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 journey can change a person.Thank you for listening and sharing the show, we’re hugely grateful to everyone who has listened and helped Travel That Made Me so far. Season Two of Travel That Made Me is coming soon.Until then, thank you for travelling with us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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, driven by a fascination with the unknown.In this episode, Rajan Datar speaks to Colin Thubron about the journeys that shaped his life and writing, the vivid way in which he sees the world, and his method for getting lost wherever you are.Colin Thubron on Travel That Made Me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 necessarily bringing us any closer to it.Andrew draws on psychology, from Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity to contact theory and developmental psychology, to explore why some journeys genuinely alter us while others leave us looking for the nearest Irish pub in Mexico City.Along the way, he explains what TripAdvisor tells us about conformity, why unfamiliar places can make us more curious, and what happened when a five-week cycle across Malaysia taught him to let go of his jars of Marmite.Andrew Stevenson on Travel That Made Me.Check out more from Andrew:https://www.mmu.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-andrew-stevenson https://x.com/adstevenson99 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 lawyer for over 30 years.At 23, Saul was handed a one-way ticket to Jamaica. There, he began representing prisoners on death row and became involved in a landmark case that removed around 400 people from death row across the Caribbean.Since then, as co-director of the Death Penalty Project, he has spent decades defending people facing execution across the world and helped achieve full abolition in three African jurisdictions.But this is also a story about travel and the extraordinary contrasts it can reveal. How does a lawyer visit prisons unfit for human habitation, then return to a beach resort and eat breakfast among holidaymakers? How does repeatedly witnessing the final stages of another person’s life change the way you see the world? And what does Saul believe every policymaker should be required to do?Check out more from Saul:https://www.linkedin.com/in/saul-lehrfreund-3929911a4/https://x.com/SaulLehrfreundhttps://deathpenaltyproject.org/https://www.instagram.com/deathpenaltyprojectuk/https://www.facebook.com/DeathPenaltyProject/https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-death-penalty-project/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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, the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, and the scientific consultant behind Pixar’s Inside Out and Inside Out 2. He has surveyed 2,600 people across 26 countries on the experience of awe and identified eight categories he calls the wonders of life.In this episode, Rajan Datar asks what happens when the scientist studying transcendence actually experiences it, and whether the bullying, the homesickness, and the punk records that upended a teenage Californian in 1970s Nottingham were doing something that could only have happened far from home.Check out more from Dacher:https://www.dacherkeltner.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 Bristol family where the Daily Express was the only paper in the house and “abroad” was regarded with outright suspicion, until a package tour to Moscow put her, at eleven, in a newspaper photo with George Best. She went on to read classics at Oxford on a scholarship, then spent a career writing about polar exploration, Russia, and, most recently, a biography of Jan Morris.In this episode, Wheeler tells host Rajan Datar how her seven months in Antarctica left her with a conviction she's carried through every book since: that no one, however credentialed, owns a place.#travel #AntarcticaWriting #SaraWheeler This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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, a rusting Hillman Minx, a caravan with no toilet, and a wrong turn around the Paris ring road.In this episode, host Rajan Datar talks to Mandy about growing up in Manchester with a single parent, and how her mother’s determination to travel on almost no money set the tone for everything that followed. Mandy first flew with the Air Cadets at 13, twice failed RAF selection tests later found to carry significant bias against women, and eventually flew a Tornado GR4 on operations, making split-second life or death decisions.Check out more from Mandy:https://www.mandyhickson.com/https://www.instagram.com/mandyhicksonspeaker/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandyhickson/https://x.com/MandyHickson#travel #RAFpilot #WomenInAviation This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 spent years as a photojournalist covering natural disasters, conflicts, and revolutions in over 100 countries.But the real story in this episode isn’t how Lee became successful, it’s why a boy who erased most of his childhood memories from years of school bullying became someone restless in a way that never really goes away, and what he’s still trying to prove, and to whom.Check out more from Lee:https://www.flashpack.com/https://www.instagram.com/flashpacklee/https://x.com/flashpackleehttps://www.facebook.com/theflashpackhttps://x.com/flashpackhttps://www.instagram.com/flashpack/#travel #ChristTheRedeemer #Flashpack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 in a tent crossing jungles, glaciers, and polar regions from North to South Pole by ski, sled, dog sled, bicycle, and kite. He’s climbed the highest point on every continent. He’s survived hurricanes, frostbitten toes, and serious injury.And yet, after all of it, he felt empty.So what was the moment that finally changed that? The answer has nothing to do with the mountain peaks or extreme conditions and everything to do with learning to believe in the boy he once was, when no one else would.Check out more from Johan:https://johanernst.com/ https://www.facebook.com/johanernstnilson/ https://www.instagram.com/johanernst/ https://x.com/ExplorerJEN This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 rerouting through the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights when Syria denied her visa, Jessica reveals the disconnect that drove her to 195 countries.She explains how traveling solo through 100 of them taught her that most people are good, and that her scariest moment wasn’t in the countries she was warned about, but in Miami, staring down the barrel of a police officer’s gun.This is a woman who has seen everything, and is still working out what she was running toward.Check out more from Jessica:https://www.jessicanabongo.com/https://thecatchmeifyoucan.com/https://www.instagram.com/jessicanabongo/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicanabongo/https://www.tiktok.com/@thecatchmeifyoucanhttps://www.facebook.com/thecatchmeifyoucan/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com