Joseph Fiennes | Exploring Canada with Sir Ranulph Fiennes

0:00You're listening to Travel Secrets with Tanya Rose, the podcast that shares wisdom for fellow world for partnering with Travel Secrets, the podcast. Today, my guest is the wonderful British actor, Joseph Fiennes, famed for so many films, TV shows, and plays from Shakespeare in Love to The Handmaid's Tale, which I'm afraid I haven't watched because I read the book and I just don't think that I could cope. It's pretty depressing. You can save yourself. And I recently saw you in Dear England, which was fantastic. And I am channeling my best I noticed that. It's Garrett Southgate in my waistcoat. I'm loving the classic look.

0:59Although he has moved on to sort of some European style now, but I'm all for the waistcoat. Go for the waistcoat. Love it. Well, you were absolutely phenomenal. I thought it was wonderful. I'm not a football fan at all, but my husband and my son said, no, we have to go and see it. And it really was. It was sensational. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. And then I have watched your documentaries with your cousin, Sarah Randall Fiennes, which was Return to the Nile and Return to the Wild, which were both absolutely wonderful and can be seen still on the National Geographic. So people have got to watch them.

1:29They are fantastic. Well, what a wonderful segue in. And if anyone should talk about travel, it's Ram. I mean, my God, circumnavigated the globe, you know, solo expeditions, 90 days on an ice flow, losing all his digits on his hand to frostbite and sawing them off when he got home. I know. But what a man. You've got to get him here one day. Yes, I would love that, actually. I really would. I mean, he is described as the world's greatest living explorer. Exactly. I think Guinness Book of Records. Guinness Book of Records. But then I think you're pretty intrepid when I watched those. It was so wonderful.

2:04So I hope we're going to hear more. Welcome. So lovely to have you. Lovely to be here. So before we get into your travel secrets, perhaps you can tell us a bit about yourself and how travel has impacted the person you became. Did you grow up traveling? Let's just talk about you and tell us about Joseph Fiennes. um well interestingly enough i think that my upbringing um impacted very much on my choice as an actor and it was all about travel it was all about kind of no finance and having to sell the house and move on and so my parents with seven children i'm the youngest of them all although I have a twin, but he reminds me that he's four hours older, that we moved, I think, every two years.

2:53So I must have gone to about, I think, 12 schools and 14 houses through my childhood that took us through various parts of England, London, Ireland, the UK, really. But getting into a playground with new faces and new spaces kind of forged something in me where you could reinvent yourself if it didn't quite work in the other school. So maybe that lent itself to acting. But certainly it gave me an appetite for travel. And I get incredibly frustrated if I'm staying in one place for too long. I do. And so travel is a big part of my life. And you could say luckily because of the job I'm in, you're forced to travel a lot and I love it.

3:40maybe a lot of people would hate to live out of hotels and um and airplanes i do now as i get older but when i was younger it was kind of it just fed into the world that i loved how fantastic and you're married to a spanish lady i am maria um is uh spanish by descent born and brought up in switzerland so she speaks as most swiss people do many languages seven coherently wow with an accent so if you hear her speak english she'll sound like she's lived here all her life um and the same in spanish french portuguese so she speaks it with their accent of the country exactly it's incredible and that which um as an asset to travel to learn a language to have a language under your belt I would say um it's for me she's my travel secret because when you go with Maria into most countries um apart from the fact that she's devastatingly beautiful the world opens up to her through her contact with the language do your kids speak and they're bilingual yeah but Spanish English speakers well I heard you speaking Spanish before we started and you're pretty good as well with a very good Spanish accent well I don't know I get away with that's the actor in me that gives it a bit of flair you know but I think a true Spanish person would quickly go no no he's all over the place yeah let's get into your travel secrets what's the number one destination that you think everyone should go to once in their lifetime that's a great question and um I feel a little bit nervous of saying everyone should go to one particular destination that I've been to because it's such a privilege to have been there.

5:26And it's a long way away and very expensive to get to. So I don't know if, you know, there's 1 % who could possibly do this or save up all their lives. So I'm going to mention it, but I'd also love to throw in a few more, which I think are equally wonderful, but maybe not at such an extravagant cost. It's the French Polynesian Islands and Bora Bora. and I got very lucky through a friend of a friend who's invited as a plus whatever to go to Tahiti and jump on a massive yacht and sail the islands of the French of French Polynesia and we moored up at Bora Bora and it is like going to paradise I mean, the quality of the water and the hammerhead sharks and the rayfish and the coral life and the pristine nature.

6:21And also there's a great bar just on Bora Bora, which is a great place to hang out. So that was incredibly a wonderful experience, but very, very privileged. But just to sail through the night and looking at the stars with a warm breeze, it is a memory I have that was very, very special. Sounds incredible. I've never been and there are all these amazing islands. And then I think there's a Brando Island now. There is, which I think has just opened up. I think there's a very interesting couple who are running this hotel right now. And I've actually been looking at it with a beady eye to see if I can get there one day.

7:00So and also they have amazing vanilla pods. You can come from there. I've heard actually, yeah, vanilla pods. If ever you go and you get to a market or you can get some local person to give you, the vanilla pods, if you're into cooking, are exceptional. Are you a good cook? I'm not. I'm terrible. I will if I have to. But that's not your thing. But that's not my thing. Did you do diving and things when you went there? And that's where I learned to scuba dive. And so scuba diving, I mean, do you scuba dive? I do. I love it. It opens up a whole other world. It's like going to another planet. It is.

7:32You just feel so wonderful underwater, weightless, fantastic. Yeah, it is a truly transformative experience to go down and just. Also, you're connected to your breath in a particular way with life and respect of where you are has to slow down and you have to key into this particular place, which has to be devoid of fear because the more fearful we get, the more oxygen you use. So you have to sort of spiritually lock into a place and then really love the nature around you. And God, if I could be a fish for a day or for a lifetime, I wouldn't say no. If it's in Borobor. I did do a night dive once.

8:14My breathing was not good. I literally remember going off the back of the boat and it was so pitch black, the water. And that's at night when everything comes out. And I think I was like a cartoon character. The minute I hit the water, I was scrambling back up. No, no, no, no. Not for me. Not night diving. But what do you have? you have these huge torches yeah yeah but i wasn't carrying a torch the guides were but i i couldn't do it it was too scary for me um in the red sea in hergada in egypt yeah the red sea that's where we ran and i had this through our trip through egypt um that you wonderfully described very kindly at the top of the segment um we started in uh alexandria and then to cairo and then we worked our way all the way down eventually towards the Sudanese border at the most spectacular place Abu Simbel which I would say again Egypt if not Bora Bora Egypt's worth a punt and I would go all the way down to Luxor I think Cairo is amazing but it is a bit peculiar when you've got these incredible pyramids right next to a pizza hut you don't see that on the photographs but in reality the city is encroached so far it takes a little away of the magic but luxor and then going down parts like as one i think um is a beautiful place and and then there's this incredible drive through i want to say it's lake nasa and then eventually you get to have a symbol which is the most extraordinary architectural event ever i mean the beauty of this place that i think The Lake Nassau was rising in the 60s, and bit by bit, they moved this incredible Egyptian artifact, which is almost the size of a city, up, it's an amazing temple, up like 20 meters, so it wouldn't get flooded.

10:06But that, I would say, if you can get to Abysimbul, and there are flights, you can go to Cairo and fly down, I think, to Aswan or to Abysimbul. And there's a lovely hotel down there. And I would say that is a must-see destination. Yeah. I mean, I love Egypt. What I would love to do is that Nile cruise where you do go to Luxor. Yeah. And then you see all of the pyramids and all of the sphinxes and things. I think that was very death on the Nile. Very death on the Nile. Luxor is, I loved Luxor, I have to say. Aswan and Luxor. Really special. Boy, you were very intrepid on that program. I saw you climbing through tombs that had never been, I mean, it was very scary, but you were very brave.

10:48Again, the privilege of what I do and how that allows me to tread on the front lines of exceptional culture is something that I feel very grateful for. But we went to one place, I think it was called Minor, Central Egypt, where we went through these tunnels that had been discovered, but a camera had never been there. I think there was one or two archaeologists that had just opened up further kind of chambers. And so Ran and I went down and that was this very, it was very scary because it felt like it wasn't made of rock. It was thick sand. And then you kept saying, bits are falling on me. Yeah, bits are falling.

11:30You could feel it sort of disintegrating. but um wow just coming across this these these mummified i think it was a tomb of priests um uh was kind of beyond indiana jones it was kind of on another scale i was going to actually ask you what is your most unexpected travel experience but it might be that however i'm sure you've got many others as well i do a few but that was one for sure so what is your most unexpected travel experience? I have good and bad and my love of travel is really about stopping the car, stopping the bus and going down the road that you weren't supposed to go down. I do love the adventure of the unknown and the best trips I've ever had are the ones that aren't planned but But they can, you have to be really street-wise or travel-wise.

12:31As I've gotten older, I've got more and more street and travel-wise. But they can be fairly dangerous. So one of the most beautiful places I've been to is Costa Rica. You can go to the rainforest in the same day. You can go down and surf. I think it's called the Nicoya Peninsula. It's on the Pacific side. Some of the beaches are wild, authentic, beautiful, untouched, remote. and that really speaks to me it's beautiful but there is a raw kind of natural energy that's in some of these places that you just have to be aware of um and i went i stayed in this wonderful hacienda at the foot of the old volcano and um i love horse riding and uh i got onto a horse early in the morning to go with a fellow traveler who was staying at the hacienda she had just got married and i remember getting up on the horse it was getting quite hot going into the shade looking back seeing this lovely woman kiss her husband goodbye and then the horse reared up and she sadly pulled on the reins and the weight of the horse came over her and she the whole horse landed on her and she fell back and really broke her head on on the on the gravel and and died and so that was the most unexpected horrific accident and in a moment of absolute joy beauty and joy and the sun and costa rica and horses in an instant you're reminded that anything can happen and I held her for a while and her poor husband couldn't, was in such shock, couldn't comprehend or communicate and she slipped away and I couldn't sleep for god I think a month or whatever.

14:31I remember going back into the jungle at the foot of this volcano where the Hacienda had a a little cottage and i walked in and i was really shaken and and the floor was moving like this undulating wave and i thought my god what have i have i taken something or is this perverse feeling that i'm the image that i'm seeing been sort of is it hallucinogenic is it from shock or um and i realized as i put the lights on that it was an infestation of these ants the size of my thumb and there were billions of them and the whole room was moving and so i sort of had to sort of somehow beat a pathway to the bed and then beat them all out and it was quite an ordeal especially having gone through that ordeal um so these are the unexpected um there are certain unexpected i wouldn't wish on anyone but when you do stop the bus when you do want to go down a road you should you haven't kind of necessarily um wrecked um or wasn't part the plan you do have to entertain the idea of danger but i did get back on a horse did you before i left and i i galloped i went hell for leather to get it out of my system but when i got back my dad did say that um you can never be entirely sure how horses are trained and maybe it or a snake I don't know um maybe it got it got scared from something but it could be the way certain horses are trained they get can get beaten into submission a bit and so they can be very temperamental so you have to be super careful do you have on your resume can ride a horse because isn't that one of the big things for an actor can ride a horse it is yeah and it's amazing how many say tick that box and then when the day comes they go very pale I remember I told you my son wants to be an actor and one of the people who he was talking to who's a friend who's an agent said you've got to go and ride a horse you've got to go and learn he's well i sort of can pony track and she went no no you've got to really go and learn because you can't tick that box and then suddenly you get the horse whisperer or something and then you can't drive on it i mean invariably the film horses are sort of better than actors they really don't bump into furniture and they stop when you say cut and they go on action so they're pretty attuned but um but yeah i've there's many uh actors who have become who pretend yeah who pretend just to get the job i don't blame them what's your most underrated or overrated travel experience but there is one place um but before i get into that i'm just going to have to um as i'm on the couch i'm just going to have to share a certain bet noire a certain thing that five star whatever star i cannot bear and is overrated and underrated and ruins everything from me and that is piped music that follows you from the dining room to the bedroom through the wonderful fauna of the garden you might be in a terrible rendition of the four seasons or what it's so naff it's a syntax that doesn't belong in the place it's this forced atmosphere and i just i'm just i rail against it and i want to talk to all managers to say why why i mean maybe people love it i'm on my own here but piped music no stop it please you might go to the other side of the world and you travel to a spectacular place It could be, I don't know, the Maldives or whatever.

18:09And you've got the same pipe music. There's this bloody pipe music that follows you around. I mean, it's incessant. It's an assault on the sensibilities. Sorry, you can tell I'm a bit tetchy about it. I agree with you, though. I think it's absolutely annoying. What is going on? There's a really good company actually called Music Concierge now that does do music for hotels, which is totally the antithesis of this. And it's only in certain areas in the hotels that make sense, basically, without it being the same tune that goes. They're very, very clever and they're doing really, really well. But pipe music and lifts as well.

18:41Oh, my God. It's awful. It's awful. I mean, if you're going to do it, there's an amazing Turner Prize winner that did, you know, audio and won the Turner Prize for that. Do something with a great initiative or don't do it at all. Exactly. But please, this thing. And most people have their headphones in now anyway, so they can't hear it. And silence. What's wrong with silence? Yeah, silence. What's wrong? Isn't that part of the deal is, you know, I'm a big part of travel and why I love travel. And it's a little bit like acting and characters. It's the space and it's the people that gets you to think about who you are and what you're doing.

19:15And if you're interrupted with this awful white noise of sort of bad classical music following you around, you can't get to that place. You can't absorb the nature, the space and interact. And actually in Costa Rica or Bora Bora or any of these places that you're talking about, why do you need to have that noise? I think it's a fear amongst the hoteliers that there's not enough atmosphere. We've got to create an atmosphere. But rely on the beauty and the syntax of where you are, I think. I agree. No, I do agree. Have you got any other overrated or underrated? Yeah, sorry, I segued off a bit there.

19:51So forgive me for deviating. No, that was a very good point. Got that off my chest. Thank you for allowing me to share. I went to, I was in LA and I put my hand up at one of these gigs to raise money for a charity and I bought something for the charity and it was a holiday in the Bahamas at quite an exorbitant price. But I had finished filming and I thought, well, on the way back to Europe, I'll stop off there um and it was butler service it was everything thrown in amazing sweet but it was soulless um and it was on paradise island which i call parasite island it was just soulless and even with the wonderful fresh linen and butler service and everyone doing so well it was missing soul for me and i just wanted to relax but i couldn't somehow it was overproduced and now at every corner and and also i think just down the road was this huge dump and skip yard and it kind of it felt like um just all a bit of an awful illusion and and i love nature it's vivid self that to me is paradise so i made a quick phone call um i checked out after one night oh did you and i found a place called long island not not over in um new york and it was a very authentic wild place that was a quick 40 minute one of those seaplanes and i got out of there and i went to this amazing place um which is a really thin island and it takes about an hour to drive from one end to the other it has what's called the blue hole which is where all the world divers go there i didn't know this oh wow um and they do these they're free diving oh yes like two miles it's pretty eerie and scary i tried it is really scary but very beautiful and i stayed in this tiny little place run by a mad french canadian guy called pierre was called chaise pierre and he cooked and he was as grumpy as hell but he did the best breakfast and then you had these tiny little huts on this beach and no one was there like four huts and this incredible beach you got bitten to bits by sand flies and the water was brackish water it was kind of no stars i mean it but but you were in real authentic nature and you could canoe out and for me that was perfect did you do any deep diving i tried to do the free diving on my own but quite a few people have come to a nasty end right now and i got a little bit scared but it's a really eerie beautiful serene place um i forget the name maybe it's just called the the blue hole um but all that coastline and on the opposite side you get these incredible sort of estuaries where the sea comes in and these small lagoons where these lemon sharks kind of swim.

22:57So you're right in with sheer beauty and wilderness and danger. And I kind of love that cast. Yeah, fantastic. I love that film Le Grand Bleu. I think it's called, you know, when the French guy does the diving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. It's a fantastic, it's very old but it's a really beautiful film. Yeah, I love that film too. So let's talk about food and drink. Food and drink is so much part of travel, so much part of life. Where do you go eating? What do you like eating? What sort of food? What's your best meal, your best drink? Let's just talk about food and drink. Have you ever read the book The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho?

23:36Oh, it's my favorite, Paolo Coelho. Yeah. Paolo Coelho. Paolo Coelho. and and um so it's a little bit like is it i think it's the shepherd that sleeps and has a dream about treasure and it goes around the world and then finds that the treasure is right under his pillow well the uk is a bit like that you can want to go off and the weather can be terrible and miserable and wet but actually i find that the uk under our pillow right here are amazing places and most of my times in London when I'm not working so I find London has such an array of the most amazing places to eat and drink but my favorite for drinking if I'm ever in that area I don't go maybe once every two years I go is the bar at Claridge's I love that place so that's something here in London but the best experiences actually that I've had are very simple sicily is one being on a small fisherman's boat with some italian friends who dive down and get sea urchins cut them in half squeeze a bit of lemon on them and the row in the sea urchin is can i say orgasmic can i say it just transports you it's an amazing taste and of course it might be to do with the sun and the boat and the sense of being in sicily added to that i would say um i went once to the palio in sienna and you could you have to stand for seven hours and it's shoulder to shoulder but it's worth seeing but do it when you're young i would say it's exhausting but down in the south west i want to say part of the square the piazza is this amazing osteria and i had the most incredible truffles there with with pasta and that had the same effect to me as the row um urchins in in sicily and then one other very very different experience was when i was working in moscow and through a friend of a friend i would i found myself in a nightclub and it was crazy and awful and i'm not big on nightclubs and noise and lights um but i was asked by someone i was with to say that these guys over there they were really sketchy in the vip area they're mafia but they would love to invite you to try some caviar so okay so i followed but but it wasn't there mafia um and so i said yes but then i found myself going down right the way through this club down on in an elevator all the way a lift sorry going all the way to the car park and there was this big bmv or whatever and they popped open the boot and i thought what is going to happen this is all gone wrong and um and they had these tins and they opened it up and they said thrice and i did and my fear disappeared instantly yes and um again rather like the truffles and the um and the sea urchins.

26:57I was transported and fear went out the window. But those are the most wonderful experiences of taste that I've had, but not the best in places. No, but fascinating. I love caviar. Oh my goodness. So, so good. Do you have a house in Mallorca, did I hear? I have been back and forth. We did have a house in Mallorca and we go back and forth. We have been for the last 15 nearly 20 years um the balearics i have to say i never tire of mallorca i've been to many places boroborah egypt um i was at the amazon uh over the over the new years that was an incredible trip what were you doing up the rio negro um went for a little bit of a cruise it was iberostar have a boat and they take you up for four days and then you zip off in these little ribs and you go up estuaries to fish piranha and what have you but that was quite an incredible trip i would say that is a must you can fly actually from lisboa to either salvador or which is an amazing place the colonial city of port city of salvador de bahia is amazing amazing beautiful colonial um port um or i think you can go from risban all the way to manaos which is the mouth of the brazilian side of the amazon and what an experience um and that's doable if borobor is not doable the amazon is egypt or the amazon yeah so intrepid do you take your kids when you go yeah we all went we all went we all swam with the pink dolphins and which is a good thing because that they eat the piranhas.

28:40And we did fish piranha. And I tell you what, I thought it was a Hollywood thing where they eat you and they do. They are beasts. They're prehistoric. I mean, the teeth. I think there are 15 species. I think the little ones come in and they nibble you and then you bleed and then the big ones come in to finish you off. I think Mark Strong talked about piranha in the Amazon, actually. I think because his father is like David Attenborough. He took him all over the world and he swam with piranha and he said exactly that. And he said that the only thing they said is don't bleed. So that they don't, I was like, oh my God.

29:13But have you seen the teeth on the, how can you not bleed? I mean, the teeth, prehistoric. Oh gosh, very. But the Balearic Islands you love. I love, I come back and there's this coastline of the Tramontana that runs from Andrax all the way up to Wendt or Porto Boyenza on the northern side. And when you look down the barrel of that coastline, I think it equals that Californian coast or any coast in the world. I mean, it is stunning. And the quality of the water is amazing. And the infrastructure of these Balearic Islands, whether it's Palma, Minorca or Ibiza, great restaurants, amazing places to eat and drink.

29:56And also there's really good hospitals in terms of just all great airports. Have you ever been to Formentera? Yes, yeah. See, I've never been to, we have a hotel called Taranka there. It's not Six Senses, is it? No, it's owned by the same people who own the Marbella Club in Marbella. And they opened it last year. Apparently, it's really nice. Yeah, here there's one or two really beautiful ones. I know there's an amazing hotel called Capricut in Palma, just outside Palma, which is an old fort that's submerged so they can see, you know, enemy coming. And that's sort of old battlements they've transferred.

30:31And I think that company bought a place as well, a hotel. They're really good informant. but it's got to got to do i think a big privilege of travel and the best way especially if you're in the balearics and it goes back to the bora bora experience if you can get on a boat because to see an island or a place from the sea or to anchor down just off the coast away from everybody and have a little bit of privacy in the sea is the best thing but to 50 of the experience comes from a boat and you don't you can get one of these ribs you can get one that you can captain yourself it's small you can go into little coves that you can't get to all of that i would say that's a big must i was going to ask you what your best travel tip is maybe that is your travel tip yeah get a boat license yeah i mean you can get a boat license in a couple of days and then all around the world you can just go and get a rib or something like that which are the best ones for going into the calitas but i think one of my language i mean we talked about my wife who you is my passport to every culture through her incredible knowledge of language but i would say learn a phrase or two it opens the world up to you and also people see you trying that's a really good thing um and polaroid cameras have been a big success for me early on when i traveled a bit of africa um and india um having loads of polaroid film and a camera meant that when you sat with kids or played football or met families you could do a portrait and give them a portrait and you know some places they don't have pictures of themselves hanging on the wall so it was such you know such a lovely present people that you yeah you give them out and you start to share and talk and everyone giggles and looks at themselves and goes oh my god no take it again and you run out of film.

32:23But I would say that's a really good thing, that and a football. Do you play football? I don't. But just kicking something around is community. So football's not big in your life. I thought when you played Gareth Southgate, you must be a huge football fan. Of course, I am. I am when I've got the waistcoat on. Well, you are very knowledgeable, is all I can tell you. You are very knowledgeable. What is your most poignant travel experience? Probably when I was seven to ten, we had a VW bus, this old cranky diesel VW bus, and it could take all the family. And it was this thing where you could configure the kitchen and the seats.

33:09I don't know if that exists, but it was this amazing kind of Rubik's Cube of, you know, seats could change and you could make a living room or a seven seater. anyway we all piled in this was in the 70s and we all piled in from the UK and we never went on holidays I didn't really get in a plane till I was 18 or 20 or something but the most poignant was everyone together every member of my family with our parents all in the VW bus driving down to france and i've never been away and it was sunny and beautiful and there were baguettes and cheese and we were in the dodoin and there was amazing rivers and i was in heaven and for me that is the most poignant memory is all the family together um and in a place that was totally unlike the uk so it was exotic to me was your father an actor my father was a photographer Photographer.

34:10Yeah. And how many of you in the family are actors? So it's you and Ray. They're all up to it. But professionally, the two of us, yeah. But the others are all very successful. It's an amazing family. Your Catholic family. Yes. Although when my father, who was Protestant, met my mum, they couldn't get married, I don't think. So he had to convert to Catholicism in order to get married. But yes, kind of lapsed. Lapsed with seven children. Marvellous. Marvellous. So I asked you to bring a photograph. Can you tell me about the photograph and how that sums up travel to you? So in my 20s, I was in New York and I came across a studio.

34:57And in the studio was Peter Beard. and he was selling a lot of his prints of Kenya and places he had been and lived. And there was one particular self-portrait he did and it's inscribed, I'll write whenever I can. And he's clearly walked this amazing, wild, rugged beach and he's come across a saltwater alligator that's been washed up and so he clearly this is before you know this is all analog um before iphones but he's done a self-portrait on his nikon or whatever it was his canon and um he's climbed inside the mouth or it's made he's made it look like he's climbed inside the mouth of this you know at a 12 meter or something alligator looks massive and um he's got a journal and he's poised with the pen writing and inscribed on the print is i'll write whenever i can and that for me is where i'd like to be and where i have been and where i've been most happy where i've been on a beach but it's not that kind of beautified beach it's this wild one that you might just go down a dirt track and it opens up and reveals itself and it's wild and rugged and for me it takes me back to those places and and reminds me that you have to stop the bus the train wherever you are get off and go to the place that wasn't designated and it reminds me of that that's amazing and actually before I go on to my very final question tell us a little bit about when you and Ranul Fiennes were doing the Canadian trip so that was going back to an expedition that he had done before or yes something yes so all of the um the documentaries we we did with uh national geographic were looking at expeditions that he he had done invariably when he was in his 20s um and one of them um there was the whole egypt you know going down the the nile on hovercraft was one um but in um british columbia he He went from the furthest Canadian point right the way down to the American border by boat.

37:29And it was a pretty mad expedition. I mean, it's just the scale of it. I mean, when you go up there and you fly and you go hundreds and hundreds of miles over where he and his companions traversed, they're absolutely nuts. I mean, it's just so inhospitable. But they did it. And so we didn't quite recreate it. We used, you know, a little bit of boats and a lot of cars and a bit of airplanes to get because it is so remote. And we, you know, we use a lot of old archive and we sort of followed him. The thing about when you go to those places, you're so, he's very military minded. So everything is about A to B and how you get over that mountain and precision.

38:21But you forget to do what I love to do, which is a luxury, which is just take some photographs and just go for a wander and appreciate the landscape. So it was lovely to take him back to see what he had done, but to really witness the beauty and the feat itself. And he actually says that, doesn't he? that it's nice that he had the time to go back and actually appreciate where he'd been and what he had done. I must send you to Rwanda to see the gorillas. Have you ever done that? Never. Because just listening to your travel tales, you're so intrepid and you love that sort of thing. That's right on my screen.

38:58And, you know, it's not easy to get there. Yeah. But it is, I've never done it, but it is a client. And they, apparently it's totally life-changing. Really? And you get really close to them. they don't have many people a day because obviously they need to preserve their habitat but apparently it is really beautiful it is a part of a conservation project yeah so the the client that we have is called volcano safaris and the owner is amazing and he's spent years and years giving back to the community and building schools and everything and then conserving the whole place where the gorillas live and apparently it's absolutely sensational so i think that's where you must go because i don't see you just sitting on a beach in the maldives but how close could you get to a silverback because they're powerful beasts you know i think you do get quite close yeah i think it's not quite as close as gorillas in the mist where she's actually hugging them but i think you do get back because they don't have many people presumably they know you're there yes yeah they do but i know can you imagine so i want you to do that and then report back i'm in i'll come back to the couch and tell you all about it tell me all about it so before i let you go what's next for you business wise filming wise and where are you going next well i've really come here to ask you for the waistcoat because because i'm getting back into gareth mode yeah um this summer it's um james graham who our number one illustrious writer has uh delivered four uh scripts so it's a four-part BBC series limited series that will which will sort of take Dear England as you saw as a play but take it into a more cinematic realm and it'll look at all the complicated themes of politics and male identity and football and hopefully come out as the World cup comes out oh that's exciting oh wonderful and i think you can watch dear england on nt live now actually can't you so if you missed it in the theater i think you can see it that's right on nt live but oh i'm so excited about that and then where are you going to go next where are you going holidaying or i i will probably try to grab because uh it's it's soon upon me the waistcoat so i will probably at the end of may go back to the balearics and to um mallorca well if you can't get to Rwanda, look at my list and see where else you'd like to go because I'm sure that they would love to have you.

41:25Okay, can't wait. Joseph, it has been such a joy and delight to go around the world with you. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Travel Secrets. I'm loving making this podcast and want it to reach as many people as possible to build this community of fellow travelers. So please do subscribe on your favorite podcast app and share with a friend. I'll be back next week. And remember, this podcast might not change your life, but it might just change your plans.