Travel That Made Me

A package holiday to Moscow. Cranes circling a Buddhist monastery. A one-way ticket to Jamaica. A mob in Lebanon. Death row in the Caribbean. Bombs falling over Afghanistan. For our Season One finale, Rajan looks back at some of the extraordinary journeys and moments that have made Travel That Made Me what it is. Our guests have taken us to some truly remarkable places and shown us just how much a...

Colin Thubron once sat in a Soviet customs office watching a KGB officer read his travel notes, unable to tell whether the book he had spent years building was about to be confiscated forever. The officer looked up and said: “This is very poetic. You could publish this.” Widely regarded as the travel writer’s travel writer, Thubron has travelled alone, writing books on Syria, Russia, and China, dr...

Why does travel change some people, while leaving others exactly as they were? In this episode, Rajan speaks to Dr Andrew Stevenson, psychologist and author of The Psychology of Travel, about how travel only changes how we see other people if we actually meet them as equals. Staying in hotels, being served by staff, and moving through a country as a tourist can expose us to another culture without...

A man walked into a meeting room in the Bahamas trembling, convinced he was being taken to the gallows. He was actually there to meet his lawyer. Three weeks later, he was executed anyway. The law that might have saved him changed just three months later. This week Rajan speaks with Saul Lehrfreund to find out how cases like this have defined his work as an international human rights activist and...

Snow cranes that circle a Bhutanese monastery prayer pole exactly three times before migrating to Siberia, in sync with monks who emerge to chant at the moment the birds arrive, is not a local legend. A Berkeley professor of psychology witnessed it, wept, and says it launched his scientific career studying awe. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley,...

On her first morning in an Antarctic field camp, Sara Wheeler watched a scientist come sprinting across the ice, wind pants around his ankles. Why? A seal had surfaced through the hole beneath the camp toilet. She’d spent two years and every spare penny getting there, as the first female writer in residence under the US Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Wheeler grew up in a working-class Bris...

Mandy Hickson was accepted onto RAF pilot training, in her own words, as a “test case,” to see how far she’d get before she failed. Instead, she became one of a handful of women to fly combat missions on the frontline of RAF fast jet operations, flying reconnaissance and strike missions over Iraq and Kuwait. The drive behind all of it goes back much further than the cockpit, to her single mother,...

With £500 left in the bank and a failing business, Lee Thompson flew to Brazil, doorstepped a church, and convinced the archdiocese to hand over the keys to Christ the Redeemer. Then he climbed inside the statue and took a selfie from the top of Jesus’s head. That photo got 100 million views and rocket launched Flash Pack, the group travel company Lee built with his wife Radha. Before that, he spe...

He got the lowest possible grade in gymnastics. Then he cycled to Africa. Swedish explorer Johan Ernst Nilson joins Rajan Datar on Travel That Made Me to trace a 30-year odyssey sparked not with ambition, but with a schoolboy bet: could someone with the lowest grade in gymnastics cycle all the way to Africa? Three decades on, that bet has become 196 countries, 80-plus expeditions, and 3,000 nights...

She visited every country on earth, becoming the first Black woman to do so. But the real reason she did it only became clear years later. Jessica Nabongo joins Rajan Datar on Travel That Made Me to trace a journey that started not with a passport but with a murder: her father, killed two days after her 19th birthday. From quitting a six-figure pharmaceutical job over a three-figure bonus, to rero...

He grew up without citizenship, without a passport, and with a burning rage after his brother died after being tortured in a military cell. Then, at eighteen, Aziz Abu-Sarah did something almost nobody in his position would do: he walked twenty minutes to the other side of Jerusalem and started learning Hebrew. His world opened up. That one decision, to embrace what he had been taught to fear, run...

Some people are just made differently. Paul Simonon certainly is. From smashing his bass on stage, which would become the most famous album cover in punk to cooking spaghetti for inmates in a Greenland jail - Paul Simonon has lived many lives. For fifty years he has roamed the planet, from a Brixton boyhood to “cowboy land” in 1960s Italy, touring the world with Joe Strummer to busking unrecognise...

What's it like to be a high-profile journalist, travelling around the world, seeing international events and wars from a first-hand perspective? This conversation is with Lyse Doucet, the BBC's Chief International Correspondent. Lyse has been a journalist for over 40 years, and has reported from almost everywhere - from Afghanistan to Côte d'Ivoire. This is a public episode. If you would like to d...

How has travel shaped your life? Travel That Made Me is a weekly podcast about how travel made some of the world’s most fascinating and incredible people who they are. From musicians to Nobel Prize winners, explorers to war correspondents, Travel That Made Me delves into all of life’s stories, all through the lens of travel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other su...