Alistair Petrie | Swimming with Dolphins in Hawaii

0:00What transpired over the next two hours was something that to this day I am still trying to I know it happened because Lucy's kept a diary for decades and we reread it and it's all true. But what happens to the wine? She said, I'd rather not say. And he said, you don't, you don't. And she went, I'd rather not. He was like, oh my God, you literally throw them away, don't you? As we turned around and saw the Taj Mahal, I had this very kind of emotional, visceral reaction, seeing something which everyone knows kind of what it looks like, but to sort of see it in the flesh, and because it was built as an act of love, I felt incredibly moved.

0:43Welcome to Travel Secrets with me, Tanya Rose, the podcast sharing wisdom for fellow travellers. Each week, I ask my guests to reveal their six travel secrets and the holidays and adventures that surround them. I would just like to say thank you to Mason Rose, the sales and communication agency that represents some of the finest hotels around the world, for partnering with Travel Secrets, the podcast.

1:13Today, my guest is the wonderful British actor, Alastair Petrie. Very good. Well done, Tonya. I've got a friend who's called Petrie. Yeah, Petrie, Scotland, and Petrie down south. So if I'm in Scotland, they'll always say Petrie and I would never correct because I will go with both. Famed for so many roles in film, theater and TV. You first came to my notice as Sandy in The Night Manager, which I am so delighted to hear that you will be doing The Night Manager 2. Correct. Can't wait. It was the best TV show. It was absolutely amazing. And I can't believe it was so long ago. It was 10 years ago, I think.

1:50Yeah, but I think we shot it about 10, if not, yeah, 10 years ago. And then obviously sex education. Sex education. Locations weren't as glamorous. Wales is lovely and I love Wales dearly, but it wasn't Marrakesh or New York. And also Star Wars. Yes, space. Amazing. So, yeah, so a lot of traveling involved in that. I loved what you said about Star Wars, which is I need a good name and I need a line. That's all it had to be. Because I just wanted to go into the cinema and to be, yeah, just give me a name. I don't want to be Senator number four. Give me a cool name and a line and it worked out. And you got more than that.

2:26I did. It was great. And what were you called? General. I was General. I've got to say this quite slowly. General Davitz Draven. Five-star general. I had this thing. My costume had this. We called it my strepsils. And I was a five-star general and had this kind of square thing that had five sort of dots, like the five dots on a dice. And so every time before I went on set, I actually wanted to nick it. But at the end of when we finished shooting and I tried to nick it, they were just like, could we just, did the strepsils fall into your bag? And I went, yes, could you just give it to the driver?

2:59I'm so sorry. Silly me. Yeah, because everything is, you can't, yeah, everything is. They didn't gift it to you. No, they didn't. There was another, I did another film called Hellboy. And you want to take, it wasn't about thieving. It's just about taking a memento. And we finished filming in Bulgaria. And I had a suspicion, I had a suspicion there wasn't going to be a sequel because it wasn't the greatest film in the world. And I thought, I just don't know if there's going to be a sequel. So I'm sure this beautiful kind of skull and crossbones brooch that I had for this very swishy cloak thing also happened to fall into my bag.

3:31And yet again, I got another phone call just going, did the skull and crossbones thing fall into your bag by accident? I went, oh, God. Oh, gave it back to the driver. So I'm not very good. I'm not a good thief. I think they've got that on your notes. Make sure nothing falls into his bag. Don't make sure the thieving doesn't nix stuff. I'm very good. It's nominal thieving. It's not really. Oh, that's hilarious. is. So you grew up, your father was an RAF pilot and you grew up all over the world, Middle East, Europe, East Africa. Yep, East Africa. So he, I mean, he came from ostensibly from a sort of family in Scotland.

4:06His father went abroad to work to find, you know, work. He was a, he was a basically a sort of textile engineer to get work. And so he was in South Africa. And so my dad was sort of being brought up effectively by his, by his mother with his two siblings in a tiny flat in Aberdeen. And he went to the grammar school in Aberdeen because of his sporting abilities he was a very good rugby player and he was very bright but that got him into a grammar school and he knew what he wanted to do which was fly aircraft and so there was not a lot of money in in the family at all and so the local church did a whip round to get the money together for his train fare to go down south in order to have the interview because he he and he became an air force pilot so that meant that that opened up an extraordinary world to him a world he obviously never knew about and that in a way catapulted my sister and i into you know you know it well it's entirely responsible for the kind of the world in which we exist you know now which is sort of something remarkable really but that meant moving every three years and um we followed you know so tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how travel impacted the person that you've become well it was it was a sort of semi-nomadic lifestyle actually because you I was born in Yorkshire and we were there for six months so I remember nothing about it I'll claim to be from Yorkshire which um I'm happy very happy to do so um and then it was some Europe Germany and then the sort of the big exciting one in a sense was Saudi Arabia oh my goodness a long time ago yeah long time ago in the 70s sort of and I remember it well I was seven years old arrived and um it was startling really but it it it took me a sort of completely culturally as a seven-year-old out of everything that I knew, which was a rather kind of magnificent experience.

5:45And it was a very outdoors. It was very, there's a lot of military people there, a lot of sort of UK, US companies, and so a lot of Americans. So I kind of lived this sort of hybrid Americana, Arabic kind of lifestyle in a way. And it was amazing. And I look back at it with huge fondness, but I would have been educated in the American system. So I was, I went through, I was at a, basically a primary school on the British Aerospace Base until I was 10. But there was, it was a decision to be made. Either you go through the American high school system, or you come back to the UK. And so I came back to the UK to school when I was 10.

6:21And that was a shock in itself. I remember when my mother brought me back, and I was dropped in this school in Maidenhead. And she then left and flew back to Saudi Arabia. And I was left. And because Maidenhead, the school I was at it's on the flight path every time the plane flew over I was like I don't know I should be on that going I don't know and eventually the French French teacher kicked me out and she said I forgot to say go and see Matron I think she gave me a sedative weirdly I really think she gave me something which is probably highly illegal now I think I think she dosed me up with something that made me feel a little bit sleepy for a while and a bit happier yeah a little happier I was much calmer about the walk so you used to go back for holidays did you?

7:04used to go back for holidays And then Nigeria was my sort of teenage years, which was great. But basically from the age of about 0 to 10, moving every sort of two to three years, which definitely informed the way I sort of approached travel, really, in the sense that sort of everywhere should be a sort of a big adventure. And new is exciting rather than intimidating, although intimidating can be good when it comes to travel. So there was lots of it. Lovely. And that also informed going forward when Lucy and I had children, we knew that we wanted to sort of drop travel raisins in front of the kids and take them to places to give them a sense of the world that they may take through through their adult life.

7:45That felt rather important to us. And then when you went to Lambda and obviously studied to be an actor, did you think, oh, good, I'll be able to travel with this? Yeah, definitely. But also, I think the main thing was that I didn't have any worries about the travel of it, in the sense that living a sort of semi-nomadic lifestyle is the offspring of someone in the Air Force. I thought, oh, travel's great, rather than... And I didn't really have a home per se, in the sense that I was sort of sleeping on sofas and stuff. And so the notion of having to go somewhere and do something else, be it some regional theatre, was like, great, what an adventure.

8:19it wasn't as though I was leaving something I was going to somewhere which was a sort of an excitement rather than rather than anything else and you did a lot of Shakespeare didn't you when you started yeah I did some so was that regional that was at the RSC so I did some I did uh yeah I mean the main main Shakespeare I did at the RSC but that was great and in the sense that it was a year-long thing the year before I got married actually but that was a year long involved loads and it was a regional tour. So we took it all over the place, to leisure centers, in all sorts of places. But the payoff, in a sense, at the end, we took a play, we did Trollers and Cressida and it was a play about war, which we took to Tel Aviv in Israel.

8:58Oh, amazing. And then we went to New York with it. Fabulous. And so we were sort of grinding our way towards that, the glamour bit. The New York lights. Yeah, we're off New York. And I do remember, yeah, one evening, we did, I think, a couple of weeks in New Haven in Connecticut as well. and we had a day out in New York and we ended up having very expensive drinks at the Mercer in New York and we got out of the Mercer about a gang of six of us and some very nice person on the door said would you like a car to take you home and we said lovely and he pointed at a stretch limo and he said where do you need to go and we went New Haven, Connecticut which I think slightly startled him and it was a very hot night and we piled into this limousine we played Jeff Buckley really really loud raided the minibar and they took us back to New Haven and didn't quite realize that we had to pay for the trip at the end of it.

9:43We covered it together and it was fine. Oh no, you thought it was complimentary. I know, theatre wages disappeared. Oh, that's hilarious. Well, let's get into your travel secrets. Yes. What is the number one destination you think everyone should go to once in their lifetime? I have spent ages trying to narrow this down and I think it is somewhere that culturally takes you out of yourself and should feel a little daunting. and certainly for me that was a trip we made in 2019 with the boys and we went to northern India. I'd always wanted to go but I was intimidated by it and I think India is probably the place that everybody should go because it does culturally take you out of yourself and it's a place that is constantly full of surprises and also the people.

10:33So much about travel is about the people that you meet and the kindness and the generosity and the interest that we experienced in India. And we did two and a half weeks, barely scratching the surface, but we did northern India, the northern triangle, and it was just a kind of a glorious adventure for a whole bunch of reasons. So I would say India would probably be number one, and it's probably quite a common number one, but I think somewhere that culturally takes you out of yourself that is scary. Did your kids love it? Yes, they did. We did it in a way that we thought, well, how do you do India?

11:17And we thought we can't do it on our own. We can't say, let's just fly into New Delhi and just figure it out. We had to have someone organize it on our behalf. And we're so glad. And they did it brilliantly. Audley Travel organized it and they were fantastic. Yeah, they're great. Very good. All of their staff have done the trip so they know what they're talking about. And they said, well, what kind of accommodation do you want to stay in? And we said, well, we don't want to go sort of corporate. And so they're kind of those brilliant sort of, I guess, bed and breakfasts, whatever, which is fantastic.

11:45Did you stay in any of the palaces? Well, we have this familial connection with the Umegh Bawan. Oh. So we didn't stay there. but in the 1950s Lucy my wife's father was at school and the first day he arrived at this boarding school this little Indian boy came in and while sort of row call was being done on a Sunday night or whatever they reeled off the names and there was this little boy and the housemaster came up to my wife's father and just said there's this young Indian boy he won't be going back in school holidays would you would it be alright if he could sort of stay with you and of course they went yeah it's fine great so for the entire kind of five years of school basically all school holidays were spent with with with my wife and well my wife's family and and the uncles were at the same school.

12:51It was all rather lovely. And he's the Maharaj of Jhopur and was at the time, because he became the Maharaj when he was very young because his father, I think, was killed in a plane crash. But that was sort of irrelevant. So Babaji, he's now known very much in the family. So part of - He's his mate. He's just a mate. So when we were going to India, we thought, oh, it'd be quite nice to sort of see Babaji. You know. Of course, as you do. You may. And we didn't really know too much about it. So Lucy spoke to her uncle and said, oh, we wanted to get in touch with Bubgy. What's the best way to get in touch with him?

13:29And he said, oh, just WhatsApp him. So he WhatsAppped him. And he said, oh, Frank majorly got a message back going, oh, yeah, great. Then you should come to the party on New Year's Eve, which we're having at the palace. And he thought, yeah, great. Okay. Yeah, no, we can do that. And we cut a very long story short. We arrived, he said, oh, and then another message came through saying, oh, there's a polo match beforehand somewhere on in the afternoon on New Year's Eve. So come to the polo. So great, we'll go to the polo. So we arrived at the polo and sort of budged in this sort of cortege of cars.

14:00And we're sort of sitting there and I said to Lucy, go and say, go and say hello. And she went, I can't. I mean, it's like going up to the king and saying, just go. Anyway, she eventually did. And I sort of was watching and she sort of shuffled down sort of the way. And there was this sort of half a beat. And then she threw up his arms, gave her a massive hug. And then a couple of minions came running over and saying, right, this is the plan. This is what you've got to do and all the rest of it. So that evening, we had the most sensational, sensational evening at the New Year's Eve Christmas party, which was sort of a traveling thing.

14:32I mean, it was amazing. They had it up at the fort because it was too, it was very windy. So they moved it from the UMA Barwon at the last minute and did it on the hill fort. And it was extraordinary. And we had dinner with him and everyone was coming up to say hello. And we were just flabbergasted. That's incredible. Yeah, it was amazing. But there was one just, I have, there was, when I told my brother-in-law who had stayed at the UMA Barwon years before, he said, God, you know, one of the weird things I wish I'd always done, having stayed at the UMA Barwon. He said, I used to wake up. they stayed there for three nights my brother-in-law and sister so we used to wake up and I used to wake up to the sound of an old English petrol mower mowing the lawns and he said it's my biggest regret that I didn't record that sound because it's the most wonderful English sound of old petrol lawnmower in India in India and I said oh yeah that's such a shame he said I said leave that with me.

15:29So I spoke to Bubji, I told him this story, and then he said, well, tomorrow on New Year's Day, you must come to the palace and you must record the mowers. And I thought, oh, well, that would be lovely. Anyway, the next morning we went to, went to, arrived at the Yume Barwon, and we had some sort of late breakfast. And I looked out on the lawn and there was a phalanx of garden staff, all with these old English mowers and I went onto the lawn and I pulled out my iPhone and I record and they went they were completely bemused about why they were doing this it was as though we literally just mowed the lawns but would you anyway they they redid the lawns and I just recorded it and I sent it to my brother I bet he thought that was the most amazing present he'd ever received it was amazing well what a wonderful way to do India it was it was incredible that's amazing so you'll never forget that never and it is one of those places that you do have to go to and experience because it's not unlike anywhere else, isn't it?

16:25I think it is. And I think it's a place that you probably have to sort of go, do a part of it, return home, carry on with your life and then return to and see more and more of it as much as you can. You sort of, as I said, you can only scratch the surface in a couple of weeks, but it felt there's a pull to return and go to different aspects. And it was extraordinary. Well, I was going to ask you what your most unexpected travel experience is. And you could actually say staying with the Maharaja of Jodhpur. It was. I've got another one, though, involving dolphins. So I could tell you that. So please tell me your most unexpected.

16:58Okay, the most unexpected. The most unexpected was when Lucy was pregnant for the first time. I said, well, our lives are about to change. So in a very good way. But we should go somewhere, anywhere. Where should we go on a sort of a last trip before our first child arrives? And she said, do you know, I've always wanted to go wild swimming with dolphins. I was like, great, leave it with me. And this was 1999. And so the internet was sort of vaguely up and running, but it was quite slow. So I sort of did whatever the equivalent of Google was and up came the first sort of search result was this name.

17:32It said, Joan Ocean, Hawaii, dolphins swimming. Click. And we went to Hawaii to swim with wild dolphins. And when we were flying in from Honolulu to the big islands, Kona basically we sort of flew over and I we didn't realize it was a very volcanic island obviously but we just thought oh it's Hawaii and Maui and beaches and stuff and it's not it's so we spent ages just trying to find a beach for the first couple of days and it was we was quite also quite startled by about sort of it was quite heavy Americana so it was sort of McDonald's and sort of Bubba Gump shrimp shack which whatever's fine but I think we're expecting something a a little more spiritual white lotus-y.

18:16So anyway, we stayed in this little kind of Hawaiian pension place, and it was great. And our first sort of day of hunting down wild dolphins to swim with, we'd been given a number by this woman called Claudia. Or rather, her name was Claudia, and she was a marine biologist. And we thought Joan Ocean sounded a bit too hippy-dippy, so we thought we won't do that, but we found a marine biologist. So we called her and said, yep, we'll meet you tomorrow on this little pier at 9 a.m., and we'll jump on the boat, and we'll go and find some dolphins. And you think, okay, great. So we met with Claudia the next morning.

18:48And we say, what are the chances of getting to sort of, you know, see wild dolphins? She went, oh, it'll take anything between five and 20 minutes. Oh, okay. It's very definitive. And she said, well, they're either in the first bay. We go to the second bay or the third bay. And we were just on her small ribbed boat, just Lucy, me, and Claudia. So we arrived five minutes later. We're in a bay inside the reef. and there was a pod of about 150 dolphins just resting because they come inside the reef so that they can rest before they go back out at night. And they're resting in that dolphins, we discovered, can only switch.

19:24They can't go fully to sleep. They can switch off half of their brains, but the other half to remain active because if the whole brain switches off, they stop breathing. So they sort of are conscious, but they're very, very relaxed and very chilled. So we said to Claudia, so all of these, you know, sort of, no, no, fins everywhere. Yeah, exactly. It's all very tough. And Lucy, who basically swims every day of her life, she said, can we get in? And Claudia went, yeah. There's no one else around, just us. Okay. So we jumped in, and it was just sort of this kind of, almost like being in a massive blue tank.

20:00And I didn't know what the visibility was, so I put my hand out to see how far I could see, and it was sort of rather beautiful. I could see my hand, and I thought, oh, right, it's blue. And then there was then this kind of phalanx of gray just sort of swam underneath us. It was extraordinary. And what transpired over the next two hours was something that to this day, I'm still trying to, I know it happened because Lucy's kept a diary for decades and we reread it and it's all true. It hasn't sort of expanded in our minds. But effectively what happened was, is because Lucy was pregnant, the females gathered around her.

20:33You could hear the clicking going on relentlessly. and then all the females shepherded her away from me and the males in the adolescence then took me to one side. And I was sort of flailing around going, this is the best thing I've ever done. And I tried to swim towards Lucy, who was about sort of 30 meters away, having her own experience with the mothers and the females. And the females were like, absolutely not. And so we were separated for about two hours. And then the males, they showed me, we started to play very very organized games so the first game they sort of shepherded they shepherded me into a place and they were all absolutely all over me and of course i'm just thinking this is extraordinary we had snorkel and flippers and that was it in the first game that we played they literally gathered in a circle it seems absurd but it's all true they gathered in this sort of circle the first thing they did is they took the mickey out to me so while I was kind of slapping around with my my flippers they then flipped on their backs and started slapping their tails as going you're an idiot but then they gathered around in a circle which I was sort of invited to join so I did and then one of them swam down about 10 feet and then released out of its blowhole a perfect ring then one of them broke from the circle swam through the ring back out and rejoin the circle another one came in and did the same thing so they were demonstrating what the game was and then I thought okay it's my turn so I sort of blundered through this thing and then they all then flipped on their backs and started slapping their thing and it was bizarre and then another one suddenly appeared with them in this sort of what felt like a big blue water tank from somewhere just appeared with a leaf on its fin dorsal fin or whatever it is and then dropped the leaf and then another one came down and picks it up and then swam around with it and then dropped it and then another one came in and dropped it and that was the game we were playing and this went on for for about two or three hours it was astonishing and then they decided enough was kind of enough and then they disappeared and then we sort of got back on the boat and we were saying to claudia go go and follow them yeah and she said they've decided they've had enough we'll never catch them so we called it a day and we were only meant to do a one day of two hours with claudia when we got off the boat we were just sort of so astonished we said right see you tomorrow at nine o 'clock and we did it every day for our trip yeah every day for a week for for yeah for 10 for 10 days and most days they were not particularly engaged but we had about two or three other experiences it's just it was do you think they were the same pods or they were completely the same pod they had these you could identify them because they had um some of them had cookie cutter um shark bites on them that were healed so you could sort of recognize And are you allowed to hold on to a dolphin?

23:21No, it was not encouraged. And nor they didn't really let, we would, Claudia said, you know, don't try and stroke them. And we thought, we'll respect that. But it was astounding. And it was just Lucy and I off the coast of Hawaii swimming with these dolphins. And you come off and it's sort of, you try and tell people about it. And they're like, really? Did that really happen? And it truly, truly did. And the sort of the postscript to that story was that our eldest son, his full name is Angus James Blue. and Blue is named after the waters of Hawaii because of that, because he was inside Lucy's tummy when all this happened.

23:55How wonderful. It was astounding. That's an amazing story. Very unexpected, but very lovely. Yeah, it's amazing. How fantastic. Let's go on to your most underrated or overrated travel experience, or both. A lot of people don't like talking about overrated, so you can just do underrated, or if you've got both, then tell me, please. Overrated is very simple. Overrated was, we thought it would be a really fun funster thing to do to go to a park-based holiday experience in the United Kingdom. And it was truly horrendous. Moving on. The most, so we went on a, Lucy was having a significant birthday, so we thought, right, let's go on a trip.

24:35So in 2016, we decided we could sort of tie in a little bit, a few things I needed to do in Los Angeles. So we'll do Los Angeles and a few theme parks with the kids for sort of a week, and I could do a couple of work bits and bobs that I needed to do. And then we thought, well, let's return to Hawaii and take all the children and sort of try and recreate our sort of extraordinary dolphin experience. And also introduce Gus, who was then in Lucy's tummy, to said dolphins. So we went to Hawaii and that was great. And we sort of thought, well, we wanted to do one more week of something. And a friend of mine had recommended a dude ranch in Montana.

25:16and I like horses I'm not a massive rider and but we thought again a lovely thing to do with the boys so we'll do that week on this dude ranch and I was sort of thinking it'll be you know what it'll be fine it's gonna be it's gonna be I'll ride a bit of a horse and I'll wear double denim and um like a legend for a week and uh yeah just the only place you can wear double denim and a stetson and not look like a complete burke so I thought well you know who doesn't love a good costume so I thought that would be a nice week and the boys will ride and that'll be great I'll sort of observe them having a brilliant time and I'll just kind of hang out so we uh we went and it was well we've been back every year since have you yeah which one is it and we're going on Tuesday how exciting um I did I did ask um the the people that run the ranch because it's a place you go to and it's only ever they don't advertise it's all word of mouth so I double checked with the you're allowed to disclose and she said you can talk about it but please don't mention the name which is quite amazing really which is very unusual um so I promised I think if there's any good armchair detectives out there uh it's a ranch in Montana um it's near the Blackfoot River so I'm going to let people go and discover it for themselves.

26:39That's really amazing. I know it's really extraordinary. I mean, in this world of social media and PR, that they don't want to, that's even more wonderful, isn't it? That's what's so extraordinary, that they want to sort of retain its essence. In fact, they're celebrating another clue. They're celebrating the 100th anniversary this year. But to your exact point, it's a rather wonderful thing that they don't need. And they do have an Instagram account, but it's very much a kind of a, it's not to promote their business. It's to kind of just celebrate the stuff they get up to. And you meet the most incredible people.

27:13But I was expecting basically to watch the boys enjoy a kind of a hunt and shoot and fish and kind of experience. And I would sort of sit in my double denim and my Stetson and enjoy it through their eyes. But we met the most amazing people. And it was one of those, is one of those places where when you, you do it sort of one week, Saturday to Saturday. But when you arrive, you feel as though they have literally opened it for that one week that you're there. And then when you say goodbye on the following Saturday, they are basically going to close it down until you choose to return. And it's something that you couldn't.

27:46It's a wonderful thing about so many travel experiences and places you can go to and places you can stay at. Like a lot of hotels, you are made to feel so special that you think everyone is there basically to hang out with you. And to give you a wonderful experience once you've gone, it just for them won't be the same again. And that, I think it's one of those amazing things that you can recreate anywhere else. Nobody could franchise this. Nobody could build it anywhere else. And that is the mark of some, an extraordinary place. That sounds incredible. Let's face it, you go and pay and stay at.

28:18I might be taking you aside afterwards to ask you privately for the name because I think it sounds amazing. I will happily tell you where it is. I'm not a rider, but I've always wanted to do one of those. Well, I'm not specifically a rider either, but not only do you finish the week feeling like you could totally do five seasons of Yellowstone, like you knew what you were doing, but people say to you, oh, I'm not sure I want to go on a riding holiday. And it's just not a riding holiday. You can choose to ride or not. Most people do because you sit on a horse, but you see the most extraordinary landscapes.

28:48You have the most incredible. It's a bit like going on a walking holiday with a bunch of people that you may not necessarily know. It's that the day kind of morphs from conversations that you have, and then the horse moves on a bit, and then you start another conversation. And then you also eat together. You grab a place in the main house where you have your meals, and then you're on the softball. It's just, it's… Sounds magnificent. I will tell you privately. Privately. Let's go on to food and drink. Food and drink is so important in life. Massively. We all love food. We love drink. But it's so much part of travel.