Why Iceland Should Be Your Next Trip | Travel Expert Tom Marchant

0:03Welcome to Travel Secrets with me, Tanya Rose, the podcast sharing wisdom for fellow travelers. 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.

0:33Today, my guest is my lovely friend, Tom Marchant, co-founder of award-winning Black Tomato Tour Operator, founded 20 years ago, I think it is now. 20 years. With your two friends. I can't believe it. I can't either. That long ago. Amazing. Amazing. do you? The ethos of Black Tomato is to find out how you want your clients to feel, which I just adore. You're on many boards. You're a thought leader in the travel industry. You've been nominated or even, I think, awarded as top speaker on travel. Something like that. Something amazing like that. And in 2024, Black Tomato was voted best tour operator.

1:14You have your own new podcast. And there is nobody I know that knows about travel more than you do. So I'm feeling a little intimidated because usually I'm the one that knows more about travel. Well, no pressure then. No pressure. Welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for having me on, Tanya. It's a delight to be here. It's so lovely to see you. And before we get into the travel secrets, perhaps you can just tell us a bit about yourself and how travel has impacted the person you've become before Black Tomato and then how Black Tomato came about. I basically like have always been a very kind of curious person, I think.

1:46And that's what sort of was the seed of getting into travel. so I grew up in Birmingham the accent doesn't necessarily give that away but yeah my mother's from Finland and she trained as a nurse in Finland and then worked in Sweden and came to the UK and met my dad in Worcestershire and we sort of grew up there but both my mum being a traveller and my dad coming from a very kind of creative at times of bohemian family we had lots of trips both in the UK around Europe growing up and I think they just planted a seed in me that the joy of travel was something that you should run towards. And as I grew up, my father was an entrepreneur.

2:23So I got to kind of see the highs and the lows and the highs that he went on. But that planted in me this desire to want to do something for myself. I didn't know what it was at the time. But I do remember my father going away on lots of business trips and coming back from the far flung corners of the earth with these stories, whether it's about Hong Kong or Japan or coming back with things from America and America just being big and bright and bold and just my eyes on stalks the whole time at these stories. And then after school, I was at university. And when I was at university, I met my now business partner, James Merritt.

2:57And we just bonded over a love of sport and travel. And then it was at uni where we just, every kind of spare holiday we got, we would take off on adventures. Not to like obvious places, but places where we could just go and really kind of lean in and discover a place that we didn't think people would know about. So places like the Philippines and then parts of South America. And all along that way, we were talking to ourselves. His father was an entrepreneur as well. And we said, we should do something together one day. And that's where really kind of the idea of Black Tomatoes started. And then post-university, we both went and worked jobs in the corporate world for a while, not because we wanted to do that, but rather because we wanted to get some commercial experience.

3:39Business experience. Yeah, although I was seconded to Warner Music for most of it, so I wouldn't really call that classic business experience. But yeah, that was the journey we took. It was a long journey, but always rooted in curiosity. And I sort of apply that to pretty much every aspect of my life. But I was lucky to have a family that would encourage us to kind of explore, not crazy wild holidays all around the world, but just to really, really look around you, both at home and away and get excited about the differences and the alternative views of things and how it would make you feel. And so much of what I do now, I kind of quite often go back to, that's how I felt when I was young.

4:20So there's almost like a childlike nature that's fueling a lot of what we do. Well, that's also this whole philosophy and ethos of how do you want, you say to your clients, how do you want to feel? Yeah. I mean, look, when we started the company, it was very much on an insight we had, which was we didn't know where we wanted to go, but we knew how we wanted to feel. And at the time, the travel landscape was full of brochures and static websites, all perfectly nice, but it was just long lists of destinations, some activities, but nothing that would really tell you what that was going to give to you or how you'd feel from it.

4:54And James and I had been on an adventure through Brazil, and we'd been in the Pantanal, sort of the central area of Brazil, It's bigger than the Amazon, like half the size of France. And we'd spend a week like trekking through jungles, sleeping in these little huts with snakes up in the eaves. You know, I got chased out of a lake by a caiman. You know, we were on horseback riding through lined sort of avenues of trees full of killer bees. It was this crazy experience. And it was at the end of that week, we were sat there having a cold beer one night, you know, fending the mozzies off. And we just said, this is the stuff we want to keep doing.

5:30And how would we do this? and how would we find these, what in those days was quite unusual were these experiences, because no one really talked about experiences in those days. So yeah, the root of Black Tomato was about feeling. And even when we launched our website, which was, well, in these days, it'd be a terrible way to do it. We didn't actually categorize anything by destinations. It was all, the first website was all about lists of feelings and the experience you could have to meet that feeling. So that has been the, if you like, the fire that's been burning underneath us since we started 20 years ago but it's still very much the thing that drives us it's this pursuit of feeling um and helping people understand that will take them to places where they're gonna maybe have certain feelings or have feelings they're not expecting but ultimately recognize that that's the power that really moves us to travel well it's really interesting because I left my office this afternoon to come to interview you and two of the girls in my office had done their honeymoons through you and you know that's just a honeymoon yeah but it is how do you want to feel it is and it's um I just think with travel for a long time it's almost been we've been pushed down a road of like this is how you should approach it and so it was very perfunctory for a while it was like it needs to have this accommodation it needs to have these facilities these amenities but you could have a dozen hotels that have sort of the same thing but all of them could have a very different vibe to how it makes you feel you know you could have someone ring you and say, I want to go and do a safari in this place.

6:56Or someone might ring up and say, I want to go to Namibia. And if they speak to Namibia specialists, that person will say, well, I'll sell Namibia because I want to sell Namibia. But if you dig into that, what are you really looking for? It's like, well, I want to kind of feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of animals I'm going to see. Well, Namibia wouldn't be perfect for that. It's very different. It's otherworldly, and it's more rare to see animals, but it gives you a different feeling. so then it just then then you start digging into what's important beyond the obvious and then you'll find a different place that meets the safari so it's it's a it's a cliche term it gets trotted out a lot but it's also it's a bit like travel therapy so we ask the questions of people that sometimes they haven't even asked themselves and you just pull on that thread a bit and so having done that people start approaching the world or thinking about in a slightly different way and that then parlays into great experiences.

7:47Well I'm going to ask you your travel secrets now and I'm sure we'll hear much more about some experiences and things that you've organized for people but what's the number one destination you think everyone should go to once in their lifetime? I promise I won't deter every question but it's kind of split but they both have a very similar feel. So the first one is Iceland. I think everyone thinks I work for the Icelandic tourist board because I talk about it so much. I've been there so many times, you know, 20, 25 times. It is hands down for me, the most enchanting, different, otherworldly, ethereal place on the planet.

8:24And it has everything that you could want for a trip, but for different reasons. So yeah, I first sort of fell in love with Iceland right at the start of Black Tomato when we were doing research trips. And we went over there and we then, we were introduced by my fixer to this, what's very well known now, this crack called the Sulfur Crack, which is a fissure between two tectonic plates in a lake just outside Reykjavik about an hour. And you could dive down, snorkel or scuba dive between this crack where the water is clearer than water in the mold. I think it's the clearest water in the world. You have to wear dry suits because it's very cold.

8:59But you can literally go down and put one hand on the Eurasian plate and one hand on the Americana plate and sort of like be holding the world apart. And it was this incredible experience and we normally knew about it. We started talking about it and it just introduced Iceland to a lot of people. And then over the years, just the sheer variety. So I like Iceland at any time of the year. So I love it in the summer months when it's perpetual light. I love it in the winter months when it's dark, but it's moody and it's atmospheric and it's cozy. And I like how the landscape can change in an hour because of the weather patterns.

9:31You can go for adventure. It's really romantic. When I was living in New York and my now wife was living in London, we'd meet in Iceland for weekends. Oh, really? And it just has everything. And then on top of all of that, the people are just incredible people. So welcoming, so hospitable, but also have a real kind of sense of self and pride of their culture and their history. And you've got these great guides who are all friends of mine now, who I'll go and spend time with. them, they just tell these folk stories that their mothers would tell them about, where the trolls live and coming. And every time I go, there's something new to discover.

10:08And I think, I won't talk about Iceland forever, but I think there's a thing at the moment which is like, oh, Iceland, it's over tourism. It's sort of, you see these beautiful pictures of it, but when you turn up, there's a hundred coaches and everyone's clean. And there is a bit of that on some of the classic areas, but the thing about Iceland, it's vast. And there are so many areas you can go to that you don't feel like that. I mean, I was there earlier in the year I went with a journalist from fortune who was doing a profile piece on I mean the company and we just went off to explore some new places and we went off to this area called smoke valley which I've been so I hadn't been to before and it was up in the hinterland and you just got out this the car walks across and as you're coming across the valley you'd see smoke rising all these natural hot springs just dug into this valley that was remote and just there's nothing like it and so I we've never had a client come back who said yeah I've had a client I want to go back.

10:58The food is amazing. The art and the culture. You've got great musicians go out there. Damon Albarn has a place out there and goes and records. Sigur Rós, which is one of my favorite bands, they have their studio and they have, I think, wife has this perfume. Everyone knows everyone, but in a really kind of understated way. So it's beautiful. My dream is to buy a little cabin outside Reykjavik. It's kind of a three bed cabin with a sauna and just go for adventures, take my daughters there. Off-grid. So Iceland, you know, and that's pretty obvious. And then the other one which has similarities is Chile.

11:38So growing up, I'd always been, I love starts, and I'd always been fascinated by the Atacama Desert. And the whole time Black Tomatoes, I've got to get to Chile. We've got great fixes in Chile. We have people go to Chile. And I still hadn't got there. And then I went three years ago and I did a trip that we flew into Santiago, then flew south and to a little town called Cochrane, which we took a bus to, which is the gateway to the Southern Patagonia National Park. And Patagonia obviously goes across Argentina and Chile and the north of Patagonia. It's remote, but it's more populated from tourism.

12:14The Southern Patagonia National Park is empty. And that's the one in Chile. And it's where Doug Tompkins, who founded the North Face Esprit, he for years had been building a conservation area down there to just protect this environment. And he sadly died in a kayaking accident a number of years ago. And he'd built this lodge, which was a research center. So for the wildlife and for understanding the area better. And his wife, and it was a charitable foundation, and his wife said, well, actually what we want to do is turn it into um you know a property where people can come and stay and explore and so explorer um won the right state so i went down to explorer's lodge there and i've never had an experience like it because you are you're there and it's miles and miles and miles of valleys of mountains of cobalt blue lakes and there's no one there and i turned up at the lodge and 20 minutes into it i went for a little walk and i saw a puma right which i'm sorry but they're around and then I can only compare it to it sounds cliche but like being dropped in another planet where there's no development and you're just exploring it is as it is and um and what the stars amazing that was that so that's that was the south and then went to the Atacama desert up to the top and blew my mind the Atacama again like ice and otherworldly lunar landscapes you know salt pans with flamingos and the stars, one night we camped out in a canyon and at midnight, a local astronomer came down and walked me and my friend out into the night sky, a couple of chairs down, a couple of whiskeys and she got out a spot of pen and the stars, and she just put, it's like being in a classroom, it was pointing.

13:57Oh really, the seven sisters and you plush it. Yeah, and then you were watching it move slowly. So that feeling of being totally disconnected somewhere remote that's challenged you from a sensory perspective, like is pervasive through Chile and Iceland. Well, it's all about experiences for you. And actually, it's so funny when I listen to so many people being interviewed, they all talk about authenticity, which I actually think is a really annoying word now because everyone's talking about authenticity. But these are so authentic because you are literally with no one in the really amazing places.

14:29And that's why I love cities. I love everything. But that definitely is a big draw for me. Probably is like a lot of travel is often like it's an antidote to what you have day to day. And so if you're living in cities and in this sort of overwhelmed, constantly connected life, going to places that feel so elemental and so moment in time and sort of untouched, but where you are, you're marveling at the world and its power, Mother Nature. and Iceland and Chile just have that space and then throw in like the winelands of Chile's amazing wines and there's everything I mean I remember reading the motorcycle diaries and going well I need to do that and it was the Chile part that really stood out and so I'm pleased I've been I'm going back next year and thankfully lots and lots of clients of ours are having that same experience fantastic what's your most unexpected travel experience or place you've been to um I feel bad saying it because it's so great now.

15:24But it was Slovenia because it's so great. I think we've known Slovenia forever. Lake Bled was your screensaver, the church in the middle of Lake Bled. And we just hadn't got around to going. We've been selling it a little bit. And then suddenly in the last four or five years, we just started leaning into it a bit more. And so I went last summer with four mates. We do a trip each year. And I was just blown away by this place, just how it's like this perfect encapsulation of all the countries that border it so it has this melting pot of croatia of italy of austria and but yeah is the stuff that is obviously inherently slovenian and and switzerland and you you'd go it's a small country you can get around easily but lubilana as a as a city has this amazing culture but vibrancy and then within half an hour you can be whitewater rafting in the julian alps um we then went off to birda which is these amazing vineyards drinking Slovenian wines and these little wines for the day.

16:21Are they good, the wines? Very good. Really good. In fact, you know, I mean, I don't think it's just because we'd all drunk a lot. We all ordered cases that then arrived a few months later that some of us have forgotten about. But that's a good sign. The people are great. And then just, just witnessing like just the most picture postcard perfect scenes. And it's like, how do I not know this? And it's so easy to get around. And it's so easy to get there. It's so easy to get there. And so, I'm such a fan and we're seeing that same feedback I think it's just something that always been almost like jumped over you know people are like oh I'll go there but I'm going to go to Italy first or go to Croatia and then when you say it's all there so that was one and the only other one I throw in is underrated but I had the best time is Belgrade so I am about five or maybe seven years ago with a friend always been fascinated by Belgrade its history in terms of what it went through as part of Yugoslavia.

17:19But even going as far back as it's where the Black Hand Gang planned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which basically started World War I. So there's so much that's happened there. But it's this stark but beautiful city. But it has things like all these hidden bars and tower blocks. So there's different stories of why it happened. But in the 90s, when it was Yugoslavia and going through economic and political turmoil, a lot of people didn't want to go out or they couldn't afford it so people started building bars in their flats and they basically became speakeasies and and and they're still today now obviously they're more cultural but it's so many of them are still hidden so you you can go so you can go yeah yeah yeah and they're you know open to anyone but you've had this weekend of just exploring sort of ending up in the stairwell of some strange tenement block going is it up here and then you go up and suddenly be in this incredible spot so it just felt very um very particular place and i and i haven't been back to hotels to stay in belgrade okay not not not i mean i think there was a kimpinski but i can't remember but it just as a place that i think people go belgrade well that's going to be it's war torn and it was um very passionate people i loved it and that was an underrated do you have any overrated places it's really hard i know you don't even have to say no i'll throw it in just because uh i just can't stand mykonos oh really it's not can't stand it that's really unfair i've been to mykonos plenty of times and many years ago which i like i just find maybe it's beautiful in certain parts but i think the recent times i've been it's just been so overrun um it just feels like it's sort of for me because so much has been built there and i think it just almost feels even though it's not it's like a disneyfied version of things so it's not i can't stand it but it's just nominal i mean all the islands around.

19:12I was going to say there are so many beautiful islands in Greece, aren't there? That's it. So I love, I love Greece. I love the Greek islands. Where do you go in Greece? It's like Kefalonia and with Xante last year and Paros. And so there's, I love it, but that place, you know, I've been invited to, can't stand as unfair, but if I get invited to something there, I'm tend to be like, I can't, because the last time I was there, it was like, it was just a bun and I remember flying out of Mykonos in the airport and it was just horrible. Sorry, it's a first world problem, but I just think when I hear people like Mykonos, I'm like...

19:49And especially if it's their first foray into Greece, it's a shame because it is so overpop... Well, it's so popular now, isn't it? It's so popular. And don't get it wrong, there's some great restaurants there. It just feels that it's just not what it was. And knowing what else is around there, I think if you're going to go to that part of the world it's each the right but I would urge people to explore further and the other thing that's wonderful to do in Greece is to take a boat and sail around all of the islands because then you can go into little nooks and grannies and beaches that you can't get to and have your own picnics best way so yeah so it's and yeah because you kind of feel trapped a bit like if you're there so yeah can I ask you about a trip that you did or not a trip but trips you did a few years ago with Eon you did trips to do sort of following James Bond around so tell us a bit about that because that sounds amazing yes but what what was that about so that was that was a really incredible uh opportunity so it was the 60th anniversary of when Dr.

20:53No came out um so they were celebrating Eon was celebrating that so Eon being the producers and guardians or that's changed been out of Bond. And they reached out to us and said, look, we want to do something to kind of mark the 60th anniversary. You've got lots of things going on. They had fantastic events. And they said, but we've never done something with a travel partner. So as we all know, every time a Bond film comes out, the whole world goes, oh, go there because that's where Bond goes. And every travel operator or tours board goes, you know, come and live like Bond. So people kind of profit off it, but without Bond ever going, we're going to endorse and actually see if we can bring it to life.

21:28So Eon had heard that we had a kind of a similar outlook in terms of we're big believers in using cultural platforms to inspire travel. So we've done stuff with Agatha Christie. We've worked with various brands to bring their stuff to life. So they'd heard that we were good at it. So we ended up having a long conversation, which resulted in signing a deal with them where we were going to basically, where we created trips to sort of live like Bond and be inspired by him. And what that meant was we created a whole kind of narrative where people could book a whole trip that kind of took them through Europe, different places, or you could buy sort of snapshot sort of little chunks of it.

22:06But EON opened up their world to us. So we got to spend time with the heads of special effects, with archivists, with Bond girls, with all these people. And we use insights and access also in places to create these experiences that were unique to us. And EON, no one else could do these. definitively bond. So it felt like you were doing something that had the oversight and the guidance and sort of from E.ON. And we were very respectful of the bond proposition. And actually, I was actually quite sort of overwhelmed, slightly intimidated by it because it was such an honor. But at the same time, you were playing with this iconic British brand that everyone knows.

22:49And so it was, you know, we had, you know, we set up, you know, chases down the River Thames. You You could take the boat that was in that. We had, you could access, I think it's Bollinger's, a part of the Bollinger Champagne House, which is only set aside for the Bond family. We were doing stunts. You could have a day doing stunts with Daniel Craig's stuntman, the guy's been in it. You could go, I mean, there was loads. And we'd have things dropped off, pushed into people's doors. And we had original call sheets from the films, put in envelopes, pushed under them. So it was really special. Did they love it?

23:21They loved it. They loved it. And it's still going. And it's a real labor of love. But I think for all the partnerships we've done, you know, that was really special. And did you go to places abroad as well where they have filmed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'd always line up with places. So we were doing stuff in Monaco, in Austria, in Paris, Lake Como. And then we've sort of been looking at other places as well. Well, I've just come back from Istanbul. and I did that walk over the Grand Bazaar you know that Daniel Craig did with the motorbikes it was amazing it's incredible we actually looked really closely at Matera where in the caves which a couple of films but that's a really big scene so we got close to doing that but didn't in the end but it's such a it was such an honour because we got to say you know we're the Bond guys if you like and Barbara Broccoli endorsed everything that was it yeah we did a kick-off event at the Corinthia and they bought in suits of different bombs over the years and dresses warmly actors and lined it all there they brought down one of the original db-5s parked it outside so they really they were so generous and supportive and it was um yeah really special to do let's go on to food and drink food and drink is so important in our lives but also in travel so let's talk about food and drink what do you like eating where do you like eating where's your favorite restaurant bar let's just talk in general about food well in general so growing up i grew up in birmingham which is a has a huge indian and pakistani diaspora so i just love indian food i like that is my favorite food or anything and when i lived in new york for five years i was also angry because you could never find a really good indian curry there which is kind of crazy given that the people there but so i think memories that i have of great most often it's um it's a bit cliche but often it's like the occasion or the people but if i'm thinking about indian food one that always stands to mind and it's more an experience because I can't actually name the place because it's random but I was in India doing a research trip and had a great guide and one day he said so um what do you want to do I said look I just want to go and eat just fantastic tandoor food like what he goes right leave with me so head off on this thing and 20 minutes later he pulled outside the overway I'm like oh I said no that's cool I said I know it's got a great restaurant and he's just thinking that's what I'd want I said no no where would you go where do the locals and he said really I said Yeah.

25:46So we jumped back in, it's on a little rickshaw actually, and went right into the heart of old Delhi, down the streets, kind of like just totally lost. You know, Delhi's like this crazy, like overwhelming sense of smell and noise and people and animals. And we just turned around and there, pulled up outside this hole in the wall. And it's this old tandoor that his mother had taken as a child. It's been there forever. And he said, you sure you went to this? I said, yeah. and so they just did this like tandoori chicken you know i'm just sitting and it was just sat there on this step with him eating this incredible food just out this tiny hole in the wall joint in the depths of old delhi i couldn't find it now but it just stays with me forever and and it's those always things i kind of you know i'll talk about a couple of restaurants a second that are bigger but it's like when i was traveling in ethiopian i spent a lot of time in ethiopia not that i've traveled in ethiopia for a lot but you have these roadside stalls that you stop at and they'd have the injera Ethiopian bread, which when it's good, it's good.

26:44When it's bad, it's like rubber. But I remember turning up and they had this injera bread and it was being served with spaghetti bolognese. I was like, why is this? And then probably much to my embarrassment, well, the Italians were in control here during World War II. Oh, yes, of course they were. So this huge Italian influence. But that's remained to this day. So I remember at this moment, I started having this injera bread with a load of bolognese. It sounds delicious. And it was glorious, you know, with a cold beer. And so it's just these things I sort of, I search out. I mean, on the other side is there are certain, a couple of restaurants in Paris that are really kind of important to me that have memories that mean a lot.

27:24So my father's side, his grandfather was a gallerist. So he ran a gallery in London called the Goupil Gallery, which was in Barclay Square, and was running the one in Paris many years ago. but he kind of dealt art for people like Lautrec and was really good friends with Theo Van Gogh and all this stuff. And so, so we growing up, we'd go on trips to Paris because there was a connection and my dad would grow up, you know, being told about the art. There's, you know, his, his grandfather was best friends with an artist called Greaves, who was the Whistler's protégé. And there's this whole, there's a plaque on in Bankman where Greaves lived.

28:04And there's a whole story about it and parents would take us to to paris and we'd go around galleries and you know the classics like the louvre and muse d 'orce and then it was the first evening there and i was probably about 11 and we went to lacupole and i just remember going into this place which you know this huge you know brasserie bistro but just this sounds and colors and all the pillars that have been painted you know by artists to pay their way over the years and then as i got older recognizing the role that Lacoupole had played in so many of the the the French intelligentsia or artist lives so you had you know Man Ray would go there and when Hemingway was there he'd eat there and all these people and it's been this this constant source so even when I go back to Paris I still like you know it's touristy as well at times but it's just something about it um that that and it's just really great family memories and so it kind of talks to me about my father's side the family's sort of connection it introduced me to just the wonder of big busting restaurants which i sometimes like it's like a scene from a from a film so i so i love that and then there's another place in paris called la fontaine de mars which is a it's a little restaurant like a brasserie um in the seventh and it's under these arches you know red and white check tablecloths it's just it's just idyllic and does these incredible lunches and i've been going there for years so I went with my folks and then as I got older I went there with my now wife and then a couple of years ago I was there with my wife and my kids and my brother and his kids and so it's been this kind of connection that goes through and I'm actually taking my kids to Paris in August my eldest birthday and we're gonna have lunch there so it's just so I think food for me is I love all types of food but it's really kind of rooted in a sense of memory or or meaning and I know it's a bit of a cliche it's the people that make the places but I think it is but it does it really And when you lived in New York, where did you live and did you go to, did you eat out all the time?

30:02I just, I love, I love New York for so many reasons. And I still, I know some people say it's changed. I still think it's got, it's got a boundless energy. New York's always recreating, right? You know, it changed after COVID, but it's, it's rebirthing the whole time. And I go there probably every six weeks, you know, four weeks. Yeah. So, and so when I lived there, I first year to was in the Lower East Side, which is still probably my favorite area. Not necessarily on the weekends when it gets all crazy but the Lower East Side and those blocks getting down to Chinatown full of like great Chinese spots or great dive bars.

30:39And then I was in Brooklyn like most Brits. I kind of went over the bridge and lived in Williamsburg and got a dog and a beard and tattoos. It's great Williamsburg. I love it though. It's so cool. But I remember going there years ago. great bars and I was back there so I ran the New York Marathon in November and I I was there with my family for a week beforehand it's half time they went back and then I had a week before it started and that was and I went and just stayed in Williamsburg and I just spent you know days wandering around these places and it's still what I love about New York you know there's still so many independent places and there are still many there's still so many stories to be had when you walk into a place I mean I love I love dive bars because I just think that's where you find characters.

31:24Yeah. You know, I love Bukowski writing, right? And so much of his stuff is like kind of booze fuel. But there's just something about, you know, in New York, there's a bar called The Ear Inn on Spring Street and the West Side Highway, just sort of south of, say, top of Tribeca. And it's been there forever. And it's called The Ear Inn because the sign outside, it said bar in neon, but the end of the B is faded. But it's this place where, yeah allegedly Tom Waits used to go and play music in there it's just it's real New Yorkers in there the bartenders it's all like they're out of central casting for like being a classic but you could go in there and have a drink on your own which you don't really do in English pubs that much no not really if I had a long day I was walking home I'd go and sit at a bar I'd just talk to people and meet interesting and it's just interesting and New York's got great high end restaurants and it changes so much but there are certain places like Iggy's and there is the Cherry Tavern in the East Village which used to be next to this, I think it's still their Death and Company, a great cocktail bar.

32:24But there was a great dive bar that's gone now, which is called the Mars Bar, which is down on, I think, 2nd Street and 1st Ave. And that was where, like, you know, it was covered in graffiti, like the stones used to go there. And it got taken away because of the gentrification. But there's so many stories in these places. And New York is so full of so many different places. Oh, it's just... Whether it's Chinatown or Little Italy or... It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. And you just, you never, time is never against you in New York, I find. What's your top travel tip? I'm going to do two. Sorry, I'm being really greedy.

32:57I'm very happy. Every tip you're giving is brilliant. So the first one is if you're staying in a place where you're going to be for a while, be it a hotel or private property where you work with people, I'm always like tip ahead. All right. So you get, you know, I know tips are only based on, right, you know, someone's done good service before you do it. But if you go into a place and you sort of strike a rapport with someone, give them a good tip because then they will look after you. You know, then, you know, not that I'm always trying to get ahead of people, but it's just like having, and yes, it's been a commercial transaction, but also they can appreciate that.