Joanna Lumley - From the archives

0:05Joanna Lumley: Hello and welcome back to the Travel Diaries podcast. I'm your host Holly Rubenstein and here each week I'll be speaking to a very special guest about the seven chapters in their life's travel diaries. From the first place that they fell in love with to their all-time favourite destination, their worst travel experience to what's at the top of their travel bucket list. We'll be uncovering their adventures around the world and the travel experiences and destinations that have shaped their lives. How are you all everyone? I hope that you are having a good week. It's been a little while since we last spoke.

0:40Joanna Lumley: A lot has happened. I've had my baby boy, Casper. He's here. He's six weeks old. He's delicious and keeping us up at night. But we're all doing really well. And I have to be honest because I didn't travel that much for the time that I was pregnant. I'm spending so much time sitting and feeding him in the middle of the night planning out all of the places that I want to talk to you about here soon. I'm sure a lot of you can relate. I've just got the wanderlust so badly at the moment. So I'm looking forward to taking him on some new adventures soon and telling you all about them. And I mentioned at the end of last season that I am taking a bit of time away from the podcast while I am on maternity leave.

1:27Joanna Lumley: but I did think that this would be a really great time to bring out a few episodes from years back that you might have missed especially if you're new to the podcast you know some of my real favorites and I've also got a brand new interview coming up with the glorious Eugene Levy who you'll know from Schitt's Creek, American Pie and now The Reluctant Traveller so stay tuned for that one coming up and I've also got a new Destination special coming up which again I think is one of my absolute favorites it's all about morocco and then we've got christmas specials coming up as well so there's actually quite a lot more to come i always do this i say i'll take a lot of time away from the podcast and then inevitably i just get tempted by these fantastic guests and destinations and i come back but today i wanted to bring out of the archive one of the all-time greats dame joanna lumley as you probably can imagine when people find out that you know i host this podcast and I'm chatting to them I'm often asked who was my all-time favorite guest like who's my all-time favorite guest who's showing me on here and while I you know it's a bit like asking the all-time favorite destinations I do pick different people on you know how I'm feeling in that moment typically I often think it's Joanna because she was just everything that you'd hope for and more she was just so eloquent and evocative and she was so nice before we hear from her though I have a little travel diary to share with you actually I wanted to tell you about the place that I visited for our babymoon because it's a hotel that I have paid to stay there myself previously and this was a press day though and if you're looking for a kind of special treat staycation this is somewhere that I would really recommend to you it's worth it it's called Heckfield Place.

3:19Joanna Lumley: It's in the rolling Berkshire countryside and I was there primarily because since I had last been they have opened up an incredible new spa and this it's really hard to put it into words without you guys seeing pictures and you actually won't be able to see any pictures because you're not allowed to take your phone into the spa but it is one of the most impressive kind of architectural feats that I've seen in a hotel in a long time it's like this absolutely enormous underground layer which is like being transported into the root of a tree and then the swimming pool is kind of seemingly like suspended in the woodland with huge glass windows looking out over the countryside and then there's this outdoor hot tub that is also up in among the trees the treatment menu is all about natural well-being and I tried a massage that was honestly one of the best that I have ever had oils made from plants that were grown on the estate itself the rooms are exquisite the kind of rooms where you look around and you're like I want to recreate hate this in my own home very calming natural textures chalky paints just gorgeous and the food there is a huge part of heckfield's philosophy as well they really lean into hyper seasonal estate to plate dining everything is fresh it's often pulled that morning from the biodynamic farm just across the grounds it's a place that manages to feel both grounding and glamorous I really didn't want to leave.

5:06Joanna Lumley: I'll share some snaps on my Instagram actually of the stay in the next few days so keep an eye out and they're kind of in my saved highlights as well. Okay guys let's get started. Dame Joanna Lumley acting royalty and one that I know you're gonna love.

5:27Joanna Lumley: Joanna Lumley, welcome to the Travel Diaries. Can't believe that you're here. Thank you so much Holly. I have to say, I don't want to be too gushing, but when I first started this podcast, I made a dream guest wish list and you were top of it. So to be here. Is that true? After 100 episodes to finally get to meet you is just such a joy. I'm thrilled, thank you so much. Such a joy.

5:51Travel Diaries Host: There's almost nothing nicer on earth to talk about than travel really, is there?

5:54Joanna Lumley: No, there is nothing. And I mean, where do we start? I've been thinking about this today. You know, your travels have been so extensive. I mean, do you count countries? Do you know how many countries you've been to?

6:09Travel Diaries Host: I don't. I did. And when you get up to about 60 or something, you stop counting. Because we used to have a very competitive crew who would always be sitting there. They, of course, had traveled even further.

6:18Joanna Lumley: Yeah.

6:18Travel Diaries Host: But I think that as I was born in a suitcase, I was sort of traveling. I was leaving India before I was one year old. I was born in Kashmir. and then traveling huge ship journeys back to this country and then out to, you know, starting my life in Hong Kong and then Malaysia and then, and so I was already on the move. So travel seemed to me completely natural way of living.

6:41Joanna Lumley: Yeah, you're a born traveler. Yeah. You're a born traveler. Well, I mean, you've started us off perfectly. We're going to go on a journey through the seven chapters of your life's travel diaries today. And we start at the very beginning, which is chapter one, your earliest childhood travel memory. So you've already painted a picture of some of the travels you took on at such a young age. What comes to mind as the earliest?

7:01Travel Diaries Host: I think, you know how you think you remember something, but it might have been a photograph. I think I remember, not really remember, but something about lying on my back, looking up at great pine trees sighing in the wind. And that would have made me about six or seven months old up in Kashmir. But as I can't remember anything about it, And there is a photograph of my sister looking rather cross with this new baby in a basket up in those huge Himalayan ranges. I wonder if I have to remember that. What I clearly do remember is sitting in a pushchair in Hong Kong. We used to do what was called boiling hot shopping.

7:42And I must have been about two, two and a half.

7:44Travel Diaries Host: I've got a very good memory for long ago. Sitting in a pushchair outside a shop while my mother and sister must have gone in to get something. and two Chinese boys came past and saw me and thought I was a cute little baby and one of them took out of his mouth some well-chewed chewing gum and popped it into my mouth. And it was so slimy and so grey and so wet that I just sat with it in my mouth. As a little baby? Isn't that weird? Did your mum freak out? No, not at all. She never freaked out about anything. She thought all that was completely normal and rather generous of them because chewing gum was quite new in those days, just after the war.

8:22Travel Diaries Host: But isn't that funny? I remember that. And then I remember that we had a flat in Hong Kong, which was a huge sort of old Victorian building. Now I've since returned to Hong Kong and seen that what used to be the road, the railway track, and then the harbour has now been built out for about another half mile. They've reclaimed or made land and have built all kinds of things over it. So you stand there with some sort of half memory. But of course, the view you're looking at is not a harbor full of great big ships and Chinese junks. But now it's just roads and modern buildings. You've got to hang on to memories because quite often they're stronger than photographs.

9:04Travel Diaries Host: They're better than photographs. Because with them sometimes comes the sense of smell, a sound, a feeling. Photographs, you look at it and you go, oh, look at those clothes. or was it really, did so-and-so have a moustache then? I can't remember. But if you have it tucked into your mind, so I always try to say to people, instead of photographing things, stare at them or draw them. Drawing is very good because you have to look quite differently at something. If I was drawing you now, I would look at your face quite differently.

9:35Joanna Lumley: In like a more nuanced way.

9:37Travel Diaries Host: And the kind of memory sticks in my head. That's so interesting.

9:41Joanna Lumley: And you talk about the fact that you, prior to that, were going back from India on ships.

9:47Travel Diaries Host: Well, in the olden days, which is what I can say quite grandly because I'm now 112, in the olden days, all armies, army families travelled by ship. Nobody could afford to fly by air. And the journeys were long and far. On the Franconia, coming back from Bombay, when I left India, it was called Bombay then, before it became Mumbai. And sailing back to, I think it might have been Liverpool, to then turn around and come back and then be reposted. That would have taken about three and a half weeks. And you did that journey? I did it five times. Three and a half weeks? No, four weeks then to Singapore.

10:24Travel Diaries Host: And if we're going to Hong Kong, it's five weeks on board these old ten troop ships. And we went on the Empire Windrush with Windrush, which was used, of course, for the Windrush generation. The Dilwara, the Empire Orwell. Then the Dilwara again. and you were on board for one month. And was that exciting or was it kind of... It's not completely normal. Children think things are completely normal. Yes. And so you get on, but it's always exciting going up huge gangplanks and finding your cabin and sleeping on the top or the bottom bunk and the new pattern of remembering to step over when you go out of any or into any room because there's always that huge high step so that if water comes onto the ship, it doesn't immediately go from one room to another.

11:09Travel Diaries Host: to step over to go in and out of any door.

11:12Joanna Lumley: And when you were little, that must seem huge. It was huge.

11:15Travel Diaries Host: And being given an orange every day, obviously against scurvy since... I mean, now, when you look at the range of fruit and the way that ships are, these were old tin tubs. These were working pack horses of ships. So there was no entertainment. There was nothing. There was no entertainment. On Sundays, they used to clear the dining room and make it into a kind of chapel, I suppose. and we were all expected to attend church on Sundays where we would sing for those in peril on the sea.

11:43Joanna Lumley: Oh my goodness.

11:44Travel Diaries Host: And Wednesdays, I remember the sailors would, those days, the division, the class divisions, and particularly within the army, they may still be there, I don't know, there were the officers who had one deck and then they were called the other ranks, which always seemed to me, even then, as pretty sort of derisory way of talking about soldiers. Yeah. The fighters. I mean, the officers are fighters too, but to have officers in other ranks. And the sailors would take us down from officers down to other ranks, where they'd set up a wonderful cinema. And they would show us and all the lovely other ranks children who we all could muck in with.

12:20Travel Diaries Host: Mickey Mouse and early, early cartoon films. And there was no such thing as television or anything like that. These were enormous streets, climbing down a kind of gangway, a gangplank kind of thing, right steep, steep, steep down, and being given ice creams. I don't think they were ice or cream, but those were whitish blobs. Too thrilling for words. How incredible.

12:44Joanna Lumley: I mean, that's such an unusual experience you have had in your early childhood.

12:48Travel Diaries Host: Normal for army brats, as we were called, army children, but completely abnormal. And of course, you went to school for two years or three years and made friends. Then you upped and went. And during that time, some of their times, their tours of duty would be over, their parents' tours of duty would be over. and they'd suddenly disappear from the class and different people would come in. You'd just get that feeling, you know.

13:08Joanna Lumley: And when you were at boarding school in England, where did you, during your childhood, like where was home in your head?

13:16Travel Diaries Host: Well, we rented and once my parents had to go back to Malaya, so then on that holiday we were looked after by godparents and guardians and stayed where we were sent. But then my parents rented, eventually found a house in Kent. But because they'd been brought up in India and their parents been. I mean, we didn't come from anybody, although we are basically British. We didn't have any base here because for so long on both sides of the family, we hadn't had a home here.

13:44Joanna Lumley: The roots were there.

13:46Travel Diaries Host: By nature, this is what we are. But then my parents, my mother's heart remained in India till the day she died. So we bought a house in Kent because it was quite near the coast. And we knew somebody in Kent. I mean, that's why. And then that became my childhood home. Right. I see.

14:02Joanna Lumley: So all over, basically, is where you were. Yeah. How wonderful. Moving on to chapter two, that is the first place that you fell in love with.

14:13Travel Diaries Host: I have quite a low threshold of falling in love. I fall in love very easily, every day, twice a day, five times a day. And as for countries, I tend to love them on the spot. Much later in life, I've taught myself that the best thing you can do when you arrive somewhere new is to say at once, I love this place. I love it. Later on, you might be disproved, and it might be ghastly. But start off with an open heart saying, I love it. So I loved Malaya, as it was called then. Because of this, it had very, very extreme climate. Bursting heat. Humid. Humid and burning suns. Massive monsoon rains and thunderstorms.

14:57Travel Diaries Host: Thunderstorms you couldn't believe. Sunsets terribly quick, because when the sun went down, There was no evening. It was daylight, and then the sunset, and it was nighttime. There was no long evenings. But as the sun went down, the brilliance of the colors, the strips of purple and apricot and green and yellow on the horizon, the speed of the flowers, which would open up and bloom huge white moonflowers, Ipomere alba, which were rather like Morning Glory or Columbine, would just open up huge, the size of a dinner plate, and die overnight. and the next morning their buds would be waiting, scrolled up like umbrellas, which would unfurl during the evening.

15:37Travel Diaries Host: Things called the Rose of Sharon, which you would pick when it was white and during the heat of the day it would turn crimson. These were great, unbelievable things. The sound of the birds.

15:48Joanna Lumley: So the natural beauty of the country. The natural beauty and the love of it.

15:51Travel Diaries Host: And then, of course, walking tin mines where great rickety bamboo structures would extract the tin and then it would go chunking down with rustling kind of water and the great rubber plantations with the trees standing in a kind of gloomy silence with scars all around them and then a little cup to collect the latex as it dripped out.

16:11Joanna Lumley: Collect the latex? I don't think I realised that. That's how rubber comes.

16:15Travel Diaries Host: You bleed the trees. You milk the trees.

16:16Joanna Lumley: I feel like I actually have seen that on one of your programmes many, many years ago. I wonder if you have.

16:21Travel Diaries Host: I wonder if you saw it in a dream, little Holly.

16:23Joanna Lumley: Maybe I have. and what would you what would you do when you were there how would you spend your time with

16:29Travel Diaries Host: your family we were at school yeah um and my father was working because he was a working soldier and so sometimes he'd disappear into the jungle for three months this was fighting off the communist invasions coming down from the north the terrorists who would terrorize and kill the villagers unless they turned communist and so it was a british protectorate so the british army which was daddy's i mean it's fun it was an indian army but then after the fall of india it became the British Army, but they were Gurkhas. So Dad was with Gurkhas, who were the best jungle fighters in the world, and they would disappear into the jungle to repel the terrorists.

17:01Travel Diaries Host: My sister and I went to the army school. We'd walk there every day, and one of the roads was covered with crystal quartz, so it sparkled like diamonds. You walked on a road of diamonds to school. When we came back, our long hair, which was in plaits, was wet through with sweat. And sometimes we would go in the school holidays, we would go to the higher parts of Malaya Malaysia is Disney the central part of that great peninsula has got the Cameron Highlands and Fraser's Hill which were up and cooler air and different flowers and just wonderfully refreshing for particularly kind of European people who found that oppressive heat almost too much to bear so this would be a huge excitement going up usually in convoy because the danger of being shot at by the terrorists.

17:52Travel Diaries Host: But going in either an armed car or an army closed over vehicle and up and up and up and then getting out into this cool air and you could hear below in the forests monkeys whooping in the trees. And in the morning there were vast spider's webs like great lace bedspreads spread over everything and birds singing and crashing in the trees.

18:13Joanna Lumley: What an incredible picture.

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19:04Joanna Lumley: Learn more about our commitment to finding lasting solutions at empowerourfuturecoalition.com slash solutions. Paid for by the Coalition to Empower Our Future. and were you to go back there now i've been back sorry were i to go perhaps then because i've not been where would you tell me to go first because as you've depicted it's such a diverse country oh really it's gone well in what respect the rubber plantations have gone they've been replaced

19:39Travel Diaries Host: by palm oil, which of course has nothing, doesn't have monkeys, nothing grows in or around palm trees. The tin mines have been shut down. There are motorways everywhere, which of course is much easier for driving. The old towns and cities have been built up. Of course they have. The world has changed. I'm talking about 70 years ago. And so there are now huge modern buildings and our little airstrip in front of the bungalow where we lived, which had little puttering bi-winged planes landing and on what was called laterite, which is the red earth, you know, making the kind of landing strip. All these huge, big, important international airways and things like that.

20:23Travel Diaries Host: So it's very different. And I have been back. And I was just taken aback because I couldn't recognize any of it. I couldn't recognize any of it. Some places have remained, tourist spots like the Batu Caves, huge caves which have got Hindu temples in them and you ascend flights and flights of stairs till you think you can't breathe assaulted by monkeys as you go up all the way up and up and up and up and there are the great Batu caves and when we were there the Batu caves were hideouts for the terrorists so it's very different now but now you can see all sorts of wonderful things and Malaysia is so friendly and so interesting and so colourful but it's not the place I knew my father used to say you must never go back that's again what keep it in your memory yeah hold it because changes are hardly ever for the better no yeah of course exactly the simplicity of a kind of life disappears we see it in london now bits of what used to be whiskery old bits of the thames where we could walk find things just look around lean on things is now one of the largest cities within a city which is nine elms where the new american embassy is complete transformation power station now huge and of course it's fabulous it's covered with flats it's covered with things but it's not that london i knew no yeah and we're

21:40Joanna Lumley: in the falling in love chapter at the moment and of course people fell in love with you at different points in your illustrious career in all different respects i would say that my earliest memory of you i think i would have been about six was watching you on girl friday i used to watch that with my parents and I mean just to give the listeners some context if they they weren't aware of it you spent 10 days on your own off an uninhabited island off Madagascar that's right I mean you know a real precursor to the survivors and the island shows you know it was it was a

22:16Travel Diaries Host: brand new idea and it came just when I think we'd done the first series of absolutely fabulous and the BBC said wouldn't it be funny if Patsy was cast away on a desert island without any drink or something. I said, well, it wouldn't, the joke wouldn't really last longer than a few minutes. And also Patsy's not mine. She's owned, as it were, by Jennifer Saunders. I mean, I inhabit her. I said, I don't think that'll work. But if you want to cast me, Joanna Lumley, away, because I'm quite tough and I quite like kind of roughety-toughety outdoor living and I'm good at having a go at things and quite practical, we could see what it was like for me to live without very much they took it to its extreme and when they say not very much they gave me holly they gave me one pound of rice which is difficult to explain because people do things in different weights but it's um half a kilo of rice i would say for for the duration of my food yeah

23:11Joanna Lumley: and you know tell us about what it was like like what you what you did to survive and and did you enjoy it.

23:17Travel Diaries Host: You spend all day hunting for firewood because you've got to build a fire. And stay warm. Well no no you're boiling. Oh of course you're on an island. This is to cook. If you've got to cook the rice you've got to boil up the water. You have to collect the water and there was no fresh water so I had to collect it running off the rocks and there'd been a late monsoon. So water was pouring around but it was off the ground so I had to collect it, purify it, then boil it and they'd given me an old tin can with rust in it to boil up my water then I had to light my fire using a flint not a match it was it was really quite hardcore and there was no fruit or and everything the monsoon had taken down all the fruits there was nothing to eat on the island yeah except limes and I fell in love with limes because a lime squeezed into water or squeezed over the rice made it palatable um it was very quick you very quickly uh find again our old human instincts i knew within two or three days i could smell when the rain would come literally to the minute when the rain would come suddenly because it happens very quickly as we're back in the tropics again yeah um it happens very fast you see a black cloud and then in minutes it's pelting down with raindrops the size of cakes banging banging banging which would put out your fire or soak the skin you never mind being soaked to the skin because you were warm but it was very very tough and I loved it you loved it I would never have gone back on that because I stopped being afraid ever not that I was much of death I realized we're just part of the huge great pattern all is well the birds and insects would come close to me when there was nobody there because the crew left the island they were living on a dive ship and I guess as it was uninhabited that the birds would

24:57Joanna Lumley: you know they wouldn't be fearful they weren't fearful they would come quite close and have a

25:00Travel Diaries Host: look at me yeah the flying foxes the bats who came in the fruit bats would fly around their little

25:05Joanna Lumley: foxy faces looking at me with their eyes wow so it was a formative experience it was extraordinary

25:11Travel Diaries Host: and it was utterly utterly exhausting because there was nowhere to sleep I didn't have a bed or anything like that. And so I had to sleep either on rocks inside a cave or in this hastily constructed A-frame bed like a sort of hammock where the rain, because it rained almost every day and every night, would come and wet you down and you were frozen. Because when the wind blew and you're wet, it's three in the morning. But I didn't have a clock. I didn't have any idea of time. But I had my own time. And it was thrilling.

25:42Joanna Lumley: A lot of time alone with your own thoughts as well, really.

25:45Travel Diaries Host: Yes, but in your head, you see, we put so much in nowadays. We take in so much. I don't use a mobile phone and I don't do any social media, so I don't do any of that. But nevertheless, I see stuff all the time. Stuff comes into my head. Music, I listen to the wireless and I listen and I watch the news and so on. So stuff comes into you. When you're there and there's nothing to come into you, everything you've known or read or listened to or remembered comes bubbling up. I could remember entire poems, books, tunes, songs. music, it was as though I'd been pushing it down by having to keep on cramming stuff in.

26:21Travel Diaries Host: The second you stop cramming stuff in, you're stuffed like a sofa, even you, sweet Holly. Listeners, I should tell you, she's looking particularly ravishing today. We are like sofas, overstuffed. And once you can just take the lid off, people are afraid of it. I was afraid of being without music and afraid of being without books because they're my lifelines. Without them, I found I had got them all stuffed

26:44Joanna Lumley: inside me anyway how liberating that's a really interesting way to approach travel maybe yes freeing try and get get rid of don't read stuff look at stuff look at stuff take in as much as you can and then of course even more people fell in love with you around the same time with ab fab and i have to give it a mention even though we've got so much travel to cover i mean like such an iconic such a role of a lifetime would you say it was one of the most enjoyable things i've ever

27:14Travel Diaries Host: done in my life and I think that's to do with laughing we laughed so much all of us in rehearsals and Jennifer and I thinking up different things these ghastly women would do we just sob with laughter and we tried because it was it was recorded live in front of an audience at the BBC I forgot I know and so you're trying to do a proper show so it wasn't as though we came on and just fooled around we did a proper show for them very occasionally things would go wrong and we'd have to retake something first of all we were anxious that the audience would be bored with the idea of doing it again. They adored it.

27:46Travel Diaries Host: They were in on the jokers. And sometimes we do things, we had to do things three times. And they got more and more involved with it and adoring it. Because of course, these huge five cameras, and behind them sits the audience. And you have this split loyalty to entertain the audience within the studio. And of course, your loyalty is to the far larger audience, which is beyond the five cameras who are recording it for the public.

28:08Joanna Lumley: That's such a skill, actually, that kind of acting where, I mean, that's a real test of a comedic talent because you need to make it funny each time we rode on the backs of the

28:19Travel Diaries Host: the great cushion of laughter that came off the audience and sometimes we had to stop because they couldn't stop laughing they could not stop laughing and it was magic and because they became fans quite quickly and a lot of them were fans already of French and Saunders so they knew they were in for something good yeah and they became devoted fans they could anticipate knowing our characters, knowing how dim Bubble was, how Dottie Mother was, how straight-faced little Julia Sawala playing Safi was, and how repellent Eddie and Patsy were. And because they knew that, they could see how certain situations might go wrong.

28:55Travel Diaries Host: Of course, they're the most stunning guest artists too. I mean, apart from our finest comedic talents, we'd have people like Elton John and Sasha Distel and people just coming, Stella McCartney, just being in and on the show.

29:07Joanna Lumley: And it's timeless comedy as well. I mean, I feel like if it was put onto, you know, a lot of old shows at the moment are being put onto Netflix. New generations are discovering it. I mean, it just appeals to everyone now. It does. It's still so funny.

29:22Travel Diaries Host: This comes from the standard of writing. If things are very funnily written, if they're very good, they become classics. So things like Porridge never date. Only Fools and Horses never date. Yeah, Fawlty Towers. You know, and those sorts of Fawlty Towers. those ones and where we I like to think because I think Jennifer's a complete star that Ab Fab has joined that legion of things that are so brilliant they become classics totally totally and talking

29:45Joanna Lumley: about classic I mean classic lines when you have a a part that's as iconic what are the like what

29:52Travel Diaries Host: is the line that said back to you most no oh people say to me hello sweetie darling in fact that was that was Eddie's lines she called people so darling darling sweetie sweetie darling but Patsy sometimes used to say cheers, thanks a lot. But I mean, almost anything, people, particularly gay people, say, can you write this on my thing? Or can you say for me, you little bitch troll from hell? Which Patsy called saffy once. And all those ridiculous things. I, of course, having played the part, I've forgotten them. Because the second you've done a script, you clear your mind and start on the next one.

30:26Travel Diaries Host: But for other people, these are like iconic lines. I met somebody last week who said, I know every line of every script, which is extraordinary. We had a particular loyalty. And when Jennifer and I meet, which is quite often, not as often as we'd like, they haven't gone away. They can't, you know, we find, if we're eating in a restaurant, we immediately know things that would make them, that they'd do wrong. And because they're such a, particularly Pat's is such a decayed character, all her organs removed. And so when she drinks, quite often, whatever she's drinking comes out of a tube. onto the ground.

30:59Travel Diaries Host: I mean, we just cried with laughter. And so we always think of things that they couldn't do. And we loved them being very, very old. When Patsy had found some false teeth in her dustbin, so she'd put those in. So she'd hardly speak. And they were bald and had wispy hair. Honestly, we loved that more than anything.

31:16Joanna Lumley: I know that you're literally asked this every single time that you're interviewed. But as the ideas just bubble up every time you come together, do you think you'd ever revive it?

31:26Travel Diaries Host: I don't think absolutely fabulous. I don't think, but honestly, you see, it's Jennifer's baby, it's not ours. It feels as though it hasn't completely gone away, both from us or from the public's kind appreciation. It wouldn't be gross. What you must never do is overstay your welcome, and sometimes you don't want to dig something up and flog a dead horse, and people go, yeah, it was funny then, but I don't know if it works now. I don't think the show could be made now, because a lot of the things we did, I think that the sensitivities of society have so altered that a lot of things people might find objectionable.

32:01Travel Diaries Host: I hope they wouldn't. Anyway, these are repulsive women. We laugh at them. But it's funny how sensitive the world is now. But Jennifer was always ahead of the game, you know, in diversity, casting. She never thought of it as that. She just liked people and liked actors and liked particular performers. So she didn't do this box-ticking thing of we must have, we must have, we must have. But when you look back at them, they're very diverse. Yeah, female protagonists.

32:28Joanna Lumley: Yeah, absolutely. Amazing memories, amazing. Well, I mean, of course, I would just like to put on the record that I would be thrilled if it ever did come back. Oh, sweet God. So moving on to chapter three, that is the place where you learned the most about yourself.

32:44Travel Diaries Host: I've learned nothing about myself. I live in here, so I know myself, so I've never learned anything about myself. Really? Isn't that funny? People often say to me, what have you learned about yourself since you were on the island or something and I I live here I am me there's nothing to learn I know me that's but that's an amazing place to be well no it's not it's not grand it's not fine I'm not going oh my gosh I didn't know I was so x or y yeah x or y how self-regarding why I am me if there's something about me if I know somebody for instance is irritating me a lot I find that is my fault and then I begin to change how I feel about them so that they don't irritate me you can't stop them being what they are so change how you hear things or feel things you can't stop people saying nice or nasty things about you so change how you react to that so you can do that but I am me so I know I know that what I have I love that I always

33:46Joanna Lumley: remember um reading an interview with you years ago I was sitting in my dad's flat and it was one of those quickfire magazine ones and it was glass half full or glass half empty and you're you said overflowing um and that has literally sat with me for probably over 10 years and in trying to kind of shape my own approach to to life which I struggle to be overflowing but I mean how has how is that you know how how did you become so like that and you know how has that shaped your travels?

34:19Travel Diaries Host: I think I was born grinning my father said I looked like a hammer-headed shark when I was born because I had a huge mouth and he said I had no nose at all just a couple of holes poked into the clay as it were and I just never stopped grinning I seem to have been born happy.

34:33Joanna Lumley: That's

34:33Travel Diaries Host: so lovely. It doesn't mean to say that you don't have great dark holes and great sadnesses and quite often long periods of your life when you suddenly go this is all becoming a little bit of a challenge. You keep on going, nobody would know, and you smile away, because if you've rehearsed well, this is one of the good things about being an actor, you can get through a lot of life. Funnily enough, doctor theatre, as we call it, which means pretending you're okay when in fact you've got flu, by the end of the stage performance, when you've gone on with a temperature of 102, you come off and you've almost cured yourself because you've acted as though you're not ill.

35:06Joanna Lumley: The power of a human mind.

35:08Travel Diaries Host: There is, there's that. And all the great explorers, people like Rand Fiennes and I've always asked them, who do you want on your trips with you? And they say people with optimism and a good heart. Not fit people. I mean, fit people is good. They've got to be fairly fit. But we don't go for the fit people. We go for the people who are mentally strong and mentally upbeat.

35:30Joanna Lumley: One of my former guests on the podcast, actually, Rand Fiennes, and a dry sense of humor as well goes a long way.

35:38Travel Diaries Host: Yes, that's what they want, a sense of humor, because you're going to go through some very grim times, very difficult times. And, of course, I think when I look back, when I hear back to times beyond my times, back to the songs of the First World War, when they say, smile boys, that's the style, you know, while you have a Lucifer, which was an old kind of match, which came out of a matchbox, to light your fag, smile boys, that's the style. What's the use of worrying? Never was worthwhile. These men are tramping towards probably a certain death. They're singing their hearts up in a major key song.

36:10Travel Diaries Host: Tramping along, smile, smile, smile. And you think this is one of the ways of approaching life. People are very anti what they call the stiff upper lip. But if you think of it as a smile instead of a stiff upper lip, if you think of people facing great hardship with a high heart and a smile and a sense of optimism, you'd rather be with them than people moaning and complaining, wouldn't you? Even though the situation is exactly the same.

36:38Joanna Lumley: Yeah, yeah. And so on your different journeys that you've taken that we've witnessed on the TV, and you've taken that positive approach, have that I mean, there have been, of course, very moving parts to many of the journeys that you've taken. And, you know, going back to the place, places where you grew up, and many other destinations that have moved you visibly. Is there a journey in particular that comes to mind that

37:05Travel Diaries Host: There are situations, Holly, rather than journeys. Yeah. The cinema for the homeless in India, where a kind businessman noticed that all these millions of unemployed and unemployable people, usually from the Dalit, the untouchable class, quite often with massive problems, drink, drugs, just poverty, or inability, or disability, living like beggars, worse than beggars, worse than rats. And underneath one of the great bridges in, and I think we were in Mumbai. Was it Delhi? It might have been Delhi. I think it might have been Delhi. By the river there, where I'm quite hardy, so it doesn't worry me.

37:50Travel Diaries Host: I was picking through piles of excrement with rats as big as cats, just running easily around my feet. Amongst these men who had no home and no nothing. Some people had set up little stalls where they could give them the humblest vegetarian food. and maybe some clean water, not give them, sell them, because they had to make a living. And so these men would beg all day long and then come by that. A businessman passing by thought, what do they do in the daytime? And he got a big screen and rigged up a kind of video camera and got some old films and put a tarpaulin over the top and would show films so that the men could sit and lose their sense of present horror and degradation in adventures in Hollywood or Bollywood or wherever.

38:40Travel Diaries Host: And we were terribly touched by that. And I went in to sit on the ground with these lovely men and the courtesy of people who have nothing always brings me to tears. And he had no teeth, so it was hard to understand what he was saying. He was speaking in Hindustani anyway. But what he was saying is, can I get you anything? Can I get you some water? He had nothing to give me, but he knew he could go and get me some water. It absolutely caught my throat. Humanity. We clubbed together afterwards, so I'm pleased to say that their worst thing was that the rains came in. So we got them a massive tarpaulin to cover the whole thing, to cover the whole tent.

39:19Travel Diaries Host: And then, of course, the street boys in Haiti. I mean, I've since met all kinds of people, the gold miners in Madagascar who scratch a living and come out with something the size of a grain of pepper at the end of probably maybe even a week, which wouldn't really buy a bunch of bananas. The poverty of people around the world woven in with their, it seems to be absolutely in balance. The poorer you are, the more generous you are with what you've got and the more courteous you are. it's the rich people who are rude and mean and this has always struck me not all rich people of course lots of extremely generous people but there is a tendency to think you're special if you're rich and that's horrifying that's why I love doing these programs is to get back to my roots which is an ordinary human being who there but for the grace of God I'm living under a railway bridge in the middle of Delhi without anything yeah those experiences I imagine

40:16Joanna Lumley: you go back to as well, like in those quiet moments. You do. Yeah.

40:21Travel Diaries Host: And also the moments of sheer jubilation, being in Uzbekistan with an eagle, which weighs as much as a small dog, sitting on your gloved wrist, waiting for it, with its hood over its head, so as peaceful as peaceful can be. And once you take its hood off and let go of the jesses you hold here, and this vast thing soars off down the valley. I mean, you think, I can't think of privilege as greater than this.

40:45Joanna Lumley: It really struck me that you loved Uzbekistan.

40:47Travel Diaries Host: I loved it.

40:49Joanna Lumley: Yeah.

40:49Travel Diaries Host: These are countries so far away. I love the whole, I've always been fascinated by Central Asia. My grandparents, who were diplomats, traveled there a lot. My grandmother was a painter, a very good painter. She painted a lot in Tibet and in Sikkim and Bhutan. And also she painted in Persia, as it was in those days. But she got to be in love with Central Asia. And it's kind of, it's kind of the cradle of civilization. Of course, there was the Far East and China and all its, but the trading went on from Central Asia and out to the Far East. Europe was pretty much in the Dark Ages. There were Goths and Huns and we were painting our faces blue.

41:26Travel Diaries Host: But these unbelievably sophisticated societies were trading and traveling with their own particular cuisines and styles and languages, religions, inventions, things like paper, silk, tea, gunpowder. traveling to and fro and ending up in Central Asia. So I love those, what we call the stans, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and then Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, all these stans sitting around, many of whom have been under the rule of Russia for so long. And impenetrable for most tourists. Until 1991. And suddenly the Russian, sort of the USSR collapsed and these countries were free again.

42:12Joanna Lumley: Yeah, and it must be so exciting going to places that feel so undiscovered.

42:18Travel Diaries Host: To take the golden road to Samarkand. Yeah, I'd love to be around. You pinch yourself. These are dream places, dreams. And you know you're walking in ancient history. And it's the beauty and the food, the food and the tastes. And we've always thought of ourselves, which we are, cultured and sophisticated and so on in Europe. But then you realise these extraordinary cultures have been going on for centuries and centuries before our time started being recorded.

42:50Joanna Lumley: Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of these gems, as you say, Chapter 4 is your all-time favourite destination, Joanna. Oh, gosh.

43:00Travel Diaries Host: Tash Rabat. Tash Rabat is almost on the Chinese borders with Kyrgyzstan. and it is the most extraordinary, spine-chilling, hair-raising place. I first read about it with Colin Thuberon's Great Travels. He's a traveller. I just literally lie on the ground in front of him and say, walk over me, O Thuberon, the mighty. Brilliant travel writer. If you haven't read Colin Thuberon, start today. And I read about this place called Tashrabat. These are the things that intrigue me. Nobody knows if it was built as a palace or a prison or a fortress. Nobody knows when it was built. And even today, and having been there, nobody knows if it has 33 or 34 rooms.

43:49Because it's so haunted that when you count them, they come out different. Really?

43:56Travel Diaries Host: And it's also beyond the back of beyond. The back of beyond. and just when you're down a valley where you think nothing else can be happening you see crouching this extraordinary low building large enough to let a camel, a pack camel through because these were when, this was all part of the spice route the silk route, they were taking their things they would have come here, they would have come on maybe asses, maybe camels for sure then they'd have to disload everything, put it onto yaks to get through the high mountain passes before they were passed on. And so this was a great place where you could take a great loaded beast in and unload it.

44:38Travel Diaries Host: There are no windows, but there are holes in the ceiling, arched ceilings, and quite low rooms, and you creep through. You can stand up and hear the echo going around, and quite sort of humble and weird. And where the grand people would have slept, and where the people who were the camel managers and the people of the cooks and the things like this, where they would have been and how long they would have stayed there. And the great cold snows and the great intense heat of the summer, them packing up and going. But you can go to Tashrabat. It takes a bit of time. Get yourself to Kyrgyzstan and get yourself down to Tashrabat.

45:15Oh, my goodness.

45:16Joanna Lumley: You painted an amazing picture there.

45:18Travel Diaries Host: You'd love it, Holly. I've got a little piece of slate. I bring back stone and stuff. And so from volcanic areas, from Mount Ararat, I've got a piece of volcanic pumice and I've got a piece of fool's gold from the Murchison Falls in Uganda which I keep keeping all in the bathroom and then just recently from Gunungapi which is the great volcanic mountain in the Banda Islands I've got some more and I've got I've got some slate from Tashra Bat.

45:48Joanna Lumley: Incredible yeah I was we were just talking earlier that your house is a treasure trove of amazing travel memories it must be lovely to come across these things or like you

45:58Travel Diaries Host: say when you're in the bath and then you take it and I write on them so that if I fall down dead tomorrow I can leave in my will I say please put into my coffin with me my stones and particularly the Tash Rabat ones and all the other things the feathers my huge feathers from um vultures and shells and things I've collected I just love all those things the coffin will be hard to be pushed I think can't be carried lots of books to read in case I'm awake is there a passport stamp that

46:25Joanna Lumley: you're most proud of um some of them don't go into your passports so Iran was not in my passport

46:36Travel Diaries Host: you're given a special pass yes and I think um Russia they don't like to stamp your passport So some of these places are, I'm not sure with China, you have a special visa, which is a separate visa, which sometimes you have to hand in at the end. That's sad, isn't it? It's sad. And I keep all my old passports when they used to be the blue ones with all the corners cut off. Yes. And when I was a model, when I started traveling, having been to school in England, and then became a model and traveled a lot on the continent doing photographs all over all the European countries, I had to travel on a photograph of myself as 12 years old with sawn-off hair, not a scrap of makeup, and a round pudding face.

47:18Travel Diaries Host: And there was I modelled up looking pretty fabulous, a bit like Patsy, massive eyelashes and hair all done, you know, rouged cheeks and masses of lipstick and things. And the passport people would look at that and see this little pudding-faced 12-year-old. Sweet. But anyway, I love passports. And they used to put on them your height and your color. This is before your time. Did they? What your job was. And if you're a woman like me, I would be Joanna Lumley. But now I'm married and it would be Joanna Barlow. Nay, N-E-E with an accent. Grave on the, acute on the first E. Meaning your born name, your maiden name was Lumley.

47:55Travel Diaries Host: They've taken all that away now. So I used to, I had my passports as Joanna Barlow and I've been thrown off flights because the people booking me booked me as Joanna Lumley. Really? Having forgotten that I said, please book under Barlow. And they said, we don't have that down now. So now my passports I have, also known as. Do you actually? Really? They hate me for it, but I say you have to write this down or I'll have to kill you.

48:18Joanna Lumley: My daughter has an extremely long surname and it doesn't fit onto a plane ticket. So we're facing all kinds of new issues ourselves.

48:26Travel Diaries Host: Do you have a double surname?

48:28Joanna Lumley: What's her name? So my surname is Rubenstein. Beautiful name. And my husband's surname is Bagley.

48:33Travel Diaries Host: So this is quite a lot.

48:35Joanna Lumley: so yes it was we worked out like does it fit into all the boxes on you know on a form it just does but we couldn't decide you know i didn't want to give up my name i grew her and uh he didn't want to give up his name it's quite an unusual yeah name so yeah bagel a rubenstein doesn't fit on

48:53Travel Diaries Host: a ba ticket no it doesn't so we think it does be a start yes we'll just go for something quite you

49:00Joanna Lumley: quite cool yeah quite cool really so let's move on to chapter five which is your hidden gem a place that you love that my listeners might not know so much about um my heart returns to sienna in italy

49:14Travel Diaries Host: the campo in sienna is as old as the hills i mean italy is full of gems but there's something about sienna it was once a hugely important town city yeah um always at war with florence which makes you're so sad you go to such beautiful places why are you so angry with each other but siena has got this great central well you could it's not square but it's a kind of sloping it's called the campo de siena and it's just a circular kind of place which would have had a fountain in the middle of it it's got massive to all the the town hall and the great libraries and huge buildings around it every year they have the paleo the great horse race they won one in july one in august where contradas which are all these different i mean talk about tribal holly it is tribalness at its most tribal you're born within a contrada so if you put your pin in the middle and then put like cake stripes out i think there are 17 contrada and wherever you're born is what you are whether you're the the caterpillar or the owl or the dolphin or the lion or whatever it is all these different contralas and they have horses and every year in these horse races they're ridden bareback at the speed of light around this great place the food there is heaven i've been there in the winter and the summer and the spring and the autumn and to smell the wood smoke all the year oh the wood smoke and the cobbled tiny streets and they've kept all these old buildings and they've got modern things we'd be doing a podcast using modern equipment like this but in one of the ancient caves which used to be a wine cellar from the 13th century.

50:52Travel Diaries Host: This is magic way of living where you stitch the old into the new and the past occupies the present.

50:58Joanna Lumley: Yes yeah. What's up it's Sean Linda from Two Black Guys of Good Credit. If managed supply runs is still on your to-do list here's your science upgrade. Walmart business has the tech tools and services that make it ridiculously easy to stock up for your office or team. Think scheduled deliveries multi-user accounts, and even IT setup. Bonus, with a Walmart Business Plus membership,

51:23Travel Diaries Host: you get free shipping, spend analytics, and 2 % rewards. Join the smart way to shop at business.walmart.com. Terms apply.

51:32Joanna Lumley: Youth mental health is a complex challenge that requires comprehensive solutions. We must strengthen after-school programs. We must make digital literacy tools available in our schools. We must work with mental health professionals to support children and we must empower mentors educators and parents to keep kids happy learn more about our commitment to finding lasting solutions at empower our future coalition.com solutions paid for by the coalition to empower our future and of course in terms of hidden gems you come across so many on your new series joanna lumley's

52:12Travel Diaries Host: spice trail adventure that's it we junk we couldn't think what to call it but because we'd had the silk road adventure we thought the spice trail because there's something about spices because they usually ground when we get them that kind of sense of trail you it's almost as if you could sniff out following it and this holly was just extraordinary because luckily now in this country not when i first came here when i think we just had salt and pepper and that was it now this country is alive with spices we can get every spice under the sun and we revel in them and the huge range of different cuisines we have and the influences and the kind of fusion cooking we're used to spices all the time where did they come from and so this idea took us far far far away to almost the most remote place I've ever been on this earth and I've been nearly to the North Pole and I've been practically at the heart of the Sahara.

53:10Travel Diaries Host: I've been around the world a bit. This was a 10-hour ferry ride from Ambon, which itself is quite hard to get to, in Indonesia. The Banda Islands, where the only nutmeg trees in the whole world were grown in the 16th century. The only trees in the entire world from nutmeg. And from nutmeg you get mace as well.

53:32Joanna Lumley: Yes. And they used to trade with the Chinese,

53:35Travel Diaries Host: with the Indians, and with the Arabs. Late to the game came the Europeans in the form of the Dutch and the Portuguese and then later on the English, who were all frantic to get this new and delicious spice, which was reputed nutmeg, to be able to preserve meat. And remember, they had no refrigerators in those days. Yes. And they also claimed that it could cure the plague and the Black Death was sweeping the world in great waves every now and again. Up it would come again and steal away half the population. so this was to be devoutly desired and utterly fought over and they exported it on these 10 hour

54:12Joanna Lumley: long ferry or longer oh those were great big ships those would take forever yeah and of course there

54:18Travel Diaries Host: wasn't it to bring them back to europe you had to go around the south of south africa because the suez canal was not open of course so either you take them up the arabian sea and put them through great trading cities like Petra and Palmyra. Petra and Jordan, Palmyra and Syria. Which you also visited on the trip. And then they would travel up and maybe get to Venice. And then from Venice over... So these are very, very long journeys. But they say that if you had... If you've got one sort of sack of nutmeg, you were set up for about 10 years. It was so valuable. Really? The markup was something like 140 ,000%.

54:52Travel Diaries Host: Look, listener, I've made that up. But it was a massive markup. A huge amount.

54:57Joanna Lumley: and what were they like? How would you describe them for the listeners? The Bounder Islands? Yes.

55:02Travel Diaries Host: You began to lose hope that you'd ever get there on this huge night ferry thundering along great big jammed with people people sleeping on the corridor floors and people propped against the railings and looking and looking and in the morning looking through this sort of haze of rain please don't make it rain, it's still hot but could we see them? Then you just see little shapes and you go, oh my god, is that the Bounder? Those are the Bounder Islands. and there are several, but there are only five really inhabited, and one is called Gunung. Gunung is the name of an island. So Gunung Api means the fire island, and it's an active volcano, and about 400 yards off the active volcano is another small bandanero, which is the island where we stayed, then Bandabissar, then Ai, and then Run.

55:52Travel Diaries Host: And these were the bandar islands, and I had to pinch myself, because by now, having done a lot of research, these were a sort of mecca for me. It was a sort of goal that you never thought you'd actually get there. Very few. You don't go there really for holidays because, A, you can't get there. B, there's not much to do except be there. There are about two hotels in all of them.

56:13Joanna Lumley: Are they kind of, are they tropical? Tropical. Tropical. Drumming rain, extremely hot. Indonesian completely.

56:21Travel Diaries Host: Muslim, so five calls to prayer a day. completely maritime so you sail and go by boat or canoe or chug chug or vast you know ferry everything comes by sea and is traded by sea everybody who can walk can swim and can paddle a boat of some kind fascinating thrilling welcoming and they'd had the bloodiest history being overrun by european nations who treated them abominably i'm pleased to say it was the one place where the English behaved very distinguished and kindly and were asked to look after them. One of the islands, one of the distant islands, Rune. And the people of Rune were so grateful and said, thank God you're helping us because we're being slaughtered by the Dutch.

57:06Travel Diaries Host: We'd like to give you the island of Rune in perpetuity. This is a long time back. It's a long time ago, darling. Now you can't really give islands to people. I suspect you would. You've got a sweet-looking face. You might have an island, Holly. You just said you can have my island. I have to say. So the king then was James I of England, James VI of Scotland, was so thrilled that he called himself King of England, Scotland, Wales and Rune. Yeah, he was so proud of it. Later on, later on, later on, the British couldn't get the Dutch out, couldn't protect it and eventually came to a deal with the Dutch.

57:41Travel Diaries Host: And the Dutch said, we'll swap Rune. We want Rune because we've got nutmegs. You can have one of the islands we've got far away in the Northern Hemisphere. We said, oh really, what is it? And they said, oh, it's in a kind of estuary. It's okay. It's a bit swampy. So we said, okay, we'll have it. It was New Amsterdam. It was New York. So we swapped Rund with New York. And it was called the Manhattan Transfer. Of course. Which is, of course, what the great group is called, Manhattan Transfer, Mantran. Bizarre. What history that links to these remote islands. And these were people sailing in ordinary boats, sailors with scurvy and God knows what, having crossed the entire world.

58:20Travel Diaries Host: coming out to fight or to trade on these islands, literally like a fairy story, like Treasure Island, like everything under the sun. So it was quite, quite bewitching and utterly thrilling.

58:34Joanna Lumley: So you take, I mean, our final chapter, which we're not onto just yet, a couple more to go. But that was definitely taking somewhere off your bucket list, was it?

58:42Travel Diaries Host: Yes, I don't have a bucket list because I don't think I'm going to die. And so I don't have to kick the bucket, which is what it means.

58:48Joanna Lumley: Ultimately, yes.

58:48Travel Diaries Host: Doesn't it? It means that when you're standing there and about to kick the bucket away and hang yourself. See, all that makes me so full of gloom. And I think that maybe everything I do is my bucket list, so I don't have to have one. That's lovely. And then if you can't get to where you pray and long to go to, make today your bucket list. Make where you are. You know, if you, that old 60s song before your parents were born, Holly. If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. And I mean that. If you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in. you can dream about the other but if you don't get there your life will be ruined and if you do get there and it's not what you hoped for your life will be ruined so don't pin too much on those future things try to love what you're doing there's a great poem called Ithaca and I've forgotten the name of the great Greek writer who did it but he's it was all about the odysseys coming back home and they were returning to Ithaca and eventually Ithaca is not the destination is not it the destination is the journey the journey is eventually what you will

59:50Joanna Lumley: remember and what rewards you what wise words to live by Joanna our penultimate chapter is chapter six and that is your worst travel experience as someone overflowing with positivity have there

1:00:04Travel Diaries Host: been some shockers along the way it's only to do with illness I managed to make everything okay usually you can get over all kinds of things. And so if somewhere's slightly hostile or grey and dreary and you were hoping for sun or whatever, you can get through it talking of filming things. But illness is very hard to overcome. And usually I have to go on working because I'm the only presenter they've got. Yes. And I can remember when we were in the Nubian desert, I was following the Nile from where it gushes out into the Mediterranean, right up to the longest source of the Nile. So that would be through Uganda and then up into Rwanda.

1:00:41Travel Diaries Host: So we were coming down through Sudan. We were camping out, and I don't eat meat or fish, so it wasn't polluted that anyway. I got a bug. And I had what I would call the black runs, which just means your entire body turns to black liquid, and there's nothing you can do about it. In the nighttime, no question of any lavatories or anything like this, camping out in the desert in my own little tent. and having to go barefoot because I hadn't had time to put on my shoes over scabby cutting rocks. There were no bushes or trees, but it was in the darkness. Again, again, again, and running out of water because there was not quite enough water to drink, knowing I had to rehydrate, and the pain and the sweat and everything.

1:01:32Joanna Lumley: Oh, dear. And waiting until the morning and then knowing you're going to have to film,

1:01:36Travel Diaries Host: and then eating Imodium and then Imodium, as you know, as any traveller knows, turns you to concrete. So you're feeling completely washed up but now filled with concrete. And those things are very hard and all you really want to do is to lie down quietly in the shade and there is no shade and it's boiling hot and you're going to have to work. That is quite... Those ones are hard.

1:01:57Joanna Lumley: People, I imagine, say, gosh, you have the most amazing life, going to all these amazing places. And that is amazing, but those moments...

1:02:05Travel Diaries Host: And I had it in India and Kashmir where I ate something out of the lake and I shouldn't if I knew that. But I did because I was on camera and thought it would be amusing. And I got crippled there. And, you know, on all the trips we do, there are days of that lying doubled over thinking, God, will this ever pass?

1:02:22Joanna Lumley: Yeah.

1:02:23Travel Diaries Host: And there's not much you can do about it except push on through, you know.

1:02:26Joanna Lumley: Yeah, and we'd never know it on camera, would we? The consummate professional. Good, that's all that matters. jana it has just been everything i'd hope for and more talking to you thank you so much for sharing your travel diaries our final chapter is normally chapter seven the destination that's at the top of your bucket list i'm not going to word it that way no but i'm going to ask perhaps is there a place that you haven't been in the world that spikes your curiosity and piques your curiosity and that you would love to visit one day, potentially? Oh, gosh, so many.

1:03:00Travel Diaries Host: I've always secretly rather longed to go to Romania, to the great wild hills there, which I believe are very, very beautiful. I tell you what I've seen, and I've seen it up in the great high Alps in Turkey. Spring flowers, when they're wild flowers, and you can't believe the beauty of the earth when nobody's been there ever, ever, ever to cut the grass and to put on insect repellents or I can't remember the words, all the things that they use to suppress weeds and things, when nothing's happened, to walk in the paradise of a wild garden, I've seen it in Greece, down in the Peloponnese in springtime, and so to go to these rare countries where they haven't gone mad with pesticides, and so all the animals and birds and butterflies and bees and moths and insects are jumping and hopping and crickets are cricketing and the flowers are better than the Chelsea Flower Show and you think this earth is paradise and the only thing that will spoil it is human beings and we are human beings so it's our responsibility not to spoil it

1:04:09Joanna Lumley: What a way to end Thank you so much Joanna Lumley, those were your travel diaries

1:04:15Travel Diaries Host: Thank you Holly

1:04:21Joanna Lumley: Oh, well, I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. And a big thank you to the Kensington Hotel for having us. After our interview, there were all these beautiful cakes that were laid out in the suite provided by the hotel. And Joanna was like, darling, you must have some of these cakes. You must have some of them. They must get eaten. And I said, no, it's OK, don't worry. And I started packing up my equipment. Meanwhile, she disappears into the bathroom. and I turn around and she presents me with this shower cap, which she had obviously gone in there to retrieve and she'd filled it with all the cakes.

1:04:56Joanna Lumley: She said, pop this in your handbag. Pop it in your handbag for the journey home. So it just made me laugh. What a lovely thing to do. So funny and thoughtful. Thanks so much for listening today. I'll be back with another special episode from the Archive next week. In the meantime, if you'd like to stay in touch, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. I'm at Holly Rubenstein. I'd of course love to hear from you. If you enjoyed today's episode, remember you've got over 160 others in the back catalogue to discover wherever you get your podcasts all the destinations that are mentioned by my guests are always included in the episode show notes here on your podcast app and on my website thetraveldiariespodcast.com right that's it for today wishing you all safe travels until next time thanks guys

1:05:48Thank you.

1:06:17Joanna Lumley: parents to keep kids happy. Learn more about our commitment to finding lasting solutions at empowerourfuturecoalition.com solutions paid for by the coalition to empower our future.