Dalai Lama along the way, walked 1,100 kilometers through Uganda and Sudan with Levison Wood, which also included the first summer crossing of the Bayuda Desert. He trekked the Mount Everest base camp with wounded soldiers, worked on earthquake recovery in the Philippines, trekked through the Jebel of the Far in the footsteps of SAS, and really he's done a hell of a lot more as well. He recently published his first book titled Why We Travel, and in the discussion of his life and worldview, I was privileged to have gotten to sit down with him in his home in London to record this very piece of audio. There is also a video available on YouTube as well, if uh you're keen. Ash really is my dream style of guest. He's a wonderful speaker, incredibly open and curious, and has achieved many of the types of things I wish to one day emulate. I am very grateful to have gotten to spend this time with him. Navigate the timestamps to jump directly to the topics that might interest you, but I will caveat that the first 30 minutes is likely of narrow interests only to my Australian and New Zealand audiences. We discussed potentially shaky ground, which wasn't planned, but just serendipitously occurred. I asked Ash about what he perceived as the different histories of Australia and New Zealand relating to their indigenous populations, these both being countries Ash has spent much time in. Neither Ash or I are experts in this, but we also don't pretend to be. Therefore, I leave the judgment of whether you think we were right or wrong entirely in your hands. But if you continue, we get into the themes of his book, his broader thoughts on over tourism, travel trends, great travel writers, great travel writing, and so much more as well. One more thing, my newsletter is the top link in the podcast description. It's really been popping off lately, which is very encouraging to see. So I ask that you give it a shot yourself. It's behind the scenes of episodes, standalone articles, and quick links occasionally to great stuff that I think you'd be keen on as well. Don't forget to leave a juicy five-star review on Spotify or Apple. I posted on my Instagram the other day one of the Apple reviews. It was the fucking kindest thing anyone could ever say about the podcast. So thank you to that person. But wherever you listen to this, five-star on Spotify or five star on Apple. And with no further ado whatsoever, here is the wonderful Ash Bartavaj. Exactly. The podcast discovery on Spotify and Apple. It's kind of fucked. YouTube, it's really good, but uh I've been having a lot of conversations with a guy called Jordan Harbinger, if you're familiar with him. He is a huge podcast. He's been doing it for like 15 years. So he's a really good person to speak with about this. His impression is, and I take his word for it. YouTube, social media, you grow a big platform there, very few convert to another platform. So just because you have a million Instagram followers and even post cool clips and stuff, that's great. It might grow your Instagram, but it doesn't move the needle for them going to Apple or Spotify and subscribing.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

And I'm that gives me a lot of solace because I've made these efforts in social media and it just doesn't move the needle.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

No, and it's also it's what how you want to spend your time. Because if you spend all your time on social media, you end up creating a certain type of content. Yeah, uh it you do you want to be an influencer? Do you want to spend your time, you know? I mean, I don't. No. And I often find this in journalism and broadcast people are like, oh, great social media following. I'm like, why? Why would you do that?

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Anyway, rambling. Okay, um who are the great explorers of history that you admire?

SPEAKER_00 3:59

I think exploration comes into a couple of different ways, and I think you can have contemporaneous explorers today as well. And exploration is sort of the root of why we travel, which is rooted in curiosity. And that desire to look over the horizon and figure out what's there in a place where you know nothing, is really mankind's Homo sapiens competitive advantage. That's what makes us different to other animals, and then curiosity also allows us to adapt to our environments. So every other animal has to evolve to adapt to its environment. Humans can use tools, society, culture to build things that allow them to adapt to an environment. So exploration in that sense is very innate within us. And in terms of the people who've done it remarkably throughout history, we don't know most of them. Right. Uh the the names that come up obviously are Shackleton, Scott, Amazon for the Antarctic. And when you read the stories of what they did, just this desire to figure out what was out there against remarkable hardship and high risk of losing their own lives, and it's Scott's case, he did lose his own life. There's uh a sort of impressive aspiration to discovery there and planning and endurance. The name of um Shackleton Ship, of course. So there's that. We talk about Columbus, um Magellan from Europe, who of course did you know circumnavigation of the globe, Cook went and checked out Australia. But the story that really sticks with me actually is the Great Polynesian migration. Oh, yeah, of course. The wayfarers. The wayfarers, you know, and uh you may have seen it in the Disney documentary Moana with uh the rock, Dwayne Johnson.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

I didn't get around to it.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Uh so these are the people who started about four and a half thousand years ago in what's modern day Taiwan and just developed new technologies, new ways of seafaring to start by just hopping between islands to eventually crossing big patches of ocean to get to places that would be on the horizon, and that took him a long time to figure out. But along the way, they developed these amazing skills and they developed culture that was appropriate for that environment. And the greatest Polynesian explorer and navigator is a guy called Coupe, and he's sort of pseudo-mythological.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

What year?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

He was cutting around the South Pacific around a thousand years ago. Um so relatively recently in in human exploration terms on the grand scale, but before Europeans were crossing the Atlantic, other than maybe the Vikings.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

And before great record keeping it.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

So that's that's a thing that makes it really interesting, and why I mentioned that Coupe's a pseudo-mythological character, because in the historical records of the Maori of New Zealand and the rest of the South Pacific, or the rest of the Pacific journey, not just the South Pacific, oral tradition was what was the equivalent of record keeping, storytelling through telling people directly. So this wasn't written down. So the only way we can really trace it historically is by bringing together different myths and records from different regions of the Pacific and seeing what intersects and calling that truth. Calling that truth. As in, you know, what is truth when you you know what's truth historically? You have historical records.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Oh right, you mean yeah, just because it's an oral, does it actually mean it's true, therefore mythological, pseudo-mythological character.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yeah, and obviously, because with within the stories of Coupe, you know, he one of the the best one is Coupe and the giant Feke, which is an octopus, and it's a story of him chasing this octopus, and that's how he discovers New Zealand from what is now French Polynesia, right here, that are that area. And was he actually chasing a giant octopus? Probably not, but it's it's a metaphor for the ocean currents in that region about how he followed them down. And uh when I was in New Zealand a little while ago, I was in Taranga on the Bay of Plenty, so the North Island, and I met this guy there who is a navigator, and he was talking to me about rediscovering these techniques because after the Polynesians had settled in New Zealand and become the Maori with a separate culture, there was less movement back and forth between the uh between New Zealand and the islands. Yep. And this navigator, Jack Thatcher, his name is, was telling me about how he had had to rediscover some of these techniques. So he went out to French Polynesia and the Marquesas, which is another island group up there, and got to know people who were still using these techniques and used it almost as a sort of cultural education for young Maori people.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

That's incredible. To say some of the details about uh these fellas, isn't one of them that they might dip their their sack into the water to like feel the current or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah, and these people were navigating without clocks, without sextants, and without compasses, which is the way people navigated before GPS.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Um until fairly recently, really. And they had all these different techniques of figuring things out. So they would watch the migration of birds and of fish, knowing well, these must have come from somewhere and there must be something over there, knowing that birds and fish find food in areas where you get upwellings against rock, then there'd be flops and inject them on the water. So if a coconut drifts in your direction from somewhere, you're like, Well, there must be somewhere with coconut trees over there, and then yeah, they would um they they some of them would be able to taste the water and taste the difference in salinity. Oh, it's so amazing. And knowing there's fresh water near here, so we can't be too far from an island that has fresh water flowing on it.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Which which isn't that ridiculous, like their senses would be so finely attuned since that was their entire environment, everything that they were doing.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Yeah, and these things, as Jack said, these things seem like magic to us now, but that as you say, it was their entire environment. That was everything they knew.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

And so, what about the sort of maybe downfall's a bit dramatic, but the deterioration of these Pacific Islander cultures over time? What have you observed?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Um, so I'm not an expert on them, but just from speaking to the people that I met there, obviously the biggest thing that made the difference was the arrival of Europeans, and that did a couple of things. It I mean, in both Australia and New Zealand, they were occupied, oppressed, and in some cases ethnically cleansed, and corralled into a type of society that effectively served the wider needs of empire or uh colonisation in some cases, and so those skills were lost. Uh, the the British brought new types of trading and new types of shipping that kind of replaced the old ways, but of course, one of the reasons that ocean navigation declined in New Zealand was they didn't need to navigate the oceans once the Maldivan culture had been established because they had two massive islands to then explore. Um, and so there's you know a multitude of different reasons why those skills were lost, and it's really cool to see people trying to bring those skills back. And Jack sailed on uh something called a wokahurua, which is a double-hulled ocean-going canoe. So you've got two hulls, you put a platform on it and a little shelter, and he used traditional navigational techniques to sail from Auckland to Rapinui, Easter Island, um, across to the Cook Islands and Marquesas, and I think he then went up to Hawaii. Right. I don't know if it was all the same voyage, but to demonstrate that it was possible to do these things. I don't know if he was tasting the water or just using the stars and that kind of a navigation.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Also, another reason why these ancient explorers are so much more romantic in our eyes is because we have to assume that it was so so dangerous. Hundreds, if not multiples of hundreds or thousands of expeditions before them would have never come back, yet they would still go out and the journey to Hawaii, for instance. I mean, this is an uh almost an unfathomable distance in a canoe, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Yeah, and what was cool, and Jack was basically talking me through the evolution of the Polynesian migratory skill and culture, in that they just developed it gradually and tested distances. And if if you look at a map going from Taiwan through to Hawaii, uh I've got a globe. I'm gonna grab the globe and show you. Yeah, YouTube experience. Yeah, it's YouTube experience multimedia. So you've got, if you look here, you've got Taiwan is up here, yeah, and then from there they they kind of came down this way, and you can see in the grand scheme of things, these islands aren't. Down the east coast of the Philippines, down the east coast of the Philippines, um, and then you've got this area called Micronesia, and you could sort of island hop through these areas into Melanesia, down sort of you know New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, down to Fiji, and then Samoa. And actually, they they kind of paused for a long time there in the Polynesian migration. So as they went into these greater and greater distances, their skills of ocean going had to improve, and so it took sometimes a couple of centuries for them to develop the technology and skills. So this is very slow in terms of the how quickly we develop and evolve skills with the kind of teaching and training techniques and technology we have now. Um, they took a pause here for a while around Samoa until they then developed the skills to reach the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, and then if you like Easter Island, where's Rapinui? It's there. That's a huge distance to cross, and then Hawaii's all the way up there. So you know you're you're crossing vast amounts of ocean, but they took the time to develop those skills and techniques to then get to the next one.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Maybe my cliche understanding of the Maori culture is wrong here, but my understanding is that they're they're a pretty warfaring culture, they would routinely fight amongst each other.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Uh yeah, I mean, uh I'm not an expert on Maori culture, but I don't think, you know, any more than European cultures were fighting with each other.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

The the reason I say that is just to make the distinction for why they never took over Australia or at least dominated some of these eastern parts of Australia, because we're the most obvious island next to them there.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah, I don't know. I mean the you know the Maori were down here, but I don't that's a good point. I have no idea why they never went over there. It's just not not something I particularly know about. I mean, they they sort of Maori culture is north to south New Zealand and out to the Chatham Islands. Uh and you know, it's distinct from Polynesian culture, Fijian and Salmon and Cook Island culture. Uh sorry, it's not an error, I know a huge No, fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

I don't want to um yeah, I don't want to like make uncomfortable ask you to explain some deep anthropological uh uh things. But you're an Englishman who spent quite a lot of time in both Australia and New Zealand. Yeah. Did you what what are your observations on the differences between how the Australians uh respect and think about and behave regarding their own indigenous population, the Aboriginals, versus how the New Zealanders do with the indigenous population, the Maoris?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

I mean, I haven't studied this, but I can talk about it from my experience in travel journalism and my own travel. So it was noticing that difference that really set me on the path, probably of being curious in travel. So I was 17 and I was at a local state school in Windsor, and that state school ran a rugby tour every few years. And the year that I was 17, the rugby tour I could have gone on was going to Australia, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands. And my mum, we lived in social housing, uh mum was on income support, but she had actually been to New Zealand to visit family in the 1970s, and she said, I think you'd love it, I think this was a really important opportunity. So she got a second job uh as a cleaner to pay for my ticket. I had to learn how to play rugby, which when you're 17 isn't the easiest thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

And then you show up against these massive Kiwis.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

You were so you know, I just turned up until I could get I could just about catch a ball and just about tackle somebody and just about lean on somebody as a prop in a in a scrum. So that was a role I played. And we went out to Australia and we had a pretty good time there. We won in Perth, we won in the Blue Mountains, West of Sydney, and then we went up to Cairns, and Cairns was the only time I saw Aboriginal people or Aboriginal culture at all. Never in Sydney, no, not when not when we were there. That's great. Certainly not in the Blue Mountains, right? This was 2001, so I don't know if it has changed. I don't know how the prominence has changed. Um but up in Cairns, you know, there were uh we played a school where most of the most of the students were Aboriginal. We they played rugby league, we played Union, it was an interesting game. Then when we got to New Zealand, as soon as I got off the plane at Auckland Airport, the signs were all in Toreo Maori as well as English, so the Maori language. There's art all over the airport that is Maori art and you know the say the designs and the styles, and Maori people were present everywhere. And you know, our coach driver was Maori and he was driving around talking about the the legacy and the history of the land around Auckland and what all the different volcanoes were and the mythology around them. So it was present in New Zealand like Maori culture is present in New Zealand culture in a way that it just wasn't as a national culture in Australia, it seemed much more marginalized in Australia. Uh, you know, we turned up at college and they they did a hucka. Most of the most of the people doing the hucker were you know white European origin New Zealanders. There were Maori kids in the school as well. And our response was um we we learned how to sing Jerusalem. I don't know if you've ever been to an England rugby or cricket game. It's not as intimidating as a hucker. I feel that well, they gained the psychological upper hand quite early. Um but you know, I just asked people, you know, what's it and I I so I say to them, I noticed this difference between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and prominence in Australia and Maori cultural prominence in New Zealand. And they say, well, I mean that's just the way it is, it's not something we really think about. Obviously, there's differences and there's there's still challenges, but that's just the culture we have. And so that really triggered this curiosity in me that I then went back and did research in New Zealand in particular as a journalist about the Treaty of Waitangi and the original you know British colonisation of New Zealand and how that differed to what had happened in Australia. And you know, it wasn't always perfect, the British, as as as we are want to do, uh, broke our treaties with the uh Maori occupied land that we weren't supposed to be occupying. Um and it was only really from what people said that in the 50s and 60s and 70s of the sort of civil rights movement and civil society started to pull back some of those rights of Maori people, the um Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal, which started to do settlement for the breaking of this uh treaty back in the early colonisation days, and then you know you go there now and things have happened like the change in the legal status of a river so it gains personhood, the Wanganui River in the North Island, or uh Mount Taranaki, or different parts of New Zealand that have rights and status under the kind of law we're familiar with, but have its origins in the uh culture and mythology of Maori culture. So that's fascinating, and it just wasn't present at all in Australia. You know, there's there's places where you go where the names are named after Aboriginal groups and Aboriginal people, but you don't see Aboriginal people, in my experience, as part of Australian societies you do Maori people in New Zealand society. And in your observation, do you have an explanation for that? I guess the I guess the differences are, you know, occupying New Zealand was a very different process to occupying Australia. Australia has bigger land. I think the Maori were better organised at the type of war fighting that they needed to oppose the British. I think the treaties and things that occurred allowed some Maori groups to get hold of uh weapons earlier that it gave them better ability to defend small territory that was more easily defensible than Australia.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

So it almost comes down to just they defended themselves more effectively and therefore could force themselves more into the change in culture.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

So I think I think there was an aspect of that. Like I said, I'm not a I'm not a historian. This is me just having a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Don't worry, no one's gonna hold you accountable for your opinions. It's just uh what do you think from your observation?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

I think more of what it is is I just don't know enough about the Australian story to be able to uh talk honestly about that.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Um Yeah, the truth is Ash, like Australians don't know about it either.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

You know, I'm someone who's maybe more uh interested in this than the typical Australian. I still have absolutely no idea. There's you know, you can throw around a couple of theories, but it's uh not backed up by any sort of uh proper analysis or data.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Yeah, and I don't know what the for New Zealand my my my experience of writing about it in New Zealand as a travel journalist is that the Treaty of Waitangi gave Maori people in the 20th century a document they could go back to and say, look, the Crown has broken this agreement that gave them almost a legal foundation to then do more from there, and it's sort of seen as the founding document of New Zealand. So I think I think there's an aspect there. Um, because of the size of New Zealand, of course, there was better organisation and communication between the various different uh groups of the Maori, which maybe have made a difference. You got like more more of a stake in in in debate and discussion.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Land size undoubtedly has to have a big part of it because you look at the Australian East Coast and the English settlers think we we really like this land. But there's all this place, you can go ahead and take it, and it's all yours. And it's uh it comes from a deep valley of ignorance to just proclaim that, but you can't say the same thing, really, in New Zealand, because it's all forest. Yeah. You can't just go, hey, go live in the forest, don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Well, I think the difference that you see in the twenty-first century is No, I think New Zealand went through an extremely difficult and challenging and painful period of acknowledging the fact that New Zealand as a nation is built on occupied colonised land and those indigenous people who were there before suffered as a product of losing that for the people that then became uh the the the Europeans arriving in New Zealand. And I just don't think Australia has quite Australians don't seem to, in general, have integrated that on a sort of emotional level. I think in in New Zealand that work was a mixture of civil society by Maori civil groups, the legal status of things like the Treaty of Waitangi, and then really this real pride that I found in New Zealand, not of everyone, but of the many of the ones that I met.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

There's allies everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

But of many people I met, the sort of real pride of a biculturalism. Right, right. That to be Kiwi was to say Kiura and not just hello.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Yeah. Like there's a there's a there's a lot of pride that this culture is also a part of our culture. Yeah. Yeah. Australia certainly doesn't um doesn't have that at all. The sense is more just we acknowledge that it was fucked, everything that happened, but let's just move on already. Um and I don't know if that is the right uh feeling to have about it, but nonetheless, I think that is the general consensus.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

So I think there's efforts being made. As a travel journalist, I turn up a lot of I I go to a lot of events, and Tourism Australia have um hosted a couple of events recently, and right up front, before they say anything else, they'll talk about acknowledging the people who were the original owners of the land. So it's in there's there's steps being taken.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

That's such a it's such a vapid, pointless signalling effort. Um there needs to be something deeper than that, like what you said. People saying Kiora, they're not saying hey, that's huge. That means it's truly a part of the culture.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Yeah, and I I think you know, it's I guess um non-Māori New Zealand did have to be dragged into doing that from the from that those pressure groups in the treaty quite tangi onwards. You know, it wasn't just they're like, hey, let's let's do this, this is a really good thing. Um and the other thing that makes a difference is the return of rights and resources and revenue to various Maori Iwis that allows them to then have a financial stake in the nation in the future. And the biggest thing that I notice is a difference is indigenous-owned tourism and finding ways to then access that. So when you when you go around New Zealand, it's really easy to have Maori guides who tell you about the place in the history and what it means to them from their culture. That does exist in Australia, but you kind of have to go like to the far north um up to the top end to um find that really prominently. And I think having more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander guides and people who own tourism who are then able to tell that story of that land more effectively is probably the way Australia can share that story with the world and be able to integrate it more effectively for Australians. I mean, I don't know what it's I'm sure it must exist around Sydney, but you know, if you walk around Sydney, it's not like you know, when you walk around Auckland, there's Maori people and Maori aspects of culture everywhere, and you know, maybe there's just a bit more successful ethnic cleansing in Australia. You know, I don't know if I'm sure the original settlers in New Zealand from Europe would have been quite happy to have wiped out the Maori in certain places and they just didn't manage it.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a place called Malabar, the next suburb down is La Peruse. This was the biggest Aboriginal uh density population in Sydney, and you know, people were very, very uh, you know, edgy to say the least. Yeah, there's I think actually um regarding the cultural impact in New Zealand, we can't underestimate just how important it is that rugby is such a popular sport and that the Maoris are so good at it. And Australia and New Zealand are obsessed with sport, right? But the Aboriginal representative representatives within sport in Australia is significantly less so. Whereas the All Blacks is so central to the New Zealand culture, which is that it opens with a haka and all your best players are Maori, all Polynesian, you know, there's a lot of Fijians, Samoans, and uh people from the rest of the uh Pacific Islands, that's what their heritage lies.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

And yeah, they're they're very good and they're very big. I played rugby down in Otago for a while. I mean, most of the people they were sort of descendants of Scottish farmers, but they were still massive. I mean, it was a pretty brutal way to learn how to play rugby properly.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Yeah, how did you go after winning a few games in Australia? Did you just get rolled over in New Zealand?

SPEAKER_00 26:48

No, we won we uh the second team which I was playing in, we won both of our games in New Zealand. How'd you manage that? Uh I don't really know, but I remember the first team were playing their game in Cambridge, and the final the game was kind of extended by about 10 minutes until the home team were able to have a penalty kick and then they won the game. Maybe they just won I think Hometown Advantage. Hometown Advantage. But we then went to go and play in the Cook Islands and we played the National under 18 and National Under 17 team, and they absolutely destroyed us. I mean they were they were very good.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Did you ever watch this documentary by John Pilger? He's a dead Australian journalist now, but it was about the Marshall Islands?

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Did you ever watch it? I've not seen it. Oh okay. Uh just the I thought that was somehow an explanation for the deterioration of these island nations. Right. But it was America in this case. Um because they I think I think these were actually somehow s officially US land. I'm not exactly sure. But basically the um the food, the food fucked them. So they stopped fishing and they were the most obese, highest smoking per capita people in the entire planet, but they lived on these island paradises surrounded by fish. Um and he, you know, tells a a pretty devastating story of decline and desperateness, you know, lots of Matthews, really high suicide rates, all the sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Well, I think you know, people talk uh when when I saw the discussions in Australia around the the vote that happened last year about whether or not to give uh Aboriginal and Torres Australia Islanders people representation at a sort of federal government level. Um some of the more malign narratives were about, well, you know, there's a lot a lot of drug use and alcohol abuse in Aboriginal culture. It's like, well, I mean, isn't that really a product of not allowing those people to live within their own culture? And I this is something I heard in New Zealand. It's a difference between integration and cooperation. So do you force people to just become brown versions of yourself, or do you allow them to be themselves and live in their own culture alongside you? And I think in you know, New Zealand it's still contested and it's still problematic, it's not it's not a sort of multicultural paradise, these are still discussions that are ongoing, and I think that's another thing that New Zealand seems to accept well, and that you're not going to fix this or solve this or have a have a solution that answers every problem, but it has to be a continuous dialogue that will go on. Um and within the Australian narrative, there doesn't really seem to be the idea that the Aboriginal culture should be allowed to just carry on being aboriginal culture, they have to be part of what Australia is, and Australia isn't willing to shift what Australia is to allow space for Aboriginal culture in a way that I think New Zealand was maybe dragged into doing over the last 50 years.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Um I live in Sweden, and in my estimation, they're shocking at this integration, cooperation, um, side of things, and I compare it with my own country of a city of birth, Sydney. I find a fantastic multicultural paradise in many respects. But you making that point is very true. It's it's the Aboriginal uh populace don't necessarily contribute, although we have every Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc., all living quite happily side by side and working alongside each other.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Well, I guess that's because the Greek, the Vietnamese, the Italians, and everyone else has come in and bought into effectively a Western capitalist mode of society. Whereas maybe some Aboriginal people are like, we don't want to just become Western capitalist people, we just like to get on with the society we had beforehand with some of the benefits and trappings of modern technology. And I mean, I like I say, it's not a subject I know a huge amount about. I would like to go back to Australia. I've been, um, my sister lives on the East Coast, um, and I would like to go and do some travel journalism exploring this a lot more.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Fuck yeah, I absolutely agree. I interviewed a guy called Mike Salbro. Uh, when I go back to Australia, I really hope to do something similar to what you've just said, some proper travel journalism that explores a community he's a part of called Cherberg. So he was one of the last of the Stolen Generation, was born in 1971, and he was adopted uh by a Swedish woman and actually was raised in Sweden and then eventually went back to Australia um to confront his birth mother and then as well become a social worker in one of Australia's worst communities, which is Cherberg, just outside of Brisbane.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

And I guess the you know, for people that are watching or listening that don't know what the Stolen Generation was, this was basically a policy by the white government of Australia to take Aboriginal children away from their parents, forcibly remove them, put them in a white school, and try and effectively turn them into brown white Australians.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Yeah, yeah. Just such a retarded, devastating policy from every perspective.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

And hugely traumatic to you know, you've most people again, I'm not a psych psychologist expert, this is just stuff that I've done in my research for while we traveled, the chapter on trauma. Um, a lot of people who abuse alcohol or drugs are doing it as effectively a form of self-medication against the trauma that they experienced often in childhood. And if you think about the Aboriginal people of Australia, they are either the stolen generation or the descendants of the stolen generation, many of them, not all of them, obviously, but that trauma is enormous. Being ripped away from your family and forced into something completely unfamiliar, being beaten if you use your own language, and being beaten if you don't use um English, you know, all forms of physical abuse, sexual abuse that happened to them. Of course they're traumatised. And if there isn't a sort of social and cultural way of healing other than become a white Australian, then of course they're gonna turn to drugs and alcohol as a form of self-medication.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

And it was uh another John Pilger documentary he did on a the Australian um I think he was really because this guy was operating at the height of television journalism where the whole country would tune in, right? And he did the first real expose on how the Aboriginal population was treated within Australia, and I forget the person's name, but it was an Aboriginal player, a part of the Australian test team, and this is in the 70s, and he was one of their star bowlers, you know, an incredible athlete, and they would go out to the pub afterwards, and he wasn't allowed in the pub. And he would stand outside the window, try to drink with the boys, and eventually was just you know told to go away, which is by his teammates or by the bar by the bar, but his teammates didn't do a good enough job of being like, let's make an exception here, mate. This is a bit ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Or try and find a place, or would he refuse to go to a place like anything totally?

SPEAKER_01 34:03

This is only 50 years ago. This is the same this is the time when both of my parents were teenagers, yeah. Um so it does in on the other side of the coin, it does help me really understand why maybe you know, some people as old as my parents and older are like extremely prejudiced against it. Their environment the entire time reinforce that behaviour. And so now my generation and younger generations, um, they just won't have a bar of it. It's just absurd that that would be a policy.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

So I I guess I'd never really thought about this before, but you know, I guess sort of whole the whole of Australia has a bit of this psychological hangover that maybe the southern United States still do today. Of in the southern United States you had uh effective uh w apartheid and racial discrimination in law until pretty recently, until Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, and that has affected the mindset of people still there today. So maybe the same in Australia and the I mean I've watched a documentary about what was the name of the Aussie Rules footballer? Um Adam Goods. Adam Goods, and I saw a lecture by there's an Aboriginal TV journalist who talked about how he'd spent a long time trying to talk about this stuff, and effectively it was just too hard, and he was now going to stop doing it. I can't remember his name, um, but he did the sort of the equivalent of the wreath lecture in Australia, yeah. And you know, going back to your original question, difference between Australia and New Zealand, the process of settlement and occupation and colonisation in both countries was quite different, you know, both in terms of the original foundations of the penal colonies in Australia that didn't happen in the same way in in New Zealand, so uh the whole process was quite different, and that's gonna have an impact on the psychology of a nation hundreds of years later, yeah, hundred years later.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

But moving away from these delicate issues, um, the Polynesians were your favourite explorers. What about in your research of great adventures have you learned of stories and myths of people even beforehand? I'm thinking like the ancient Egyptian who maybe made it up to the United Kingdom, you know, or the Viking who made it down to China, or um the Chinaman who made it over to the United States, or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

I mean, the these kinds of stories are always really interesting, aren't they? Because they they're sort of the other thing they do is sort of you know historical what-ifs, the counterfactuals. What would have happened if these people had to there? Um I've done a lot of research about Ukraine. I travelled there, and you know, the original Kiev and Rus culture was basically from Viking culture, from Scandinavia, they came down through the rivers that uh end up in the Nep uh Dnieper, Dnipro River, which is the one that runs into the Black Sea in the south. And yeah, it's just sort of discovering all these little legends and stories that affect the world that we're in today and shape the kind of world that we live in. Understanding some of the sources and origins are fascinating. Um I think the other pro the other challenge about um over mythologizing and overlauding individuals in exploration is it ignores the sort of cultural causes of exploration. So, you know, you talked about it earlier uh with these explorers that eventually made it down to New Zealand and the hundreds of years it took to cross these different gaps in the Pacific. There's thousands of people that set the conditions for the successful person that we never even hear of. Yeah, that one guy gets all the glory. Yeah, that's the person that gets known. Whereas it there's hundreds of other people, their families back home, who've who've made this possible. And I think when we talk about exploration, it's you often have the person who gets known for exploration is just a bit of a often a bit of a weirdo and quite single-minded, yeah, and doesn't really maybe they just can't fit into society back home, but they have this vision.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

That's the case with the great people from history though. Yeah, you know, definitionally they were outcasts and weirdos, and people thought they were kind of nuts.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Yeah. And well, I guess that's so you know, what does that mean for today? And I think you can look at exploration in the modern day in a couple of different ways. You can have, I mean, you're not really gonna find any new, you're not gonna find any new land, you're not really gonna go to many places that other people haven't been to before. So it's about telling stories and places. So in 2014, I did a project called Walking the Nile. A friend of mine called Levison Wood, he walked the entire length of the river Nile from its source in Rwanda all the way up to Egypt. Um, and I joined him for a couple of stretches. Now, you know, there are people living along the entire length of the River Nile. We talk about the people that discovered the source of the Nile, speaking Burton, they were just the first white Europeans to be there. They weren't the people that discovered they put it on our maps, right? Exactly. And for someone like Lev to go there and do that story, you know, he I think he sometimes finds it uncomfortable being called an explorer because he recognises some of those tensions, right? But what he is certainly doing is turning the stories of those places and those people to an audience that would otherwise know nothing about it. So going to Rwanda and talking about the modern-day legacy of the genocide that happened in the 90s, or going to Uganda and talking about the impact of poaching or deforestation or climate change, or the impact of huge Chinese corporations moving into the area. This is storytelling, and there's an element of exploring within that. So when I'm going somewhere to do a story, the exploration that I'm doing is I've got to do all my research and find out about it. And I went when I went to Ukraine in 2018, I had no mates. I I didn't really know anyone. I don't think I knew anyone who'd been to Ukraine. I mean, obviously, there are people from the UK who have been to Ukraine recently, but I had to kind of do everything from scratch, then finding the sources, finding the people, going there, and then just seeing it for myself on the ground, and then having conversations with people there. So that's that element of exploration. I think what we think about historically of exploration is the first curious people to look over the horizon, the first people from their society who've never done anything before, uh never been to that place before, to look over that horizon and go, I wonder what's out there. And that's that's the root of all travel. I wonder what that's like.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Totally, totally. Um, someone who does deserve all the glory though, Percy Fawcett. Tell us about him. I I don't know anything about Percy Fawcett. Percy Fawcett, he was um right at the end of the height of the I think 1800, late 1800s, sort of well-funded, really well-famous British explorers. Uh, should know about this person. You absolutely should. It's um called The Lost City of Z, written by David Grant. Yeah, yeah. Yes, that yeah, yeah. So the story of Percy's just, in my opinion, I project and romanticize on it so much. I wouldn't have the the balls to do it myself, what he was doing, but he had over his the course of his life four or five major expeditions into the absolute middle of nowhere Amazon, and uh to the point where you know he sort of had a whole routine, he would dance like a bit of a funny guy and give out cigarettes and stuff to tribes that kept trying to kill him. He ultimately perished in the Amazon in pursuit of the Lost City of Z. But this was a guy who was a captain of World War I in the trenches, which in the book is very well documented, like extraordinary bravery, leadership, etc. So, you know, in many respects, you know, a great man, but still was so totally devoted to spending years at a time in malaria-infested, dangerous Amazon in the early 1900s.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

So I guess the other thing that I find really complex around characters like this is their motivations, right? So if you think It was glory. Yeah, and if you think about the explorers that are known as explorers, right? So Christopher Columbus, Cook, Speak, Burton, they were effectively the recce party for occupation, colonisation, resource extraction, and ethnic cleansing. And whilst they might have been the first from our world to go there with superior technology, with uh deadly diseases, I can't I've I find it an uncomfortable thing to sort of celebrate um because of the impact of it. That's not so I'm creating an ethical judgment, uh, but when we're when we're talking about them, and because they're so often celebrated and lauded, it is complex. And it and a lot of a lot of you know, even if you think about Antarctic history or Himalayan history, much of it is wrapped up in imperial glory. So when when they were trying to get down to the South Pole, you had there were these individuals who had this real motivation and drive to be the first, to plant the flag for their nation, and for the nation that was an ability to say we're the best, and there's this real obsession about just going around naming things like this is Queen Maud's Land and this is Victoria, and but it's it's it's it's all part of occupation and colonization. So it's you know, and I'm a product of this, you know, I'm half Indian. Um, British Empire was good for me in the sense that I'm here, had it not been for the Empire, and and I think looking back at the history of these things, it's if you're going to look at the what we often do is we celebrate the glorious moments of our histories, but we don't feel shame for the more shameful parts of our histories. So finding a sort of neutral, well, I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna celebrate this, but I'm also not gonna uh talk about this shamefully, that's kind of okay. But if you're gonna celebrate one thing, you sort of have to acknowledge the shameful parts too. So, in all of the journalistic work you've done, uh what do you think has been the most consequential piece? Um I think the most consequential for me was going to Ukraine in 2018. So I'd served with the British Army in Estonia, with the British Army Reserve, on an operation called OpkeBrit. So and after After Russia had invaded and occupied Crimea in 2014 and then invaded and begun a war in Donbass in 2014, which is eastern Ukraine, the other European allies that had formerly been occupied by Russia wanted to improve the deterrence to stop Russia doing the same thing. So we were part of a British army uh force that is now rotates through stationing in Estonia. And I learned a bit about the legacy of Russian and Soviet occupation in Estonia and the language and ethnic challenges that was creating, being stoked by by the Kremlin. And that made me want to go and visit all the other places along that border that were having similar challenges: Latvia, Lithuania, um Belarus, and you know, Ukraine ultimately. And that was where I really found it important to just go and ask people, but without arriving with my own judgment. From re reading academic papers, listening to historians. But how was this shaping the identity and beliefs of people on the ground? Travelling around all the different parts of Ukraine, which is extremely diverse, both in terms of the landscape, but also in terms of the culture. You know, in the in the West, most people, I mean, actually within Ukraine now, two years after the full-scale Russian invasion, speaking Ukrainian is very much a form of identifying yourself as a Ukrainian uh patriot. But back then, most people in the West spoke Ukrainian, most people in the Far East spoke Russian, people in the Middle spoke a blend. Um, so you know, you had these identity differences, you had these interpretations of what was going on, you had interpretations of history, and I went to Donbass, you know, overlooking the front line of where the Russian troops are, and I got permission from the Ukrainian government to go into Russian-occupy Crimea. And I think that was important for me because I was able to then write stories about Ukraine and what I took away from speaking to people who were there. I then went on and studied a master's in strategic communications, which is how does propaganda and information operations change the way people believe and behave about things. And then, whilst I was studying that masters, the full-scale invasion of 2022 came about, and so it's consequential for me because until February 2022, whenever somebody said, Where would you recommend that's a bit unusual? I would always say Ukraine. I loved it, I had a great time there. Um, hiking around the mountains of Western Ukraine with a guy that had been fighting the Russians for two years after the 2014 invasion. Fuck, he would have had some good stories. He yeah, and harrowing stories as well.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Right, yeah, no good in the sense that they are big.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

Yeah, consequential, but he would have much rather have not had to become a soldier, he'd have much rather just been a jewelry maker and an and a mountain leader in the Carpathian Mountains. He didn't want to fight a war on on his homeland. And speaking to people and speaking to people who would have previously said that they were Russian in eastern Ukraine, who were now overlooking this front line, who said, I mean, I speak Russian, my background is Russian, but I'm not Russian, I'm Ukrainian. Seeing this change in identity when they realised what Russia had become and what that meant to them was very powerful. Also going into Crimea and going down to Yalts, which is where there's a statue of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, and that was where at the end of World War II they basically divided up Europe, created what became the new Iron Curtain, and it's sort of great power politics. Didn't matter what the people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania wanted. Churchill went, okay, at the end of the war. Churchill and Roosevelt said, Stalin, okay, at the end of the war, you can have that. You know, the Estonians didn't want to be taken back over by the Soviet Union again. Um, but meeting somebody there, he said, This is this is what we want. We want Russia to be respected and powerful again. So understanding and developing that empathy, empathy doesn't mean you agree with it, but you understand those perspectives, and that journey helped me understand that there will be people with beliefs that you can't rationalise out of them, you can't really debate or argue with them. That's like that is the position they're gonna hold. What they then choose to do with that, you might be able to nudge them gradually away from it, but understanding there are people who will have diametrically opposed worldviews to you and care more about the power of Russia than what individuals want or the individual suffering of people. Since the invasion, have you gone back to Ukraine? I've not. I've uh explored a couple of documentary ideas about it. Um haven't been able to get over there. I've also got a daughter now, so considering the impact on my family about me going into somewhere where I would go, where we'd be safe, or safe enough, or reasonably safe. What's an unexplored angle for a documentary? About Ukraine. Well, in 23, so a year ago, I did a documentary for BBC Radio 4 that didn't require me going into Ukraine, and that was exploring how Ukraine had communicated to the UK about um about what was going on so that British public support for Ukraine could be consolidated, really. That then that allowed our government to have the freedom of movement to support Ukraine as much as it wanted. I I think what would be an unexplored angle for Ukraine?

SPEAKER_01 49:31

I I just asked because it's a very well-covered event in the media. And um, for you sitting there thinking, here are a couple documentary ideas, what what's something that could be you know very compelling and new, um, and like you say, an alternative, empathetic way to look at it?

SPEAKER_00 49:48

I mean, I I would love to tell the story of Ukraine of Ukraine because so much of the story of Ukraine now is about the war, and the whole of Ukraine is at war and it's affecting everybody in in Ukraine. But we hear stories about the front lines and the suffering of the soldiers, which is important to tell, and also it would be good to tell the story of Ukraine. So almost like a travel documentary around Ukraine. What is what is this country today? And how has the front lines being a couple hundred miles away affected people in Lviv? How has it affected how is it affecting Kyiv today? What is Kyiv? Because when I went in 2018, Kyiv was amazing. It was four years since they'd thrown off Russian influence, and uh the previous president Yanukovych was deposed after sending out snipers to kill a hundred of his own civilians in the streets of Kyiv following the revolution, well, what became the revolution of dignity in the Maidan. Um it sort of had this atmosphere that I imagine Berlin must have had in the early 90s, where this sort of tyranny in this police state disappeared, and there was a sense of wow, we can do everything we want, we can be ourselves, we can be free, we don't live in a police state anymore. And it really had that energy and that vibe and that positivity of we have moved away from the Russian imperial world and we're moving towards a European world. That was what it was. I mean, that's what Putin didn't want, that's why he he launched the full-scale invasion. And there's that there's that story about what is it to be Ukrainian other than just suffering an invasion. And I th I I would like to tell that story. And talking about the history, you know, I I went when I was in Donbass in 2018, there's this valley called uh the river, it's the river, it's called the river, is it the river Denetz or the River Don? Anyway, there's this amazing monastery there called Sviatagirsk. It looks like um Rivendell out of Lord of the Rings, or it looks like Hogwarts, it's in this amazing valley built into the sides. If it was anywhere else in Europe, it would have been a number one tourist attraction, right? But it was in Donbass, so people didn't go there. And there's this incredible beauty in the landscape and the culture and the stories and the history. And then far western Ukraine, you could.

SPEAKER_01 51:55

Yeah, the Khans rode through there, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Um, but you know, before the Khans arrived, it had you know, Moscow was its sort of you know, colonial sort of like distant outpost of Kiev and Rhys culture.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

I like that idea of telling how Kiev was this city so full of optimism and life and an expression of creativity, making a comparison to maybe Berlin in the 90s, and then just if it's done really well, leaving the audience with this deep sense of empathy and like gratitude it didn't happen to us because here are all these amazing people who are actually very, very similar to us and um are now thrust into a conflict that's gonna uproot whatever their career ambitions were, family ambitions, travel ambitions, and that's that's a that's a really devastating reality that's happening.

SPEAKER_00 52:52

Well, there's also the fact that if we don't give them everything they need, we could be next. I mean, England's probably not gonna be next anytime soon, but um you know Stonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they're they're they have a legitimate concern. But you know, Putin and his mates have said they'd take the Baltics and Poland if they could. You know, if if we don't give Ukraine what it needs to win, that's not the end of the war. Putin's not gonna stop with Donbass and Crimea. So he said that.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

You you're looking at it through the eyes of a travel journalist, but as well as someone who's served in the United Kingdom's army. Is it called military here? Well, the British Army. The British Army, yeah. Which which uh which which which set of lens do you look through mostly when you look at this conflict?

SPEAKER_00 53:35

Uh I think you know, bringing being the British Army is a bit of a job, but it's a very special special job compared to many others because you're considering defence all the time. And then as a travel journalist, really all you ever do is you tell the stories of the places that you're in so that people back home can understand it. And a lot of travel journalism focuses on the mechanisms of travel, right? So, what country are you gonna go to, what type of holiday are you gonna have? You can have a beach holiday, a safari, an adventure holiday, um, and they talk about the facilities. And I really view all of those as the like they're just the ways of getting to um they're just the mechanisms. Underlying all of that is your motivation. Why are you travelling in the first place? And for me, curiosity, I mean in the book I write about 12 different motivations, right? But the ones that drive a lot of my work are empathy, trying to understand the uh beliefs and behaviours of people, curiosity, just asking why is this like this, inspiration, someone has told me about this place, and I want to go and learn a bit more about it, um, and wonder, which is that feeling of encountering either a place or an experience that changes the way you feel about the whole world. Expand your worldview. Well, expand your worldview just makes you you can see something, you see something you've never seen before, or you notice something. And here's an example, right? If you suddenly, if you're out in the middle of the desert, you know, middle of the outback, and you look up at and you see the Milky Way and you see everything, and you look up at a star and think, the light from that star left that star 60 million years ago, when the I don't know, 60 million light years, yeah, the other side of the galaxy, wouldn't it? When the dinosaurs were still kicking around on Earth. Yeah, that's glorious. And you're like, whoa, suddenly your sense of time completely changes, your sense of space changes, and for that period of time when you're in that moment, in that moment of awe, you feel different. So I like my travel to do all of those things. The background in the army just gives me the ability to ask questions and think about things that not every other travel journalist does, and when you're writing travel journalism, you're trying to either do inspirational, which is telling people about something that they wouldn't have otherwise known, or informational, telling them how to do it. You know, when I walked across Uganda with the Leverson Woods, it became the front page of the telegraph. But most people are not going to walk across Uganda or Sudan in the middle of summer, yeah. But they've learned something about it that might make them go there on a holiday or something else. So when I was doing the things about Ukraine in 2018, that was a place that people could go on holiday. And I wanted people to be aware that there's this amazing country a couple of hours away by plane that is really affordable to travel in, that we should go and see. And when the war finishes on Ukraine's terms, when they hopefully win, I really want people to go back and travel around Ukraine because they'll need it, they'll need our support, they'll need to have money being put back in their economy so they can rebuild. And that point you make about you know, so you look at Ukraine and there's a familiarity. There's a familiarity in this the way the cities are laid out. It looks like any other European city, it is a European country, and then when you speak to the people who are there, they want to just get on with what they want to do, they don't want to be fighting for their country, they want to be a graphic designer or a musician or a chef or um work in software. That's what they want to do, and it's knowing people that are doing the same job as you being forced to go and fight on the front line because of what Putin is doing to defend their homeland, that that really makes it very resonant. You know, you can you can it feels um it feels very close.

SPEAKER_01 57:24

Oh yeah, it feels so close. Um I mean you're really close to me. I've interviewed a guy twice called Olexander Kucherenko, who's a couple years older than me, just had a young daughter, and was a very successful uh engineer, right? So he worked for a Ukrainian company, but man, Ukrainian labor do most of the engineering uh software engineering in Europe, first of all. And now he's in this position where he's thinking the next couple years of my life, I'm maybe I'm gonna open up my own business, you know, become a very wealthy, successful man in his region, maybe move to Stockholm, right? And now it's the question do I flee? Uh am I a coward for fleeing, but I have this responsibility to my family? And God, it it yeah, it really gets to me. It's it's so, so horrible because there is nothing different between him and me, except he was born in Ukraine, I was born in Australia.

SPEAKER_00 58:20

And the thing that is also really apparent when you go there, and this is what I saw in 2018, is this real aspect of civil society and pride. So after the revolution of dignity and the Russian-backed president fled, uh Ukraine, there was sort of not really a government for a little while, and Ukrainians just really got involved and just sorted everything out. Uh, you know, civil society just turned on, like, how can we help? This which was a sort of culture that developed around the Maidan protest, it was very um communal, and everyone just got involved where they could. And then when Russia launched its invasion of Donbass um with unmarked vehicles in 2014 and our marked troops, people volunteered to go and fight. You know, the the actually some of the first units that ended up stopping the invasion were what are called popular mobilization units. People just got together and went out and fight, fought them. So there's this real sense of um self-support and self-starting mindset that you find in Ukraine, and that has an impact in the way Ukraine innovates and evolves. So you look at their technological innovations on the battlefield, that is because you've got software engineers and because you've got product designers thinking like, okay, what so how do I take this and do this and build this, and then we can create uh an unarmed aerial vehicle that can drop a mortar bomb? Create a drone for 50 bucks, yeah. So that that kind of ability is a product of the diversity of society that's fighting the front line.

SPEAKER_01 59:45

Obviously, I'd prefer and they prefer they didn't have to do it, but so if I ask you um what is an example of great travel riding, who comes to mind?

SPEAKER_00 59:58

Um one of my favourite books is by a woman called Kapka Kasapova, and it's a book called Borders, um, or is it Borderlands? Anyway, it's about she's Bulgarian originally, she lives in Scotland now, but it's about that region between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, which is very sort of blended and ethnically mixed as a product of the various different empires that came through there, and then there's been periods of sort of swapping of land, uh ethnic cleansing going back and forth, people moving around, and it's about her journey around that area, just trying to get a real feel for it and a real sense of place. So it's deeply personal, deeply um emotional, and it just gripped me the whole way through. I really enjoyed uh Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. So Rory Stewart, eating educated, you know, very privileged background. Uh uh briefly was an officer in the British Army, uh, was a diplomat in the foreign office, who was involved in the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan. So he had a really strong understanding of um politics and local politics and culture in those regions, and he walked across Afghanistan. And it's about his journey of walking across Afghanistan, the places in between, and turning up and just staying with people and visiting places, and it's almost a bit of a you know, late 19th century great game cultural understanding that I think we the UK probably has lost a large part of when we're trying to deal with the rest of the world. Um, not to say that the the reasons for why we're doing that was good, but it he had a really deep understanding of these places. He then went on to become uh a member of parliament for the Conservative Party, and he became a minister. He left and he now runs a podcast called The Rest is Politics with Alistair Campbell. But he just has this really deep understanding, this ability to think beyond the short term in those places, and it's a really great story about his walk across the country.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

Okay, so in that case, um the Bulgarian woman and Rory Stewart, what makes them what is it about what they've written that is good travel writing? I'm trying to get to the bottom of what is good travel writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:21

Um I like good travel writing that makes you feel in a place. So the descriptions have to be accessible but compelling. And when I started to develop my travel writing, one of the people that I read a lot of was Ernest Hemingway, and Hemingway, you know, he won a Nobel Prize for Literature for the Old Man in the Sea. But he started as a journalist, and Hemingway talked about this thing called uh Le Mou Juste, the one true word where there was one correct word to describe everything that just really got to the heart of it. He also talks about the art of book theory. I don't know if he gave the name to it, but it's the approach of you kind of write um a concept and it's up to the reader to do everything else. You don't give them everything, you let them find it through the subtext through the writing. And he also used to try and really reduce the number of words he used. You can read books that are incredibly long and just over-describe something, and you've kind of forgotten what you're being described about by the street. Because I'm so obsessive about finding the right word, yeah. And his writing was really short and really concise. And in he's not any his the book that I write about in Why We Travel, the one that really captured me was um Immovable Feastable Feast, yeah. The one about his uh his early years in Paris. And as I yeah, as as I say to you, know this, is um he's not a nice person to spend time with Hemingway. He's cantankerous, he says judgmental, yeah, he's judgmental, he's cynical, he is hypocritical, arrogant, arrogant, and and he says himself he's got a fast, quick temper. So it's not an he's not a pleasant person to spend time with, but every now and again he'll write a description of somebody or of a place, and the description of a place is just so accurate, so mojused, that it's like you're there, or it's like a scene in a film, and oh I get this perfectly, or he he describes people so well and without saying too much that you feel like you know them, that you feel like they're someone from your own life. So, really good travel writing does that, it doesn't use too many words, but it gets to the heart of a place really clearly.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

What I've observed in examples of just impeccable descriptions or lines that stand out to you is they're not using nouns to describe something, rather, they're using feelings or words which aren't grammatically correct, but mean so much. There's so much subtext to certain words, and so therefore, by describing someone in a certain way, that isn't just a top-to-bottom noun and adjective description. And yeah, it's it and it's using things that you wouldn't expect to and do you remember the line? There was a funny line um about a priest throwing a milk in the bottom. No, no, it's a poet.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:25

I was just thinking exactly that. And and he's talking about this guy who is basically having withdrawal from opium, and uh Hemingway goes to give him some bottles, and the poet basically chases him away by throwing bottles of milk at him, and he says, for a poet, he threw a very accurate milk bottle. And it just really kind of gets to this like I can see that. I can see the scene of you, this sort of like weedy uh poet suffering from opium withdrawal, but who's got an extreme, extremely good shot, and just very good at it, and it just sort of summarizes moments really. Clearly. Do you think that there was a golden age for travel writing? Um, I think there's some amazing travel writing being done at the moment. Leo McCarran's just written a book called Wounded Tigris, but he also uh wrote a book about his walk around um Palestine, um, Israel and through Jordan, and that's brilliant. It told me stuff about a place that I never knew about before. Um I I think I tend to prefer modern travel writing. Yeah. Obviously, I've you know drawn from the Hemingways and the Thebrons and the Throos, but I think there's often an often a sort of um The world's changed so much. So that's a good point. There's so there's but the style of writing has changed, I think. I think people are much more willing to reveal their own anxieties and more willing to reveal them, put more of themselves in a book. Some people don't like this, and you know, my book is part memoir and part travelogue, part research and interview. For me, the memoir was important because it gets to the heart of what I'm trying to talk about in the book, and I think there's a bit more memoir maybe in books today. Let's have a look at a few of the ones that are on my shelf. There's uh I love Robert McFarlane. He's normally considered a nature writer, but he tends to the way he describes stuff is amazing. Like he some of his language is quite florid, but it's just so vivid and so compelling and so different to other travel writing. Um, it's quite poetic in the way he writes. Uh, there's a guy called Nick Hunt who wrote a book called Walking the Woods and the Water. So he read he redid a trip that a guy called Patrick Lee Ferma did in the early 1930s. So Lee Ferma had walked from The Hook of Holland all the way to Istanbul, and he's just talking about all the places he went through. It's an amazing book. Actually, Lee Firma wrote it over three books, but uh Nick Hunt went back and redid that book, redid that walk, and it's just brilliant. I found it such an enjoyable book that carried me along. It was actually done in a way that you there were elements of it from sort of old style travel writing, but there was a sort of self-awareness that I think you can only really get in travel writing of the early 21st century. Then you've got funny travel writer like Bill Bryson, and he uses self-deprecation and humour to get to the heart of a thing and sort of reveal the ridiculousness of things that we take for granted. I don't know if you read his his book about Australia, but his ones about England or the UK generally, is you it allows you to see something in the way that someone else would see it. And that's quite a compelling thing to And he's American, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:57

Bill Bryson's American originally. It's actually funny. Two guests that I can remember at least said that he was the best author they'd ever read from a purely they're envious of the way he writes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:10

It's really hard to write something that feels that effortless and that funny. Yeah. So he's funny, he's effortless, but it's just it really comes across wonderfully. Uh there's another guy called AA Gill who's passed away now, and he was a journalist who started as a TV critic, but he used to write travel stuff for The Times. He's quite acerbic, quite uh cutting, but he would great words, a Cerbic. But he would also just like um I don't know, conjure up a picture of a place that really summarized what he was doing and what he learned from somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:45

I also see a bit of Tim Ferris on the shelf there. Is this guy someone you um take seriously? Has in influence you?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:52

So I I've got the I've got the hard copy of the four-hour work week, which tells you how long I've had it. Um I found that a really interesting book because it really taught me uh made me rethink about my approach to work. I don't know what it was like for you, but I remember leaving work leaving university. I had no idea what I wanted to do. All of my mates were applying for the graduate milk ground jobs, you know, at the big accountancy firms or were talking about going into law, classic London, classic London, or maybe going into the army, and actually I passed my selections going to the regular army in 2005. But I just realized I could work in this office for like 70 hours a week, and then that company might just sack me next year, and they've there's no loyalty. What am I doing this for? I'm doing it to earn money. Well, why do I earn money? Well, I want to have a home and I want to do stuff. I was like, well, why don't I just go and do stuff? And there's something you know, he really talks in the books about focusing on the things that you're good at and sharing with others the things that uh you know, fulfilling the need that you have. If you have a desire for something or a need for something, other people will probably want that too, and that could be a product you can sell. And for me, that was compelling stories and travel. And so by writing about travel, I was effectively doing that. I didn't turn myself into successful at business, it seems. I didn't start outsourcing loads of my things, but I you know I've certainly found those principles uh which no one had really taught me early on, I think were quite good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:21

We we were talking um before we started recording a little bit about the publishing market, and I gave some examples of books that were these outlier bestsellers for very serendipitous reasons. Tim Ferris as well is another one of them. I um have heard him speak quite a lot about how his efforts getting the four-hour work week published because he was an unknown guy and it was a genre of writing that hadn't necessarily been done before. So it was new. And he went to the South by Southwest Tech Conference, which I think to this day still is, but definitely at the time was where you know the the biggest entrepreneurs in the world were attend in attendance. And Tim, without any press credentials or whatever, forced his way into the places where these people were drinking, gave them he was very tactical about it, gave them uh copies of the book, but with snippets that this is actually the part I think is most relevant to you, etc. And uh through doing that and then being very strategic, taking them making the most out of blogs, which were at the time in their in their absolute height, um, got this early promotion which we were talking about, that then propelled him onto the bestseller lists, yeah, which then it's the domino the whole way down.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:37

Yeah, and I think if you can find other people to talk about your work in a in a way that excites you, uh then you're well if you can get other people to talk about your work, you're kind of borrowing their credibility, and they may also be the people with a bigger platform, and I think that's probably what uh it's funny because I was I was thinking about Tim Ferris when I was starting to develop some of the strategies for preparation of my book. Um so the Harbak's out, and I've got the paperback coming up. So I'm thinking this year, what are the things that I can be doing that are the equivalent within my world? Uh it's not travel, but a couple of other books that I really like is uh Yu Venora Horarius Sapiens and Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography, which you know prisoners of geography took an idea that's fairly well known within academic circles, international um material realism, and explained it in a way that made sense to an audience that otherwise didn't. So it's a great book, well written, using his journalistic expertise. But it's also about who ended up reading it and how it then spread. Um, so yes, I'm I'm starting to do the same thing with why we travel. I'm gonna start speaking at universities and schools.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:40

So give us a sense for the publishing market around travel books, both memoirs, armchair travel, like we were saying, um, and then yours, which maybe fits into a little bit of a different category. How do they sell? What are the authors that sell the most? Um, and how can you therefore you know make yours an international bestseller?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:00

So I I lecture in journalism at City University London, and when I one of the things that I say to this the students right up front is travel journalism to my mind covers two things inspiration and information. So inspiration is you're introducing somebody to the place of an idea they may not have thought about before. Information is giving them what they need to go and do that. That's travel journalism. In travel writing, one of the subgenres is armchair travel. So that's somebody taking you to a place and doing a journey that you may never do. So my friend Levison Wood wrote Walking the Nile, nine-month walk from Rwanda to Egypt. No one else is gonna do that. Um it's not like if you read a piece about I don't know, going to Paris during the Olympics. Other people do that and go, Oh, I will go and do exactly the same thing, or go and do that part of Paris. So it's that's that's armchair travel, it's journeys that people otherwise wouldn't do. And the people that do well in armchair travel are tend to be well known already, um, either through broadcast or television, uh sorry, television, or uh they've written quite a few books and they travel right about different places. And I guess you'd call much of Bill Bryson's stuff armchair travel, but the kind of people that he he's going to places that other people will go to, right? So, you know, the Appalachian Trail, Australia, England. So people who want to learn a bit about those places will then pick up those books and they're like, I want to learn a bit about Australia. Bill Bryson, I've heard of him, I've read one of his other books, I'll pick it up. So they do well, and I think we were talking earlier on 99% of all book sales come from 1% of the market. So those well-known authors, they will do well. You then have um guide books, so books that sort of are completely informational, they're telling you all the stuff about a place, brat guides, you've got isn't it incredible there's still a market for guidebooks? So you say that, but I guess a lot of people get their information about a place from Instagram or or um other forms of data and online content. But there is something brilliant about sitting down with a guidebook and looking through places and you get discovery because you just follow through the pages and you find something you otherwise wouldn't have known about. And if something ends up being on Instagram, what happens is all the other Instagram influencers will go and replicate the same thing, and once you get there, it's it's just a place for Instagrammers, or just a place for people who follow Instagrammers. That that very easily happens, so you just don't get the same, I guess, organic type of travel. Um, I doubt I have no idea what the travel market for guidebooks is like for younger people. I can't imagine it's very big. I imagine most of the people who read guidebooks are sort of romantics like me who bridged that gap between when all there were were travel books, uh sorry, guidebooks, and and now when you can use the internet. Um so you've got that as another type of travel book. Then you have something like Kapka Kasabovas, which is uh border, which is very personal. That kind of is telling you something about a place that you you could travel to, but you may not do that sort of thing. And for her, it's about this this fractious border, where does Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece end? So it's telling you something about a place that you may otherwise not know. So that kind of goes into um into that kind of armchair travel, and then you've got something like uh A Year in the Med or Abroad in Japan, which isn't quite armchair travel, but it's a memoir about a place which uses travelogue. Um so my book, Why We Travel, I I call it smart travel or smart thinking travel because I've drawn on some of the things that I generally have been inspired by in things like the four-hour work week or sapiens or prisoners of geography, where you're giving people concepts and ideas and information that they may not have otherwise known before. So for me, that's mostly a lot of sort of bit of psychology, bit of strategic communications, but also the sort of how-to that you get in a s in a smart thinking book like uh The Four-Hour Work Week. Practical advice, practical advice, or something like uh Why We Sleep, which is a book that explores the concept of sleep, but also through that can teach you maybe how do you sleep better. And so Why We Travel uses a blend of memoir, travelogue, so my my own travel journeys, my own life story, it's fairly autobiographical, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:44

Yeah, each chapter is punctuated by several anecdotes from your life.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:48

Yeah, so I kind of use those as a way to introduce the reader to a concept or a theme on why I approach this form of travel. Then I try and use like the kind of travel writing that I've used in my journalism to explain the story to give people that sense of place. Um, and then there's lots of research and interviews with it. So things that I read and extracted and summarized, but also um first source first source, primary source, okay, right first and primary source interviews with people, um, whether they are scientists or psychologists or philosophers, to try and get those things. And then at the end it's my advice. And the advice actually really drawn from my friends asking me things, like, oh Ash, I'm because what people would say is they'd say, Oh, what should I do in France? I'm like, well, where are you going in France? And they're like, I don't know. And I'm like, why are you going to France? Like, oh, because I like cheese. Okay, so actually, what you want uh, you want to go and have a sort of food discovery trip. And they're like, Oh yeah, that's right. So you so what what why do you want to do that? Like, you know, I just really want to learn about how learn about different cheeses, and you know, they may they may not have been thinking of that 30 seconds ago, but it's a bit like a coaching conversation, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:00

And then it becomes a much more enjoyable experience, yeah, more intentional, more intentional, with still a lot of chance for serendipity whilst you're there.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:07

So serendipity is one of the chapters in the book, absolutely, and I think serendipity is a really under celebrated part of travel. It's so tempting when you travel to do all the research on Instagram, on booking.com, whatever, top ten things to do in Barcelona. And what you do is you basically just create work for yourself. Like I've got to go to all these different things at these times, you book them all in, and your time in you know particularly in cities, is you're just smashing from one place to another, standing in cues, standing in cues, and you don't really have time to relax or enjoy and think. And some of my most enjoyable and rewarding experiences in travel in places have been the accidental. It was chatting to a guy in a cafe in Sudan, and he told us about a festival going on round the corner, and we ended up being some of the first the first Westerners to document it in journalism. How good's that? What what country is that in? Sudan. It's a place called Cadabas, it's an amazing festival. It'd been documented in academia before, but I hadn't seen anybody write about it in journalism or certainly document it in uh video. Um and that was just because we chatted to a guy in a calf. It's the only reason we knew it was there. Um but importantly, we had the time. We actually had to change our route, so we were going past a place. But we were like, well, we're gonna we're walking past it, we don't have to be anywhere else. We might take half a day longer to get the other to get to the other side of the desert, but this is a cool thing to do. So we could do it, and when you look back on your travel, I don't know if you find this, but I'll use Paris as an example because it's such an obvious one. The places that stand out in my memory are not like the Michelin-style restaurants that I booked into or I went on a press trip, or the hotel that put me up because I was going to write about it in the newspaper, um, or really even seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. It was my friend saying, Oh, come and meet me at this place, and going over the back of Sacrecoe on the north side, away from the tour of terriers, away from Montmartre, and sitting in this cafe with this guy who called himself the mayor of Montmartre. My friend, my friend Hannah Meltzer, uh, who's an amazing writer who writes brilliantly about France. She lived in Paris and she said, Yeah, come and meet me here. And my sister and I had this most amazing, wonderful evening that we never could have planned or predicted. And it was entirely dependent on who was there. The fact that I was there with Hannah and she was able to introduce me to a couple of people. That wonderful, those opportunities in travel. And I think if someone said, What's the magic in travel? I'd say it's probably serendipity.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:48

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I I'm sure you have the sense from me. I was emailing you about serendipity before, and every guest I've asked some variation of the question of what uh role serendipity has played in their life, and uh without fail, it's a serendipitous moment that has created the most consequential outcomes for them.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:10

You asked me about consequential travel ear on. Me going to Ukraine was entirely a product of serendipity. It was the fact that the battalion that I was with in the Army Reserve went to go and do this deployment to Estonia. I learned about the legacy of Russian imperialism, and I decided to go and do a journey. I got to Ukraine and I had I had interviewed a British MP who was doing a PhD about Ukraine, and he put me in touch with his researcher who was over there, and she introduced me to somebody else who was able to take me around Donbass. And she introduced me to somebody who helped me find a guide in the Carpathian Mountains who had fought in Donbass. And he was uh he was we were just bimbling around in the mountains, we got lost, and we found this door which had this amazing Ukrainian rune carved on it, and it's all just serendipity, and you know, I turned up to Ukraine pretty much without a plan of where I was gonna go, and it's just giving yourself the time and space to discover things, and that's both in terms of the joy of travel, but also in terms of how my career has planned out. I didn't plan to be a travel journalist, it's just and now you've written a book.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:14

There is no um brighter beacon for serendipity to be introduced now into your life. It's it's impossible for you to say who's gonna read this, what's it going to then create an opportunity for you with, and then how will that change your future?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:30

Yeah, I was I was chatting to a couple of um public relations people, and they said, Oh, I know somebody who'd like to read this, and I ended up doing a talk at uh an event at BAFTA, the British Film and Television Academy. Um so you never know where these things are gonna take you, or you know, chatting to you, it was a product really of the book coming out. As you was listening to um Heidi Blake, who had done an amazing report that you spoke to her about on your podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:58

Oh, that's right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:59

And in my head, I'd reached out to you, but that's true.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:02

You said something about Heidi Blake's interview, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:04

Yeah, well, I can't remember if you'd emailed me first or whatever, but you can never know what how these connections are gonna happen. Yeah, but yeah, I'd heard uh I'd heard Heidi's interview and was like, yeah, that was uh that was that was cool. Nice. Oh, stoked. Do you know Heidi? Um yeah, it's like sort of professionally knew her from uh some of the work that she's done. Not not incredibly well, but like I follow her work and it's it's impressive. She's an amazing investigative journalist.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:26

She's as good as they get. Yeah, it's she's as good as they get, and it's it's a shame that magazine journalism is so so steep in decline that it's pretty much fallen off the cliff. But back in the height of magazine journalism, 90s, 2000s, Heidi would be uh an international star. Yeah. Because her reporting is so good and her writing is so good, and the access she gets and the her curation of the stories as well, because I think that is probably one of the most um you know important variables for any writer. What is your own curation? Do you pick the story that's actually interesting to people? Um, and she's in my opinion at least got it in 10 out of 10.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:07

So because I lecture in journalism at City, I was able to go to the event for the launch of their new masters there, which was in podcasting, and they brought along a load of people who um won various podcast casting awards. And one of the uh people who came was a woman called Basha, I can't remember what her surname is, but she is a journalist with Tortoise Media, and she what what Tortoise figured is they weren't getting as many people as they wanted to read their long-form articles, so they'd come out as a sort of you know long-form article, investigative, interesting stories, and they turned to podcasting as a way to get their journalism out there, and then that became an art in itself for them. And I think I think Heidi did a podcast of her last investigation as well. Um she did, uh, but that's another way that these amazing investigative reporters are now telling their stories through audio, and then people might then return to read the print and read it in more detail as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:04

Yeah, totally. Um, did Bear Grill's endorsement of your book move the needle at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:09

Um I don't know, actually. I'm gonna be speaking to the publishers on our ask then. It would have probably moved it more if we'd have done an Instagram post about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:19

Have you uh worked alongside him in the army or is he just friends because you travel in the same circles?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:23

No no, so I um I've talked at his festival, yeah, which is down in um I did a way at a festival. Yeah, so obviously he's like this international superstar and almost a almost a sort of cult figure in the world of adventure. Um but uh yeah, I did a talk at his festival, and that's the only that's sort of like my route to knowing him. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:47

But how stoked for were you when he you know sent through those kind words?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:52

I mean, it's great. These there's other quotes and there's other people that have offered quotes that almost uh Uh and I'm sorry to bear girls, do matter sort of more to me. Like my friend Um Levison Woods gave me a really lovely quote. And you know, Levermine's careers are sort of run alongside each other, and a lot of the early work that I did in TV and other things, and many of the introductions come through him. And uh so that meant a lot to have those words from him. Aldo Kane, who is um an amazing uh former rural marine who then moved into sort of safety and rope work type things and now presents and enables television programs, an incredibly busy guy who uh was is sort of bouncing around between various expeditions and volcanoes and mountains and glaciers in Greenland and then having a second child and running a bunch of businesses and running a expedition safety company. And he took the time to write the loveliest words about it. Really, you know, you could tell he'd read the book. He hadn't just gone, Oh, yeah, here's some words, brilliant, take take that. He'd really put thought into it. Um, that was really meaningful. My friend Pip did a guy called Nick Crane, to it's actually the people that I know better and who I know how busy their lives are and what's going on with them. Those are the things that really matter. Uh a woman called Ginny Reddy who wrote a book with Wonderland, she um she got in touch and was very effusive and very kind about the book, and she and she's an award-winning writer.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:35

There you mention um the last tourist and the effect that maybe had on travel patterns. I also want to throw in there eat prey love. Yeah. Um, just purely observational, yeah. How do you think that affected tourism and the way people think about travel? As cultural phenomena.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:54

That's that's uh that point about eat prey love. I hadn't uh thought about that impact it would have had on over tourism, and it's a it's a good point. Um so eat prey love is a book about a woman going through a difficult period in her life, and then she goes travelling and she goes to Italy to eat. To eat. Barley to pray.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:16

Barley to prey.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:19

Paris to love? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:21

I don't know. I don't know. I've only watched the movie. Um but yeah, she goes to three countries and she eats, then she has a spiritual journey, and then she finds a man she loves.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:31

Yeah, so there's so there's two things about that. One I think it's sort of um most travel journalism is about silo travel, and one of the things that I do talk about in the book is um traveling with others. Um under the under the title of eroticism, and I don't mean in for sex, but uh eroticism in the Esther Perell sense. But that is a part of it. Uh what sex doesn't have to be like eroticism, as Esther Perell talks about, is the gap between self and other that creates a space for aliveness and excitement. Um she's a relationship psychotherapist, but I don't think it just has to be sex, like that's what you have in friendship, right? That gap between self and other that creates a space for aliveness and surprise. And for Esther Perell, she's talking about it as um a decline in those things as a couple become too similar and don't create space for surprise and aliveness and difference between them. Uh, but that happens with travel as well. If travel becomes routine and you know exactly what you're going to do, there's no aliveness and surprise and excitement. Um, and if you travel with others, if you travel with someone else, that can create more of the space for it. So there's that's the first thing I'm gonna say about the solo travel thing. But I guess what I pray you love did is it created a sense of aspiration for people, and it's almost like the challenge that you find with people that are following Instagram influencers and in travel, they go to a place for the experience that that person has. They're gonna, I'm gonna go to Ibithra and do this, and I'm gonna have the same experience as this person, and you're never going to because you're different people at a different time doing different things from a different background, and different means and different means, that's important as well. Uh, different amounts of wealth, and you're travelling in a different era, possibly, but also if you just repeat what somebody else did exactly, you're not giving yourself the space for discovery. The place for the author of Eat Pre Love to find good love may not be the right place for you or for me, exactly, and the place for spiritual sanctity is not the same as it is for you or me. And I think she does go to Barley for the prey. I mean, was that one of the reasons why Barley became like this massively overtouristed place? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:44

I don't know either, but I would love to see someone do the hard work of the retrospective how these how these big cultural and when I say cultural phenomenon, I mean popular movie, yeah, um, does actually drive significant behaviour change. I mean that's measured in the economic uh upside and downside of places. And you oh sorry, go on.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:11

Well New Zealand and Lord of the Rings, it very booms New Zealand's tourism. Yeah. Uh so I I every time you do something in New Zealand, you know, I love Lord of the Rings and I love living down in a targo and riding horses where Rohan was. That's pretty that's pretty happy. That's pretty happy. Um but you know, every time you go there, there's there's people that are just dressed in Lord of the Rings stuff when they're going over for a holiday getting their Lord of the Rings photos. And yeah, it's I think um, you know, back to where we started about exploration. Even if you can't go to somewhere for the first time that any human has been there from your culture, you can still explore and discover new things, and there's this sort of oh, if it's not on Instagram, it can't be worth going to. Yeah, but go and find somewhere interesting, go and find somewhere new. I went to Albania in 2015, it was amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:07

How good is it? Yeah, I had the same experience. I um was hitchhiking from Greece through to Morocco, so up through Albania, across the Med, down through Spain, and Albania was just a place which my my impression was I'll go through the country. Uh, ended up spending a lot more time there, and ended up just being so stoked with how good of a discovery this place was, also regional places throughout Greece. But yeah, Albania was so special, they have this incredible um, their food is so good because it's Turkish and Greek and Mediterranean blended. Uh their economy's in the dumps, so everything's really cheap, and it's an unexpected it's out of the side of the European Union, so there's significantly less tourism there. But their their their glory in terms of the environment is just as good as anywhere else in the Mediterranean, and their culture is uh very distinct and unique despite being so ethnically close to all of their neighbours because they had the most ridiculous like 40-year period post-World War II.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:12

But anyway, uh exactly. I mean, it the story that I went to go and do there was following the route of a British secret World War II mission, going around.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:21

Oh yeah, this was in the book, wasn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:24

The inspiration chapter of why we travel. Um so yeah, just bimbling around there, and yeah, I'd gone in the footsteps of this World War II mission, but back to the point we're talking about April Love, I'm obviously not going to have the same experience as a World War II officer because I wasn't being chased by the Nazis, it wasn't winter, and I'm now in a country 70 years later. Yeah, um, but what I did have was an it was a route to follow that allowed me to learn about Albania today, eat amazing food, incredibly hospitable people, people giving me like a bottle of olive oil because it because he there wasn't oh we don't have any in the shop, but I'll go and get some from home. It was awesome. And I think actually Albania really has just become a recent tourism success story, and that they've really put a lot of money into the promotion of it, got a lot of influencers out there who are doing lots of Instagram stuff. Um but you can always find a place that you know just because it's now all over Instagram and all over journalism, is it better is it better than it was three, four, five years ago? I mean, probably not, it's just better promoted. So there are other places that you will find that are like that that just because no one else has validated it, who use opinions you respect, doesn't mean it's not good. And I think that's uh that's the discovery and exploration element.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:44

What are three countries you'd put in that bucket? Unexplored. Um sorry, unexplored's the wrong term, but Albania in 2015.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:51

Albania in 2015, Ukraine in 2018. What about right now though? Uh I don't know, I have to go and find them. Um maybe okay, so places are probably underrepresented for how great they are to go and see. I mean, most tourism from the UK goes to five places. It goes to Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and the USA. I think like 95% of our tourism probably goes to those places. Um places that I've travelled to that are I mean I now since we've had a daughter, my travel has been much limited. Um so there's not a huge number of places I've travelled for the first time in the last year or so. Places uh I would really recommend people go to uh I love Estonia. Have you been? No. Estonia is amazing. Uh the Tallinn's beautiful, the landscape and the and nature is phenomenal, fascinating cultural stories, particularly down in southeast Estonia. Tallinn's a really cool city. The beer's excellent, the food's affordable and awesome. It's this the architecture's amazing. Love Estonia, so that's probably one place. I'm just trying to think, I'm sort of moving my I'm I'm sort of looking over. I should get my globe again. Um I had a really interesting time in Pakistan in 2022. Being half Indian, it's very hard to get to Pakistan. But I went there to uh film a series for Discovery Channel. I had a great time, really enjoyed it. Oh, it's you know, a challenging complex country, but I loved it. Japan's pretty well known as a tourist destination. Hokkaido, which is the island all the way up in the north of Japan, um, people go there for skiing, right? Uh Sapporo, and that's what it's known for. Go there in autumn or spring, and it's just beautiful, like amazing, incredible lavender fields in spring. And then the fall colours, autumn colours in uh Hokkaido are stunning. Beautiful landscape, phenomenal um, phenomenal mountains, phenomenal volcanoes, great hiking and walking. You know, people people think about New Zealand as a place where you go hiking, but people don't go to Japan for that very often. They're like, I'll go to Japan, I'll go and see all like the weird fetish culture and go into the city and just eat ramen and play computer games. You know, it's also got some of the most amazing natural scenery accessible in the world. That's amazing. Oh, yeah, nice. Um Estonia, uh Pakistan and Hokkaido, Japan.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:34

I have a question prepared here, I'm not exactly sure how to phrase it, but you mentioned Pakistan there, Albania today, uh, we could throw in s northern Mexico, we can throw in a lot of other places. My sense, and this could be totally wrong, it's because it's just an impression, but the violence uh against tourists in certain parts of the world is actually worse than it maybe has been over the last 40 years, when the general narrative is one that it's all getting safer and better to go. Now, naturally, I mean you're a pro, you've been in the army, you can easily avoid all these situations. Um, but not everyone has that breadth of experience. And you know, two Australians got killed just the other week in northern Mexico, they were on a surfing holiday. Yeah, and I just don't know if that maybe is just it's always been that way, or rather, actually the violence, so the threat of death, not just the threat of being s robbed, but the threat of death is is significantly worse than it has been.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:39

I don't have the statistics, or I've not done the research to be able to uh talk about this with any authority. Um we probably hear stories of danger and violence more often now, partly because of the way news works compared to what it did 20 years ago. There's more people travelling than ever before in more places than ever before. So is a proportion of people travelling through an area? Is the rate of murder any higher? I don't know. So there's a lot of different things coming into play there that uh only a proper academic analysis would be to give you some.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:13

Look, that makes sense. That's why I sort of said I don't know if it's even a good question. But nonetheless, well, I don't I also don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:20

I mean, it is the world safer. I mean, there are certain things that have changed, right? So in the 1960s and early 1970s, you could travel overland from London to Delhi, right? You could do that, you could go through Iran, you could go to Afghanistan through Afghanistan, you could go through Pakistan, all of which are places which have seen wars and violence, um, attacks, economic desperation, upheaval, invasion, drug trade, all of these things have made a huge difference. So I don't know about intimate advanced journalists are much less safe now than they were ever. Journalists have been killed more in conflict zones or in places where they're investigating stuff than ever before. Wow, okay. Mexico journalists get killed a lot. Yeah, Mexico's the worst. Um but that's because I mean sorry, gone. Yeah, Mexico journalists investigating the drug trade. Journalists in war zones never used to be deliberately targeted, but this is certainly something that started to happen from my reading of it, from speaking to journalists. That started to happen more frequently uh in the wars against ISIS, where journalists would were not just seen as an opportunity, but their killing or capture and then later murder was seen as an opp sort of PR opportunity. So yeah, things do change. I don't know. I don't have the data to be able to give you a proper analysis.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:41

You did mention something really interesting there though, which tees up the next question, which is that more people are traveling than ever before. So the economics of tourism is downstream of disposable income. So it started with the Brits in your book. I got this a couple hundred years ago, they started touring Europe. Then the US middle class unlocked a hundred million plus people who can now fly all over the world and consume cultures from all over the world. Australia followed, then the rest of Europe. Now over the last 10 years, China has been one of the best, you know, just from an economic perspective, uh tourists that you could have. India's got 1.4 billion people with a rising middle class, Latin America, Asia, maybe even Africa. Like we could unlock hundreds of millions of new people in the in the next 20, 30 years who now have enough disposable income to travel. Uh, what is uh what yeah, so what leading indicators have you seen and therefore, and then after that, like what does that actually do to travel, especially in places all throughout Italy where it's it's unbearable to be there because of the amount of people there at the moment? So I'm more asking you a question of projecting into the future, how do all of these new people who now have access to leisure travel affect travel behaviour? Uh, but then as well on the red hot destinations, Florence, Rome, etc., how will they be affected?

SPEAKER_00 1:44:05

In places like Venice, Barcelona, Paris already talk about over-tourism, which is where the number of tourists get to such an extent that there's not the infrastructure there to support them, whether that's beds, whether that's restaurants, whether that's space in a museum, um, or that there's no space or services for locals anymore. That's kind of what over-tourism looks like. This isn't a new phenomenon. We've seen that in places like Ibetha for a long time. So in the book, I I talk about the tourism evolution of Ibiza, which was a sort of you know, sort of Mediterranean backwater when modern tourism started to arrive in the 50s, 60s, 70s. But the thing that made a huge difference was the arrival of um cheap air travel and the rising middle class in Europe. And suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were going to Ibitha, where only a few years before tens of thousands were. So what happened was hotels were built, massive hotels, services, restaurants, shops that used to serve locals could make more money serving tourists, so that's what they did. Um, and this sort of idea of Ibitha that people went for had disappeared, and the term is Disney Disney fied. You've heard this, right? We're no longer seeing an authentic thing of a place, but you're seeing like a mock-up of what used to be there before. Um, so the problem for that is if you are the people in a place like Ibitha, and suddenly millions of dollars of tourism revenue are coming through your through your town, and you're like, oh, this is a good economic opportunity, it's very understandable how people will switch what they're doing to make money out of that industry. But the impact is that there's no longer any services for locals and no industry beyond tourism. And in any tourism town, you have this tension where people complain about it, but they also it's also their business, and and in some places they've become very wealthy from it. You know, they've not to not to speak for the people of Ibiza, but that's a island that many people have gone from subsistence farming to jet setters in two, three generations, as in the owners of some of the land. So for some people they've done really well out of it, but for people who aren't from that background, who don't have access to earning the money out of that industry, it's rubbish for them, and there's no other employment on the island, largely. So that happens in some places. Uh, the way Ibetha's dealing with it is uh limiting the number of new beds that can be opened so you can't have more people in the island, and um trying to put some money back into the economy outside of tourism, and they're trying to basically appeal to a wealthier tourist, so there's less people, but the ones that are there spend more money. Um the biggest problem for most towns is day trippers and sightseers. So you think about the old school way of travelling where someone would be on a coach, you'd stay in a hotel, you drive somewhere, get out, take photos, go to a pre-arranged buffet, canteen, and you all sit down and eat there. So no money's going into the local economy, but those places are still bearing the burden of vast numbers of people in huge coaches coming through. And there's a town in Austria that's trying to deal with this at the moment, where it's like this beautiful place that appears in loads of things in the South East, loads of TV series in Southeast and South Asia. So loads of Indians go there and loads of Koreans go there, but and loads of Chinese people are going there, loads of Europeans are going there, but they're not spending any money in the town. So, how does that town deal with it? They've tried all sorts of things like blocking off the good views, they've tried to charge people coming into the town. So it's in it's really difficult. So those are the socially negative impacts of tourism. Um, and you have others that are even worse. So, you know, the explosion of tourism in Cambodia, where there's very little regulation, and Thailand, huge amounts of child sexual exploitation, people trafficking, and actually all over Europe, places where you know Albania, you know, um big cities, you know, there's pl in London, there's plenty of people who, you know, it's not a world that I access, so I wouldn't know about it, but there are people that are um people people are being trafficked and enslaved, modern slavery for sexual exploitation. And so these are these are problems all over the world as a product of people coming in spending money and consuming other humans effectively, and then there's the environmental damage from the carbon footprint of travel through to consumerism. So, what can we do as individuals to change this? So, places can make it impossible for that type of tourism to exist, they can shut down tour companies that operate in that way, fail to give them licenses, they can ban coaches, they can do those sorts of things. Um I mean it's gonna get worse before it gets better. You've got you know you just talked about the countries that start to come into middle class tourism, they're gonna have money. The you know when the United States opened, as he said, like you suddenly get a middle class of a hundred million, in India that's six hundred million. That's that's if they're travelling in the way Americans do, Rome is gonna be overwhelmed. And impossibly, but then you also have to say, well, for decades we've marketed these places as the ultimate thing to do and the ultimate place to go. Just because these countries have developed their economy later, should we prevent those people from having that privilege? You know, it's really easy to shut the door once we've had all of our benefits, and you know, as I'm much more conscious of my impact of my tourism now, particularly in a carbon footprint perspective. Um but I've already lived in Australia and New Zealand and I've already been to all the remote places. So if I'm if I'm now saying to people in their twenties, oh, you can have everything you want by travelling around Europe, but like easy for you to say, mate, you've been to Australia and New Zealand. So I think telling people that they shouldn't do it doesn't work particularly well. Giving people better reasons to travel at home matters. Um we just make it too expensive. Um but then you have another issue, like why should only the super rich be able to go to Venice or only the super rich be able to go to Rome? That's so the city doesn't get destroyed. Yeah, but just tax the rich more.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:31

I I really think that actually um is the the way it's gonna go. Whether it's through legislation or just the market prices of things going up because there is a supply constraint, like in Ibiza, they limit the amount of beds, new beds, or in Rome they just say, you know, they also you can't open up more Airbnbs, we're getting rid of these shocking, you know, excuses for a hotel or an ebb or a hostel, and therefore with a more limited supply, the price will just get higher. But then once you do go to Rome, your experience will be better, and but it also will never exclude someone who really wants to do it on the cheap, they're just gonna be more creative about it, you know, and therefore they might actually have a better adventure doing it. But it means you can't really go with your family. I totally acknowledge this, and there it might be the case there's no good solution. I can tell you with Amsterdam, for years they've been actively advertising, do not come here, particularly Brits, they don't want Brits, young British men rather, um, because it's such a good buc destination. Um, but the impact is so so clear there. And uh as a former local of the town, you would just never go into what are the best parts of town, um, because they're just dominated by like tobacco shops and convenience stores, which is a completely rational reaction to all of these people walking by who just want a bottle of water or to buy, you know, a joint. Um, but they also serve as money laundering outfits, and they are only really relevant for a drunk person uh tourist. And beforehand, you know, they were cafes with lots of seating outside where you could have that extremely romantic travel experience of feeling like you're blending in with how the locals would live, and you pick up the magazine and you can read a um well, yes. So I know I said a lot there, and it's also a very romantic, maybe rather privileged uh uh perspective, but nonetheless, at least that's my impression for what it will happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:51

I mean, travelling around India now is a very different experience to when I went backpacking around in 2001 because suddenly there's Indians travelling. You go to a town like Darren Salah, it's unrecognisable because all the middle class Indians are going up there for their weekends. Oh, that's cool, and it's it's not the sort of like hippie Dalai Lama town, yeah, it's like noisy Punjabis eating pizza, you know, it's like Blackpool, but but for the Punjab, and it's um the the solution that I try and give in travel writing is finding alternatives. So the the sort of travel journalism term is something called a destination dupe. So rather than going to Bath, go to Cheltenham, it's still a Regency town in the in southern England, you can have a lovely town there. Rather than going to Stockholm, go to Gothenburg, you know, rather than going to um rather than going to Florence, go to Bologna. I mean Bologna's pretty busy as well, but rather than going to Bologna, go to Parma, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:51

I I I think Italy has a tough time though, because you can s objectively make the case that Rome actually is a must-see destination. There isn't an alternative for Rome, nor is there really for Florence, nor is there really for Venice, and so some of the or Paris, and so some cities will probably just in perpetuity have this problem. But in those examples you gave Stockholm, Gothenburg, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:16

This also comes down to um people getting their motivations for travel wrong. In that, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to achieve in your trip? Are you just sightseeing? Are you exploring? Do you want to have a foodie experience? Are you aspiring to what someone else did and you just want to replicate that story? Or are you going to discover? Are you going for a sense of healing? You know, if you want to go and eat good food, you mean you can literally go to any town in Italy. If you want to go or France, um, if you want to go and see ancient history, I mean, there's a certain type of ancient history in Rome, but you can go to North Africa and find Roman ruins and Roman architecture. I mean Palmyra, the itis.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:05

But it's not the Pantheon, it's not the Coliseum.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:07

I that's I really think Italy does have a hard time here. Though those are also marketing products. Like, what is you know that they've become celebrated because they are amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:17

Isn't it glorious even today to like you turn that corner and then holy shit, this fucking thing here, the thing from Gladiator is here.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:24

You can't replicate that.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:26

You can't, but also it's it's is it is the juice worth the squeeze for you as a traveller? You know, do you want to fight through all those people and all that money? Is it worth it? I mean, uh yeah, I mean, I mean, don't get me wrong, you're you're completely right. Rome is incredible, Paris is beautiful, London is awesome. You know, there's reasons people go to these cities all the time, right? And and that will never change. And I guess it's just worth saying to people, is there another way you can do it? You know, what are you really looking for in your travel? And then again, it's that same point I was mentioning earlier on. I had the privilege of travelling to these places largely 20 years ago when there was much less much much smaller crowds.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:20

Ash, um, what is something you wanted to talk about, but I didn't bring up? Um I don't know. We talked about empathy in Ukraine. Um we've been around the map, but nonetheless, I'm sure that the it'll hit you either later or now, but something that would be an interesting thing to say, but hasn't been broached.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:42

I think what I'd like people to think about is that travel isn't defined by where you go or the things you see, it's about the way you feel inside, and the best way to have fulfilling travel is to align the places you go and the things you see and the things you do with your original motivation to to start with. But that requires a lot of self-reflection and understanding your motivation, and so much of our travel is driven by aspiration, which is a product of marketing, whether that's through social media or classic marketing or just the legacy of things to ask yourself the question before you think about where you travel or how you travel, ask about why you're traveling, and that's going beyond the easy answers of I want to have an adventure or I want to have a rest or I want to have a break or I want to have some fun. Those are those are outcomes of of your of your travel. The deeper things are those 12 motivations that I try to explain. Curiosity, are you being curious? In inspiration. Is there a story or is there a person whose journey or history you want to learn more about? Um hedonism, do you do you just want to have fun? That's okay, there's nothing wrong with doing that, it's completely legitimate. And purpose, that's usually trying to um have a sense of reason for being there. Maybe that's learning something like learning to ski as an example. Mentorship, that is finding a teacher. That teacher could actually be a place you learn something from a place like architecture in Florence, or it could be actually finding a teacher that you're studying something within a certain place. Serendipity. And I I I think serendipity is the one that people should really look to more often because that's where those accidental discoveries come in. Hardship is about just doing something really difficult. That could be going up a mountain, or that could be doing a marathon, and it's what you learn through doing that. So it's really that uh or going on an extremely low budget, or going on well, going on an extremely low budget. So hardship is a very specific thing, which is about uh suffering and fun. So it's this scale of fun. So you've got type one fun, which is it's fun at the time and it's fun in memory. Type two fun is it's horrible at the time, but you look back and you're glad you've done it. So that might be running a marathon. Type three fun is it was horrible at the time and you wouldn't ever recommend it. That's like something bad has happened, uh, which in my lev's case was getting lost in cashmere, and then type four fun, which is something that's really, really hard, it's still a challenge, but you are competent at it. That's when you get into a flow state. So this is something that like actually challenging yourself. You can I mean you can do that intellectually as well, but you know, travelling on a budget isn't like a sort of flow state as much, it's just it's it's traveling on a budget creates serendipity. That's where budget travelling comes in. Because you know, I'm staying in a hostel when you bump into people, we can't afford to go and eat in that restaurant, we can't afford to go up the Eiffel Tower. What else can we do? Oh, why don't you go up the Tower Mont and look at the Eiffel Tower from the other and buy a baguette from uh Cat A Ford? Yeah, exactly. Um, so that's that's where serendipity comes in. Service is going somewhere to do something, right? And that could be for me, it was military service. For some people, it might be going to be a doctor volunteering in a war zone. You might go and drive aid trucks, that's that's that's purpose. And the negative flip side of purpose is volunteerism that can be badly managed. So there's orphanages in places like Cambodia or Kenya where the kids there aren't actually orphans, they've their parents have been paid for these kids to be taken away to be educated because the parents think that something better is going to happen to them, and it's effectively a human zoo. People turn up, they pay two grand to be there for two weeks. That's fucked. Teach bad English to these kids. You know, the people the people attending these things aren't aware they're doing something really downright, obviously, yeah. But they're driving human trafficking, basically. Holy shit, I wasn't aware of that. Yeah, I mean it's in the film The Last Tourist, it's quite well, it's quite well covered in that. And there's organizations you can look at to make sure that the charity you are volunteering with is ethically uh ethically good. Um says purpose. Then for me, there's the empathy, that's going to really learn about a place, really understand it. I you know, I got there in New Zealand, I'd like to go into more of that in Australia, understanding the legacy of that relationship between the Indigenous or First Nations people and uh um European Australians, yeah, for want of a better term. Um, and healing. That's you know, I took my dad's ashes back to India, and that was part of a really long journey of psychological healing. There was wonder, which is that mindset you can have that allows you to experience all eroticism, which is traveling with others and changing your relationship with travel to create surprise and playfulness, and hope, which for me was taking my mum's ashes to New Zealand and turning a period of grief into hope. That's a lot that I've just talked about there. There's 12 of them, and they're all very different, and none is better than another. We travel for different reasons at different times. I've travelled entirely for fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. And the thing I'd like people to think about is there's so many different reasons to travel. Don't trunk it into a hierarchy about what's the best form of travel, yeah. Um, but be honest with yourself about what you want and eat at that time, and then pick a destination and a mode of travel off that rather than the other way around.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:28

Love it, mate. Final question. Uh, every guest gets this what is a country you're particularly bullish on?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:34

What what uh bullish in terms of I think it's great.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:38

Bullish in the uh sense that it has a very bright future ahead of it. Doesn't it might not necessarily be great now, but one you could you know invest in.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:49

Probably Australia. Oh, I love it. Or New Zealand. Go on. Uh, because they're places that still what in my experience of going there, they're places that have a sense of optimism. They're places where there's still property is just about affordable in most of those places. Like uh particularly if you get out of Sydney, out of Sydney, yeah. Uh get out of Sydney, get out of Auckland. So it's a place where you could start a family and buy a house and get a job. People are still moving there and live a great life. Living a really high quality of life. You know, people people are paid well in those countries for the jobs that they do. Uh so I think Australia and New Zealand.

unknown 2:03:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:26

Amazing. Can you believe someone said the United Kingdom the other day?

SPEAKER_00 2:03:30

Really?

SPEAKER_01 2:03:30

Yeah. Was it Nigel Farage? It wasn't a particularly good answer though, to be honest. He more just loves London. He lived here for so long. He's an American. Um, well, mate, look, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, uh, inviting me into your home. And I listened to the book, absolutely loved it, and um, I was very stoked when I had discovered that you were potentially someone I could talk to because I'm really looking for guests like you. I think it's most closer to my worldview, my curiosities. Um, and I felt that throughout this chat and meeting you before. I think it's very natural. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:09

Thank you. Cheers for asking me to come and talk about this type of bit was uh useful to the people listening as well. Yeah, me too. Uh if anyone's out there, you know, feel free to get in touch at Ashbardwage. Uh the book's called Why We Travel. Through those two things you can find me, but love to hear what you think about what we were talking about. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:26

Ash Bardwaj might be hard to spell, but the e I'll put the email in the podcast description.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:31

Yeah.