Tom Bradby

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1:12Tom Bradby: That's code TRAVELDIARIES. You can also find the link in the episode description here or head to salee.com forward slash TRAVELDIARIES for more details. Thank you to Salee.

1:28Tom Bradby: Hello everyone and welcome to the Travel Diaries podcast. I'm your host Holly Rubenstein and here each week I invite a very special guest to take us through the seven chapters of their life's travel diaries from their all-time favourite destination and hidden gem to what's at the top of their bucket list. This season you'll be able to watch the podcast as well as listen. Thank you very much for some of your messages about last week's video on Spotify. sorry there were some audio issues there it's a kind of new frontier the video element of podcasts and interfaces that we're having to navigate it should all be resolved now and thank you for your patience on that well i hope that you all had a good week this week it was lovely to have a little taste of summer wasn't it for a couple of days and today's guest i met a couple of weeks ago at the london marriott county hall it is tom bradby now tom is the calm authoritative face of the ITV News at 10.

2:26Tom Bradby: But behind that desk is a man who's reported from war zones, witness history unfold firsthand, and he's even been shot in the line of duty. He's spent decades right at the centre of global events, from political uprisings to natural disasters, often in places most of us would never dare to go. And then there's the royal family. He's one of very few journalists who have had real behind-the-scenes access at the moments the whole world is watching and I try and ask him about this today. He was a journalist chosen to conduct the official engagement interview between Prince William and Kate. Years later, he was trusted again, this time sitting down with Prince Harry and Meghan in Africa in that interview that completely broke with royal tradition when Harry openly spoke about the pressures he was under and confirmed a rift with his brother.

3:16Tom Bradby: So these are moments that people will remember watching forever and talking about picking apart the next day, all with Tom at the helm. And now he's turned all of that experience into drama with his new ITV series, Secret Service, with Gemma Arterton, a gripping political thriller that feels so real because it comes from a world he knows intimately. It is brilliant. I've got another chapter in my own travel diaries to share with you. This is a very special one. A London staycation at Raffles London at the Owo. Now the OWO is the old war office and Churchill worked here. Intelligence operations were planned here.

3:56Tom Bradby: You can feel that weight of history in a way that's really rare for any hotel. We arrived on Whitehall and you step into this vast, imposing building that once helped to run the British Empire and you pass through these enormous doors into a space that immediately sets the tone. These high ceilings, enormous glittering chandelier, polished stone, and this sense of hushed grandeur. And then the corridors, long, softly lit, lined with dark wood panelling that's original to the building, genuinely feels so cinematic, like you've wandered onto the set of a political drama, except every detail is real, and every inch has been painstakingly brought back to life.

4:39Tom Bradby: I was staying in the Haldane Suite, which was Winston Churchill's office in the 1920s, looking straight over Horse Guards Parade. And for anybody who is into history, you're going to find this place so exciting. It's definitely a high price point to stay there. So if staying there is out of reach, might I recommend going there for a drink, a cocktail. The cocktails were fantastic. Or a meal in one of the restaurants, just so that you can get a glimpse of this incredibly historic building. I think for me, it's up there with the most impressive hotels I've ever stayed in. make a date to visit there if you can.

5:17Tom Bradby: Raffles London at the Owe. Thank you so much for having us. So let's get going with Tom from the history of Malta and the islands of the Swedish archipelago to the beaches of Sydney and the mountains of Austria. This one takes us all around the world. So let's buckle up and get started.

5:43Tom Bradby: Tom welcome to the travel diaries it is lovely to meet you I feel like I know you because I see you every night on the tv screen how are you I'm very good you know the funniest thing about

5:54The Travel Diaries Host: being in the news I've sometimes been around like on a you know with a film star or a tv star and you watch people come up to them and they're they're very sort of respectful whereas when anyone meets someone on the news it's like they had a previous conversation that was interrupted halfway through and it's just hilarious it's kind of actually really endearing part of my job because people just come up and start chatting to you and it's always a con they don't say oh hi you're they just say well you know that donald trump is blah or yeah kiss you know it's just it really

6:26Tom Bradby: amuses me that's so funny uh is is travel an important part of your life yes i spent a while

6:32The Travel Diaries Host: as a foreign correspondent i've traveled a lot through my work generally both before being a foreign correspondent and afterwards i love traveling i just love it i love getting on a plane i love going somewhere new i love going somewhere not new i mean there's a few places i haven't necessarily enjoyed every every second of certainly when you're a foreign correspondent going somewhere dangerous it has a slightly different texture to it you know definitely places where I stayed up all night unable to sleep thinking about whether I really should be going to whatever the dangerous place it was but yeah I love travel and it has been part of my life from a relatively early age and I guess when I was growing up had some quite formative experiences traveling so and I will want to travel till I die I just love it well it sounds like I'm in the

7:24Tom Bradby: right place you're the right place we're gonna uncover the seven chapters of your life's travel diaries today and i know it'd be hard to whittle it down but we go back to the beginning to your childhood with chapter one and that is your earliest childhood travel memory i think i would

7:40The Travel Diaries Host: the one i'm gonna pick is going to gibraltar so when my dad was in the navy in a way that seems weird now a lot of my childhood was just away i mean he was away on a ship for eight months 10 months a year more than once i mean quite regularly but i think my dad was my dad was on a ship called devonshire and it was attached to the mediterranean fleet and he was basically going to be in the med for eight months or a year and what my mom discovered was that she was entitled to a married quarter in gibraltar and my mother was quite adventurous and she obviously thought well i don't want to stay in rainy britain with my six-year-old son i was an only child so why don't we just go and live in gibraltar so we got on a train and we traveled all through france and all through spain to get to gibraltar and my memories of it are so vivid i can remember my mum who spoke virtually no french and no spanish at all imitating a sleeper train on the train platform in madrid which i found absolutely mortifying i found that bit of it sort of vaguely traumatic but then we got to gibraltar and i went to school there a pretty rough military school i think somewhere out on the point and i loved it you know it was just sunny it was a bit exotic i went swimming in rosia bay every day it was an absolutely it was it was a really really wonderful experience how long were you there for we were there about seven eight months my mum later told me that my dad's ship only actually came in once in that time and I don't really remember my dad much there oddly enough now my mum has gone when I think of her it's often in Gibraltar funnily enough I think I think it was a a very formative yeah it was a very it made me love the sun and the med and the sea I mean the the changing schools is obviously quite but I obviously fitted in okay I remember being in a gang I mean there's I'm not six like I mean let's not exaggerate but I remember at one point being chased by another gang and the gang and that jumping off a wall and landing on a nail went through my foot and the gang leader taking me back to my mum who's absolutely tore a lot of strips off him but yeah it was it was a really good time so I would pick that the other place I would mention is is when I was I was born in Malta and we went back to live there for eight or nine months when I was three and although I don't have any direct memory of it when I've just finished making this tv drama secret service which is out very soon was based on one of my books and we partly shot it in malta yeah and i had we spent two weeks there and i took had all the family out and they were my kids are in their late 20s and they were working from home from there and i was on set every day and it was just it was just a really really i mean i'm so thrilled with how the drama turned out which really helps but it was a thrilling it was a really wonderful and magical experience being there but the whole Malta of it all was quite a thing for me and I felt quite emotional about it and I had this weird sense that it felt like a bit like home and familiar

11:00Tom Bradby: in a way I couldn't quite quantify a circle moment and then yeah your family being there too yeah and

11:05The Travel Diaries Host: I don't know whether that's just mystical you know nonsense that I've convinced myself of but it did feel and maybe the Gibraltar which is kind of quite different from Malta but has some similarities I don't know whether that whole double experience of living in Malta at three and Gibraltar at six created this kind of thing. But I certainly directly remember Gibraltar and Malta is more of a feeling.

11:28Tom Bradby: And I mean, it's so exciting that that was shot there. What is it that you love about Malta as a destination?

11:35The Travel Diaries Host: Well, it's incredibly beautiful.

11:37Tom Bradby: It's so much more historic than some people may realise.

11:39The Travel Diaries Host: Yeah, I mean, Valletta, what a city. and the you know the color of the sea everything about it is i mean there are bits of it where you know if they had their time again maybe they develop tourism slightly differently but most of it i thought was stunningly beautiful i mean i'm i've got to tell you it's an absolutely amazing place to shoot a tv drama and hopefully lots of people will visit having watched it

12:04Tom Bradby: what are some of the main sites because the show really like highlight it's shot in some of the really key sites of Malta?

12:10The Travel Diaries Host: Well I'd go to Valletta and I would spend quite a lot of time there because Valletta is stunningly beautiful just wandering around Valletta is amazing we didn't go on this trip to Gozo because we filmed all on Malta itself but I have been on a swimming holiday of all things to Gozo separately we went a couple of years before which I absolutely loved as well. Gozo's a different island yeah you have to go to but it's kind of quieter and it's got really beautiful coves and incredible and if you like open water swimming and the most incredible swims along long cliff edges you know water that's in incredible visibility and perfect sort of color so gozo was lovely but on malta rabat is really amazing old town it's near my birthplace from tarfa so we went there i went to the old naval hospital which is now deserted but it was my kids found that very funny nick clearly going to dad's birthplace this really really was for me and i ended up incredibly proud of it so i look back and feel slightly mystical about the whole experience really like malta a cast you really like they're all incredibly likable a director you really love a producer you really love so the whole thing was one of the best experiences yeah it was one of the best experience of my working life for sure but go to malta you know and not just because i was born

13:34Tom Bradby: don't let that put you on today's episode is brought to you by airbnb if you travel even semi-regularly you'll know that moment of locking your front door and heading off and your home is just sitting there while you're off on your adventures more and more i'm hearing from listeners and friends who found a really practical way to make the most of that time hosting on Airbnb when they're away. It's not about doing anything full time. It's simply about unlocking the value of your home during the periods you're not using it. You stay completely in control of your calendar and you decide what works for you and when.

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14:47The Travel Diaries Host: Well it's a place called Alpback in Austria which most people will never have heard of it's a tiny ski resort in the Austrian Alps regularly voted the prettiest village in Tyrol and I think possibly Austria I first went there when I was five but when more and I loved it immediately but more pertinently when I was 12 we moved to Germany my father went to work at the embassy there and we moved to this house in Bonn and I basically got into ski racing it's the very short version of this story I loved skiing and somehow the idea came up that I was going to go and train with one of these alpine clubs and I ended up going to the join the Alpac Visitors Ski Club so I would spend I would guess somewhere between seven and ten weeks a year in the Alps not so about four weeks or five weeks over Christmas and then maybe three weeks over Easter and then we'd go summer training in a glacier nearby and slalom was my thing and I don't want to imply that I was a serious top level skier but probably for about four years I was trying five years maybe I was trying pretty hard and sort of gradually starting near the bottom working my way up the rankings of the British Junior Championships didn't get near the top but then I stopped before I would have been in that age range anyway but and there are kind of you know reasons why I stopped I learned to not love ski racing and decided to stop it but what I never lost was the love of this kind of tiny Austrian village where we all trained next to the local kids and I just sort of

16:28Tom Bradby: loved it and it's become a second home to me wow I didn't know that about you what an amazing random fact yeah can you paint a picture of what it's like if it's one of the prettiest it's just a

16:38The Travel Diaries Host: tiny little resort and it has a group of it's sort of the center of it is on a kind of u but you know a sort of s bend it's got really pretty church it's got some i mean it's just all every bit chocolate boxy austrian albs i've been there quite a lot in summer with my wife and we love it in summer it's the most incredible walking and the skiing's a bit more extensive i mean when i was there your average day would start at 8 30 on the slalom run in inner outback and would probably end the trainer one of the trainers i had could be quite bad tempered so if he didn't if he didn't think we were trying hard enough he would ban us from taking the lift and we'd have to ski the slalom and then take our skis off and walk back up and then ski down that was a really bad day but um and i ended up sort of falling out of love with ski racing because it's a very binary you know if you're at the british junior championships and you're in the start gate and you know you're starting at number 35 or something and you're not going to win or near the top but you know you want to do your best and you've trained for this for four weeks and you come out the start gate and you catch an edge on the third gate and crash out and then you have your trainers and your parents saying oh what went wrong tom and you'll be like well i bloody fell over and i just found the sort a whole letting feeling that you I'd let people down yeah really awful so I sort of fell out of love with the ski racing part and so you mentioned then so you lived in Malta Gibraltar

18:15Tom Bradby: in Bond yeah so do you think that that is what gave you that curiosity for the world that then led you into journalism

18:25The Travel Diaries Host: I think it probably is I mean I think it gave me a love of I mean I really love everything I do I I really love my work with ITN. I've been with ITN for 36 years, which when I say out loud sounds demented. But I really loved it as a trainee when I walked in through the door and I still do. And yeah, I was incredibly engaged with the world. I can remember, I guess I must have been 12 or 13, going to Berlin. And in those days, you could go through into East Berlin in a diplomatic car. My dad couldn't go because he was in the military. but my mum and I went one day through Checkpoint Charlie, through the Berlin Wall into the East.

19:06The Travel Diaries Host: And I was riveted, of course. I mean, it was just, you know, I was a 12-year-old talking about sort of East versus West. And that made an absolutely monumental impression on me. And I think part of my love, I mean, Len Dayton died a short time ago. He's probably my favourite spy writer up there with Le Carre. But his Berlin game set and match series is one of my all-time favorite reading matter. And if you read my trilogy's Secret Service, Double Agent and Triple Cross, which the TV drama is based on the first of the books, but it's fairly obvious that I was inspired by Len Dayton. But again, you know, the kind of grayness of the East and the way Len Dayton portrayed it, I probably read Berlin Game not long after I was in Germany for that period so I would absolutely draw a line not only to my journalism but also to my writing from that from that period yeah as a young man boy and when you first started reporting abroad

20:12Tom Bradby: as a foreign correspondent was there a place that captivated you um despite what was perhaps going

20:20The Travel Diaries Host: on around around you I was Asia correspondent so I I traveled but that said I traveled I spent a lot of time in America I think it's kind of weird when I look back on it why you had such a strong reaction to a place for for or against I loved India I mean India was just fascinating to me And quite a lot of what I did in India was, it could be a bit grim. I mean, I went to cover an earthquake in Gujarat. I spent 12 days sleeping in a graveyard because that was the only place with walls that were standing. And we were trying to protect our kit. And there wasn't a single building in a town that had previously inhabited 20 ,000 people that was left standing.

21:08The Travel Diaries Host: And many of the people were very sadly buried beneath the rubble. And it was quite a traumatic experience. if you've ever covered an earthquake in a hot climate things it's really terrible let me tell you and so i had like bad experiences in india but i think just before that literally the reason i was in india i've been to cover the kumala which is the world's biggest religious festival yeah which from memory i think happens near varanasi and we went to cover it as a human phenomenon because on one day the most auspicious day in the month happens every 12 years at that time around 35 million people i think it's now nearer to 70 tried to get down to one point um on the ganges between sun up and sunset i'm like you you 35 million people in one place i mean that is and after we so we did that and which was kind of an amazing experience then we went to

21:59Tom Bradby: but how do you cut how do you cover that even safely like well i tell you what there's no

22:03The Travel Diaries Host: mechanization like if you have a certainly when i covered it you have a heart attack in the middle of that you're going to die you know you want to you want to be really basic you want to go to the loo you go to the loo i mean there's no there's no like public toilets and there's no medical facilities and there's no helicopters landing i mean it was just one enormous motorway of people going in one enormous motorway of people coming out i mean i don't know how many m25s of us but

22:30Tom Bradby: just vast numbers of people unfathomable really unfathomable and that was kind of the whole point

22:35The Travel Diaries Host: of it and trying to give a sense of that scale was quite difficult difficult but it was yeah it was an unforgettable experience and then we had this sort of reverse experience with the earthquake which was was it was pretty traumatic and then on I remember leaving we were leaving India flying back to Delhi from an airport in Ahmedabad and I was so tired like I hadn't slept it was like 40 degrees in the day three degrees at night didn't really have a proper sleeping bag so i hadn't eaten properly for days had like two hours sleep a night so i was pretty much at the end of my tether but was sort of sitting there all over my team comatose in the airport and suddenly this basically i can't think of any way that we're describing it than this enormous fight starts over the airline check-in and our indian fixer is saying well yeah these people think that the airline staff have sold their tickets to someone it's like there's enormous fist fight it's like we're at the okay corral you know it happens in the middle of the airport and i just thought that's india just always in your face never boring full of culture and life and history and

23:44Tom Bradby: an incredible place really well i mean it sounds pretty formative chapter three is the place where you learned the most about yourself where would you pick for that well i would say the obvious

23:55The Travel Diaries Host: choice for me would be Jakarta I got shot in Jakarta and had a pretty bad 24 hours I suppose and it showed a lot of my life at that time in sharp relief so what I mean by that is I'd been in Jakarta for a while at that point it's not a city I overly love anyway I mean I I haven't been back there, funnily enough, since I got shot. Where were you shot? I was shot, you mean in my body or in physically? In my lower, I had a sort of rocket flare went through the middle of my lower right leg. It was basically after the dictator Suharto fell, there were democratic elections. Would it have been a year or two later?

24:47and basically Megawati Sukarnoputri,

24:51The Travel Diaries Host: who was the daughter of Sukarno, who'd been the president of Indonesia at Independence, she won the largest part of the vote and her supporters, who were a kind of paramilitary army, all dressed in black with red berets, came down to Jakarta and made very clear that if she wasn't, because she didn't have a majority, wasn't voted by MPs in as the new leader, then there would be hell to pay and they MPs in their wisdom decided not to vote her in and so there was hell to pay and the whole sort of city got ripped to bits and I was in the middle of a massive conflagration between protesters and the parliament and it just it just you were caught in the middle and someone fired a rocket flare right through the middle of my leg and um what I mean by where I learned most about myself though is that I think I mentioned before that when I was going into dangerous places I would you know I didn't have the thrill I would normally have like if I was going to cover the Kumela in India I'd be really excited about getting in a plane if I was going to the war in Kosovo I'd be excited because you're always excited by a big story but there'd be a kind of knot turning in the bottom of your stomach yeah and I had three young kids by then wow and i just found myself so there'd been a lot of trouble in east timor before i got shot in jakarta and i remember staying up all night before i went and my wife waking up and said what are you doing and i was like i just can't sleep i think what if i never see you and the kids again and i just i'd found it i'd found it quite it begun to torture me in a way probably wouldn't now if i'm really honest if now my kids are grown up but it really did you know i wanted my whole life to be a foreign correspondent for some of the reasons we talked about at the start it had been in my blood to want to get out there and see the world and report on things firsthand and here i was reporting on very exciting things but i was tending to torture myself about whether it was you know responsible as a dad to be doing this and i kept on thinking I had this sort of story I played in my head of you know imagining my oldest son at 10 and someone saying oh something about oh you know what's your dad's name oh no he's not my dad he's my stepdad oh what happened to your dad oh well he died where did he die oh he died in Jakarta um and that really kind of played on a loop inside my head and so I thought being shot really brought that into stark relief because I thought and my wife and I weirdly had quite different psychological reactions because before it happened and when I was going somewhere dangerous and worried about it she said well you say you can do it safely so just trust to that and do it and so after I got shot I was like well I got shot and survived this is fantastic I can go anywhere and do anything and she's like are you smoking something funny like what the hell like you told me you could do it safely and now you've been shot so you obviously can't and I really think you should can it and

28:00Tom Bradby: ultimately I did being a foreign person yeah I mean I did it for about another year and a half but

28:05The Travel Diaries Host: um I kind of took the decision I couldn't be deployed anywhere dangerous for the for the following year anyway because I couldn't run properly and I basically took the decision that that was I was going to wind it down and stop it and are you happy you did I think I I have the greatest admiration for long-term foreign correspondence and you know i so many people i work with have had hair raising experiences you know i ended up being shot but plenty of other people that had just as bad experiences in some ways but didn't didn't get physically harmed and i don't think it's worth the stress it's causing me yeah and you know to some extent i don't think that's necessarily about the risk or not risk per se because there's risks in lots of things right it's a question about how you manage the psychology of risk if you can go into it as a lot of people who are successful long term at it with a more phlegmatic attitude you know i could i could die getting cycling to work you know fate will do what fate's going to do if that's your attitude and you can stick to that then i think it's much easier to do that kind of job than it is if you're always trying to work out what threat's going to come around the corner tomorrow and mitigate it because and the final thing maybe i'd say about being a foreign correspondent which is so hard almost the most stressful thing about it i came to be rather sort of jealous of military people who yes were taking more risks per se but they had like training and a and a purpose and a logic whereas when you're a journalist it's like well should we should we go into that village you know could be a massive it's just been hit by a mortar we could end up with a massive exclusive on the other hand they could mortar it again and then they get us yeah and you like evaluate that evaluate that and you big exclusive death yeah let's just debate that for a bit and that i found that so stressful you know you sit around what's the right answer we sort of left east timor effectively at gunpoint when that was a big story and there were reports that the indonesians were massacring people in inside and which they weren't on the scale that we you know there were lots of things going on but not like massacres at that particular point but we didn't know that and it's cut a very long story short we had the potential possibility to go back in and get a flight landed and you know maybe have an exclusive in showing what was or wasn't going on and i remember sitting around with the team and saying right okay we're going to have a conversation in this room all i'm going to tell the news desk in london is that we're going or we're not going i'm never going to say who didn't want to go and i went around the room and everyone

30:49Tom Bradby: said well i'll do it if you want to do it tom and i was like oh my god no pressure anyway yeah

30:55The Travel Diaries Host: and well we decided to go and then didn't manage to take off and wasted a lot of money hiring a plane because the person who told us we had clearance turned out to be a liar but hey god

31:07Tom Bradby: The roller coaster of foreign correspondence. Wow, what an amazing chapter of your life. And we move on now to chapter four. And that is your all-time favorite destination. What brings you the most joy when you think about it?

31:23The Travel Diaries Host: Sydney.

31:23Tom Bradby: Sydney.

31:24The Travel Diaries Host: I thought really hard about this because there's so many places that I love. And I've been lucky enough to go to some great places through work. I've been on some wonderful holidays. is that we went to Namibia on a family holiday a few years ago, which I absolutely loved. Not the first time I'd been there, but I really loved it. But I think my wife and I were in Sydney before Christmas. When we left Hong Kong, when I was winding up being a foreign correspondent, I, as I said, was doing pretty well as a novelist. And we did very seriously think about me leaving ITN. My wife's a jewellery designer, and she was doing really well as well with that.

32:02The Travel Diaries Host: and we thought why don't we just we didn't feel ready to come back to the UK and we thought why don't we go to Sydney because we'd been to Australia quite a bit on holiday from Hong Kong I'd gone there to recuperate after being shot and there's something about Sydney the sunshine the beaches the boardwalks the food the outdoor life the sunny optimism that both of us my wife was actually born in Australia her dad was in the Navy as well I just happened to be there but yeah it sort of speaks to us on some level and we we try to go back every other year or so and when i say to people in the newsroom right there are well you're not here for the next piece where are you i'm going to australia i'm like what again and i my wife has some family there so i use usually use that as an excuse and we do go to see them but mostly it's because we just love it

32:50Tom Bradby: oh i have to say i've never been it's on my bucket list i i just like you say the kind of sunny optimism of it all just i mean it's a long way away which is a pain in the neck but

33:00The Travel Diaries Host: Once you get there, it's really, we're the little kids, definitely so. But when you get there, it is, it's so worth it. And, you know, this time we were there, we rented an apartment high up above Bondi Beach. And it was quite weird because it was about three weeks before that attack. And the pictures of people running off the beach was exactly the walk we used to do. So that was pretty weird. But my wife and I are sort of really big swimmers. So we sort of wandered down to the Bondi icebergs sea pool every morning. And like your day begins with a swim against this amazing sunny sky. And then you head out for a breakfast in the sunshine.

33:38The Travel Diaries Host: And I don't know, it's pretty hard for a day to feel bad after that.

33:43Tom Bradby: Oh, sounds gorgeous. Such a nice quality of life out there.

33:46The Travel Diaries Host: Yeah, I don't think I'd want to live there, actually. I mean, it feels a long way. I mean, in a way, what's wonderful about it is it feels very cut off from the rest of the world, even if you go there for a short time. and I think that probably would be why I wouldn't want to live I definitely wouldn't want to live there and all our family and friends are here but it's definitely you know for the rest of our lives I think we'd really love to spend you know some time there I mean probably if we could we'd go

34:13Tom Bradby: every winter for a bit but um so you know it really well what are your go-to favorite spots

34:19The Travel Diaries Host: that you go every single time we definitely go to the Bondi icebergs to swim pretty much every morning there's a great pool in Bronte as well I mean in fact there are really good sea pools all the way up and down it we always go to Bill's and Bondi for breakfast Bill Granger who sadly died recently great kind of breakfast lunch spot so that's fantastic what do you order pancakes in my case my wife doesn't but um they do a really delicious ricotta pancake in Bill's so um yeah I would really recommend that i mean the there you can walk i think from coogee sort of south of bondi all the way up to manly and so that that's a walk that goes ultimately over hit sydney harbour bridge and then all the way around the north shore i think there's like 86 kilometers of boardwalk and we we what we tend to do is like we'll get out have a swim at breakfast and then we'll go and do some walking and you just sort of uber to the place where you finish the day before and then walk for three hours stop for lunch and so it's kind of active yes active holiday yeah outdoor

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37:26Tom Bradby: So then you were also a royal correspondent. I was. As a big chapter, notable chapter of your life.

37:33The Travel Diaries Host: Very short, actually. I was only royal correspondent for two years. Not that you'd believe that if you read my cuttings. But yeah, I was in fact very briefly royal correspondent.

37:41Tom Bradby: And you also travelled with Harry and Meghan to Africa for their documentary, which was a watershed moment. You know, it was the moment that Harry said that he was going on a different path to William. do you feel like that interview shifted the future of the monarchy well what I have learned

38:11The Travel Diaries Host: I'm a journalist and so when I am asked about the royal family when I've been asked over the years I've always felt like I should try and answer honestly wisely or unwisely and obviously there was a long period where even though I was like royal correspondent actually only from 2001 to 2003 the tale of it I went on to be UK editor and then I went on to be political editor for 10 years but obviously the tale of that job lasted a pretty long time and every time I was asked about it I felt like what there's no reason not to talk about it and I always try to answer a question as openly as I can because I think you know I just think as a journalist you should what I've unfortunately discovered in the last four five six years is that if I talk about it at all and say anything at all then that becomes a headline so what I've sort of decided and I'm really sorry about this it's not very helpful and it's you know probably not very helpful for your listeners but it's just a decision I've come to is to try and take a vow of silence on the subject but preferably for the rest of my life, which let's see.

39:23The Travel Diaries Host: But I just, there's so many royal commentators who have so much to say and I just don't want to be one of them.

39:30Tom Bradby: Is it something that you've kind of moved on in terms of like your personal relationships as well? I think,

39:39The Travel Diaries Host: again, anything I say about that just gets turned into a headline and my personal relationships or whatever they are, I felt like I had to, when asked about that, reflect on it before, but I've sort of realised I don't. So I'm going to sort of very politely, respectfully, much as I like you, and I'm enjoying this interview, going to try and avoid getting into this one because it just creates an awful lot of clickbait.

40:10Tom Bradby: God, it makes you think how tedious it must be for them if it's this difficult for you.

40:14The Travel Diaries Host: well it's just a it's just a reflection of the reality isn't it really i mean you know people are interested if you're somebody who is perceived to know things then anything you say is gonna is gonna blow up um and i've just had to accept that i mean yeah i don't think that's my start point as a journalist clearly because i am on the record over the years but i think i've just had to learn a bit of self-discipline about it really so this is massively unhelpful for your interview i was

40:44Tom Bradby: I actually just find it interesting.

40:48The Travel Diaries Host: It's complicated. I mean, the thing I would maybe say, and this doesn't have, I don't say this particularly germane to the royal family bit of it, but it's just obviously, I've been a journalist working in national news for 36 years. I've developed relationships with all kinds of people in all walks of life, politicians and all the rest of it. And that's a kind of complicating factor because you want to get to know people because you want to know what's going on. You want people to tell you the truth about things. but then obviously you develop personal relationships and that gets complicated and i think the job of managing that is maybe more complicated than you think it is when you first start um you know particularly if someone's like a prime minister or a leader of the opposition or something like that and you're maybe being a bit of displaging about something they've done on the news but you then having dinner with them the following wednesday you know it's those are kind of quite nuanced complications so you want to know them because you want to know what's in their heads and you want to be able to report it to your audience but at the same time maybe you really like them and therefore you know quite like them or get on with them so i don't know they didn't really teach you that in journalism training it's something you have to work out yeah it's like relationship building and like straddling this nuance yeah and i'm i try really hard to keep confidences which isn't the world's most useful trait in a journalist I sometimes think because you kind of think right well I know lots of things but I can't report after them so but I guess I'd rather know and feel that you're what you are reporting you know is truthful yeah absolutely

42:25Tom Bradby: well we move on to chapter five and that is your hidden gem a place that you love that maybe my listeners don't know so much about i wanted to pick something slightly random because i don't

42:37The Travel Diaries Host: think it's a hidden gem but i wanted to pick stockholm because over the last few years we've been a couple of times to on a summer holiday to sweden we went once with our kids we rented a house up on the stockholm archipelago and my wife and i liked it so much we went back last year and we didn't rent a house but we stayed in a couple of hotels because the kids weren't with us and it is so lovely i mean it's the swedish summer vibe is a thing i mean when i say who knew it's like lots of people knew the swedes knew but i didn't know and don't get me wrong i love a greek summer holiday or wherever you want to go in the med and you know malta blah blah as we've discussed earlier and we've done we love doing that but sweden was a you know the it's just the whole business of everyone has their house out on the water and not everyone a lot of people have houses on the water and there's like they have the sauna and their jetty and they get on boats and go up to tour the islands and i don't know they're just the whole if you've been there in the summer you'll

43:43Tom Bradby: know exactly what i'm talking about if you long days as well long days great food incredibly

43:49The Travel Diaries Host: friendly people just the whole vibe bit um was really really spectacular i really loved it i

43:56Tom Bradby: think that really is a hidden gem the archipelago in particular um for anyone who hasn't been there if you're is it easy to get into the vibe and the culture if you're not swedish i would say it is

44:10The Travel Diaries Host: it's very relaxed it's not very fancy we were staying the first year we rented a house out in I think it was called Rosaro, which is out near Vaxholm. So it's about 40 minutes out of Stockholm. Well, first of all...

44:22Tom Bradby: Do you drive or do you go on back?

44:23The Travel Diaries Host: Well, we hired a car and we drove to this house. And basically, it's 40 minutes out of central Stockholm. But it feels like it's a million miles away. So you can go to Vaxholm and get the ferry in Stockholm, which in memory takes about 50 minutes. And it goes all the way down the archipelago. So you just see this amazing house after amazing house. I don't mean like rich, fantastic, incredible.

44:46Tom Bradby: house i just mean sort of often quite simple they're very simple often not all of them some of them are quite fancy but a lot of them are very simple and there's just like a house painted

44:56The Travel Diaries Host: yellow or blue normally sauna jetty into the water and if we wanted to go in stockholm we'd maybe get the ferry in have a wander around have a few drinks have dinner one night we wandered up to someplace above stockholm where you can watch the sunset or the sun begin to fade over the city which was really beautiful and then just get an uber back to the the house or the ferry if you're in time but yeah it was just the whole and i we did find it you know up around rosara and vaxholm you know you go out to dinner and you think oh this is gonna be terribly fancy but it isn't at all it's quite it's quite sort of plain in a way but we really loved it and i guess as a swimming enthusiast it's the dream it was really because like you you just go to the end of the jetty and sort of my wife and I have got a quite long distance swimmer so we sort of you know probably want to go for an hour or more and it's just great because you just get in your wetsuit and off you go straight from the end of the jetty and you know you swim around the bay or whatever and

45:59Tom Bradby: it's it's absolutely fantastic so you'd need a wetsuit would you to get in is it I don't think

46:03The Travel Diaries Host: you'd need one I think for us if we're swimming a decent long distance partly I'm incredibly lazy in as much as you swim in a wetsuit um but yeah it's more comfortable if you're going to swim a long distance in a wetsuit and if you like swimming then it's a it's a great place but even even if you don't it's it's a if you just like plunging when you're hot i mean i maybe we got we got lucky with the weather but the last two years we've been the weather's been really hot

46:29Tom Bradby: and so you know it's perfect seasons there like proper winter proper winter proper yeah i went

46:37The Travel Diaries Host: funnily enough i went dog sledding with um the youngest son sam in finland this year partly because i wanted to if we get to series two of the drama you'll see that a finland and dog sledding

46:48Tom Bradby: features and i wanted you're doing it's doing it was a genuinely researcher but it was the most

46:55The Travel Diaries Host: you'll mention of seasons that they're kind of wonderful those countries in summer but also amazing winter and we went up to the north and it was minus 30 so beautiful it was just incredibly beautiful and it was like lapland yeah we were literally in lapland okay in north of katila dog sledding is an amazing thing to do by the way if you ever if you ever i would love to do that it's an incredible i mean it was with huskies was it with huskies yeah we did it for three days we left the the main farm um and then we just went out into the wilderness and we didn't see anyone else we stayed in two hearts out in the middle of the wilderness and we didn't see anyone now any other sign of human habitation really for three days it was amazing yeah it was great and

47:39Tom Bradby: how did you like deal with it being that cold when you're on the sleds are you in just massive

47:44The Travel Diaries Host: suits it was it was quite difficult operating because obviously you think you're okay and then suddenly you're not you know you're you're you're going along fine and then suddenly you're really really cold your extremities are really cold so you have to watch it you're like eyelashes couldn't turn frozen yeah yeah yeah and then the landscape there is amazing landscape is amazing then of course if you go around a corner and you're not constantly fall off and that and you can't let go of the husky so you're like literally holding on for dear life as they try and yank you

48:14Tom Bradby: on your side halfway down the thing but yeah did you see any northern lights we did we saw the most

48:21The Travel Diaries Host: incredible northern lights i mean i honestly think i would say to people if you're going to see the northern lights probably don't because your chance of getting a really great northern lights on that high but on the other hand when you do see them we were on the last night we were staying in this hut that was up a little bit of a hill it was a very sort of very bucolic pretty place i mean bloody cold but kind of amazing and then we just came out after dark to go and look at the clear sky and just saw the most incredible northern lights i mean just stunning absolutely

48:55Tom Bradby: stunning i have seen them in iceland once then obviously we saw them through our phones in

49:04The Travel Diaries Host: wimbledon well it's a lot warmer seeing them in wimbledon through your phone i would say

49:11Tom Bradby: but i imagine seeing them in that completely like unpolluted like wilderness landscape they must

49:18The Travel Diaries Host: it must be quite moving in fact yeah yeah it was really really vivid um it was just it was an incredible experience it was absolutely lovely yeah and you mentioned just earlier that you'd

49:32Tom Bradby: been skiing in japan that sounded amazing what made you choose to go skiing i think i mean my

49:39The Travel Diaries Host: poor kids didn't have much choice on the skiing front as you'd expect from the early bit of the conversation they were like skiing at two you know I said you can I taught them all myself they may hold that against me but um and I was like right you can snowplow for two hours and then you're not snowplowing again so they were there was kind of a bit like military school scheme anyway they are they're all very good skiers and we we love we love skiing together all of us and um I think we just had always had on our bucket list going to Japan and it was our 30th wedding anniversary and we thought it would be a great claude my wife and i thought it'd be really fun to do a really big exciting trip together so we sort of thought about it for about three years and then decided to go for it and i have to say i'd been to japan a few times when i was working in asia but nothing prepared me for how much i loved it and i think all of us felt the same actually we just really loved it everything the kind of culture the history

50:36Tom Bradby: it was amazing well i guess as somebody who knows ski resorts so well for you to love it that much it must have what was it about it then i think it's not just contrast well first of all like if

50:47The Travel Diaries Host: you're into skiing and powder skiing i do quite a lot of ski touring and it's just so incredibly light i've never skied powder like that but it's just the japan of it all really like we we went to niseko which is the big resort everyone knows and then we went to a much smaller one called the zawa onsen which was like a little alpine resort but the japanese version it was just so charming and and then we went to Kyoto and Tokyo but I just I I found in a way that really like surprised me I just loved everything about love the food I mean I know there are downsides to Japanese culture but the kind of politeness the orderliness the calmness you know you're in Tokyo one of the biggest cities in the world if not the biggest and everything just seems so calm around you it's quite it's quite uncanny and I hadn't noticed that so much when I was working there but going just to soak it up as a tourist was was and you know just the onsens the hot the hot baths and everything it was it was amazing so fun brilliant well very much in contrast our

51:52Tom Bradby: penultimate chapter is your worst travel experience or the place that you would just never ever want

51:57The Travel Diaries Host: to go back to going back to my time as foreign correspondent at the time of the kosovo war i was sent to bari in italy to basically cover the war from there because that's where british pilots were taking off from and i can remember all of us sitting at dinner in some restaurant overlooking bari harbour congratulating ourselves and what an excellent place we'd found to report on the war and at that point as if somebody up there was looking at me my foreign editor called and said right we want you to get to northern albania now take your hard car get

52:31Tom Bradby: on the ferry and then drive and so um barry from impuglia yeah uh yes so that's what we did we got

52:39The Travel Diaries Host: the ferry to turana and drove up to kukez in the north from where i then spent three weeks covering the kosovo war i mean it was the kosovo war was really depressing because there were refugees coming out every day with terrible stories but all i remember is that road i'm sure it's fine now

52:56Tom Bradby: and i probably actually know tom that albania is like being tipped as the hot new destination well i do i have okay people are buying up property i know and i and i and i do want to

53:10The Travel Diaries Host: go back and this and and that's why i say i feel bad because i think albania is a great country and lots of people are going but at that point i imagine a very different time the road from tirana up to kukuz and then honestly i just i don't know i'm not sure i mean it was right out there with being shot and being scared just driving it like really just it was just sort of narrow road and there was no barrier for most of it and you look down you saw all these cars that had been spilt over oh my god burned out in the thing and it's like an eight hour drive and i think you know we couldn't there was no hotel in kukes because it was stuffed full of there was only one stuffed full of cia people so we ended up having to wander around offering people cash for renting apartment and we ended up in this pretty grotty apartment anyway it was a rather grueling depressing not very nice three weeks and i didn't i'm afraid leave with any love of kukas northern albania but i'm sure it's lovely now i'm sure it is different circumstances different times and i would like to go back to the coast i've heard that it's amazing lovely isn't it and that doesn't

54:09Tom Bradby: sound like a very relaxing stick no no it was not well we're on to the final chapter then of your travel diaries it has been so lovely chatting with you i've really enjoyed it thank you chapter seven is the destinations at the top of your bucket list the one place I haven't traveled

54:24The Travel Diaries Host: much through my work is South America actually and so I have been to quite a few countries in South America but in the way that my job sometimes delivers I mean I often get asked have you been to place x and I sort of stare into space for a bit and think um and I feel sort of pathetic I surely you must be able to remember everywhere you've been. I mean, surely. But actually, I can't, because sometimes you went for like a day or two hours, you know, some politician. Like, I'm pretty sure I've been to Morocco. I'm pretty sure I've been to Tunisia. I'm pretty sure I've been to quite a few of those North African countries, but it probably was on a political trip where I went in for, anyway, I've got no meaningful memory of them.

55:12The Travel Diaries Host: And that's really been, I've just got finished in, well I've just got a new book out um called Red Scorpion which is about a young doctor called Laura who ends up she's in financial trouble and ends up accepting a job working for a South American businessman and going to work for him in Columbia and it doesn't turn out to be quite the job she thought and so we did go and research all that in Columbia and had a great trip there doing so so colombia i feel like i have seen but i don't know the rest of south america very well so that probably is top of our list of places to go i'd love to go to argentina and i've only been to brazil very briefly so i'd love to go back on that so i think quite inspiration for the next

56:00Tom Bradby: novels yeah maybe and then itv you could commission those to be shot there and then it all it will

56:05The Travel Diaries Host: will work out i'll look forward to it hopefully well thank you for having me i've very much enjoyed

56:14Tom Bradby: oh thank you to tom that was so much fun what a lovely guy i really enjoyed that chat secret service is available to view on itvx now honestly it is such a brilliant show i'll of course be back next week with a brand new guest so don't forget to hit follow or subscribe on your podcast app so that you don't miss an episode. To find out who's joining me next week, come and follow me on Instagram. I'm at Holly Rubenstein. You'll also find me on TikTok at Holly Rubenstein as well. In the meantime, have a fabulous week and safe travels.

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