From the shadows around the flickering campfire there was a gentle crunch of footsteps on sand, then a Tuareg nomad, wearing an elaborate headdress and full-length faded purple robes, stepped out of the darkness and sat down next to me.
I was crossing a remote and starkly beautiful region of the Sahara with a small BBC crew, and I had thought we were the only two-legged creatures for miles around. But the Tuareg gave me a simple nod, as if he’d just joined us in an empty train carriage, and behaved as if it was completely normal to chance upon an open-mouthed group of telly travellers. My guide passed him water, and bread we had just baked in the sand, and we sat there munching, as I gazed at him, and a billion stars above, in utter wonder. The wanderer ate his fill, tilted his head again in gratitude, and slipped back into the darkness.
That unforgettable, simple meal in the desert is just one of hundreds of magical moments I’ve been privileged to enjoy on the dozens of TV journeys I’ve made for the BBC over the past decade – trips that have taken me around the Indian Ocean, the Equator, Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and, most recently, along some of the world’s mighty sacred rivers.
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I have hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, played tribal polo with the headless corpse of a goat, tracked lions on foot and eaten some spectacularly weird food, from zebu penis soup to buffalo dung. I have also been battered by a masked female Mexican wrestler, and failed – on camera – at just about every global sport that requires a thimbleful of focus and skill.
But my journeys have taught me book-loads about the world and the joy and tragedy of life, and have, I like to think, given me a great sense of how to travel. My trips have been spectacularly memorable, for me at least, because they often combine adventure with a clear plan and destination, making them a modern, diluted, telly equivalent of an old-fashioned quest.
On occasion, the demands of TV mean the crew and I have gone out of our way to find extreme situations to thrust me into. So I have driven through the world’s largest minefield, acquired a Somali diplomatic passport in my own name – one of my proudest souvenirs – from a man called Mr Big Beard in Mogadishu market, and crossed covertly into a militarised region of Burma to meet the endangered Chin people.
While most travellers will not be particularly keen to plot their own version of my more hairy journeys, I do think they could benefit enormously from injecting a similar dose of purpose and meaning into their next holiday. A proper adventure is so much more memorable than just flopping at a resort, but it doesn’t have to involve trekking across the Arctic tundra or surviving in a desert for a week by sucking beetle juice. You could follow a river from source to sea, travel overland to somewhere local or exotic, making the journey part of the break, or start a trip in one location and head to another, exploring along the way.
One veteran traveller once told me his adventures always started at his front door, and his favourite trip had been when he centred a glass over his house on a map, drew around the rim, and explored every inch inside the circle. Advertisers have convinced us having a holiday must automatically involve sunshine and a beach. Yet, unless you choose carefully, the memories of these holidays can fade as quickly as the suntan. Resist the urge to go somewhere well known – some of my most memorable adventures were on trips I made to countries that aren’t even officially countries, such as South Ossetia, Somaliland, Transdniestria, Taiwan and Nagorno-Karabakh.
There are dozens of independent breakaway states that have parliaments, armies and passports, but are not recognised as countries by the rest of the world. Visiting a group of them left me wide-eyed. They are quite literally off the map, with eccentric customs, the energy of upstarts and patriotic locals desperate for the rest of the world to recognise their existence.
You don’t have to travel far to discover the exotic appeal of an unrecognised state. Transdniestria – a sliver of a place between Ukraine and Moldova – is on the eastern edge of Europe. Crossing the border from Moldova, from which it broke away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, remains a bit like entering a Soviet-themed resort – a chance to leap back behind the Iron Curtain. Lenin looms over the streets in the capital Tiraspol and, when I was there, official buildings were adorned with a hammer and sickle. People sat outside leafy cafés debating whether turmoil in Ukraine would affect the price of their favourite dish, imported pig fat, which they were busy smothering in melted chocolate. The food may not deserve its own cookbook, but I defy any traveller to spend even an hour in Transdniestria and not gather a stack of decent travel stories.
I racked up a few while trying to film a secret military base outside the capital. I was creeping through bushes saying, ‘They’ll never see us from over here,’ to a colleague with a camera, when there was a squeal of tyres and we were grabbed by heavies from the local KGB, who apparently failed to follow orders when Moscow announced they were disbanding. We were hauled away to detention cells at HQ.
Eventually, one of our local contacts persuaded a KGB official I was related to the Queen of England, based on some nonsense I’d been spouting during a long drive the previous day, and we were released and given KGB cap badges as a souvenir. It was a precious travel experience – genuine jeopardy that ended safely – and gifted me a tale to bore my son with for years to come.
But memorable travel doesn’t have to involve the secret police or a flak jacket. High up on the list of the most spectacular, unforgettable destinations I’ve visited is Madagascar, which offers genuine adventure in a place that has the feel of another world.
Like the Galápagos Islands, but on a larger scale, it has been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that flora and fauna have evolved along a different path, blessing the island with blood-red frogs, spiny forests and trees that drip with bright pink orchids.
Pottering across it in an old car, I came across sights that left my jaw hanging open: octopus trees with arms loaded with two-inch needle thorns, sharp-horned zebu being prodded to market by cowboys on horseback, and enormous, freakish baobab trees with oversized trunks and stubby branches. It is the most extraordinary destination on the planet.
You hop on a plane to get there, of course. And most of my TV travels have involved a long flight that delivers me to some strange foreign airport. Although the growth of the airline industry means that a lot more people can enjoy a holiday in Mexico, when we fly, we miss out on the adventure of a genuine journey.
But there are still travellers who take their time and savour the sights. I was humbled and inspired by the modern long-distance walkers I met while filming my series Pilgrimage, about the greatest journeys of our ancestors. Even in the 21st century, there are still people who walk from London to Jerusalem, not for reasons of piety, but because the journey is life-affirming and epic. For many of them, I suspect, it also becomes addictive.
In the spectacular Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, now the end of the world’s most popular long-distance trekking route, I met a hiker called Keith who had walked from Abergavenny. It was his second trip, and he was not alone.
If you can’t handle the blisters, taking the train is a magnificent compromise between walking and napping at 35,000ft. Many of my most enjoyable journeys have involved rails. Even just thinking about the time I travelled from London to Istanbul by train with my brother James brings a huge smile to my face. Slicing through forests, towns, fields and mountains, we had a secret window onto a thousand different lives. Everything is there outside those panoramic windows.
So, get off that beaten track, and don’t just rely on a flight to get you there. We’re often sold a vision of the world that depicts it as a dangerous and frightening place. It helps travel companies to persuade us to take trips to their sanitised all-inclusive resorts, where it’s hard to find the exit and the only locals you will meet wear name badges. In reality, the world is friendly and endlessly hospitable. And the further you go from the tourist traps, the warmer the welcome and the more authentic and unforgettable the experience will be.
Wherever we go and however we get there, we should never forget that travel is an incredible privilege, and a major holiday should be one of the most memorable events of one’s life. Our travels can provide us with a sense of purpose and achievement that’s often lacking in the modern world. It is important to take time to plan and prepare the trip. That way, it can be turned from just another holiday into a more interesting experience and a more rounded adventure. Happy travels.
Simon Reeve is the author of several books, including New York Times bestseller The New Jackals, an investigation of Al-Qaeda, published prior to 9/11. As an adventurer and presenter, he has journeyed to around 110 countries; simonreeve.co.uk
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