Back in 2018, Romesh Ranganathan visited Haiti, Ethiopia, and Albania and made a television programme about what it was like to visit these countries, countries not normally on a tourist's radar. I watched it, enjoyed it, and wrote about it. Since then there have been two more series (series two in July and August of 2019 with a Christmas special in December of that year and series three in March 2022).
Both on BBC2. I've finally got round to watching them on the iPlayer and guess what? I enjoyed them too. So I've written about them again. Some of his destinations felt, to me, more daring than others. I'm no intrepid explorer but I beat Romesh to both Bosnia and Herzegovina (I went in October 2010 with Shep) and Colombia (February/March 2015, with Chris). Although I'm yet to visit any of the other destinations that cropped up in series two and three.
That's Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Romania, and, for the Xmas special, not a country at all but a region. A vast region. The Sahara. We start our road trip in Zimbabwe where the absolutely lovely Chipo takes on the role as Romesh's tour guide. Which, of course, means having to bat off a lot of his deadpan humour.
Romesh calls the luggage trolleys at the airport shit, moans about the "fucking flies", calls a cow a "prick", and suggests a local drink smells like a Malteser that's been up someone's bum. He can, when he needs to, take his subject seriously. Even if he does joke that Sue Perkins would be far better suited for those earnest straight to camera soliloquys.
Most of the shows start with Romesh outlining his preconceptions with the country he's visiting and in Zimbabwe it's Robert Mugabe and fuel protests. The economic collapse, mostly caused by Mugabe, has made foreign travel to Zimbabwe, these days, virtually non-existent.
That's a shame because it has a lot to offer and they start with one of the most amazing sights I've ever seen. The only trouble is they have to go to Zambia to get there. Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river straddles the Zimbabwe/Zambia border and the view from the top, where Romesh and Chipo sit - actually in the water, is both stunning and vertigo inducing. It's one of the seven natural wonders of the world and tourists would love it.
As they would Zimbabwe's incredible wildlife. There's rhinos, cheetahs, elephants (one of which, according to Rom, is seriously "packing" - he's not talking about its trunk), antelope, and even a black mamba. The rhinos, famously, are facing extinction due to poaching and many have had their horns humanely removed so as to deter poachers.
The safari feels like a different world to the big city of Bulawayo where huge lines of cars wait to buy fuel. Sometimes for hours on end. Chipo explains to Romesh that in Zimbabwe's recent history there have been times when prices would double every day. She has a one billion dollar note to show as an example of this hyperinflation but there's even higher denominations than that. A twenty trillion dollar note. That's $20,000,000,000,000.
It feels ridiculous even to type it. Rom and Chipo visit former white owned farms and the ruined city of Khami (former capital of the Kingdom of Butwa) and learn about Cecil John Rhodes who arrived and named the country after himself.
He didn't really, it was named in his honour, but his shadow stills looms large over the former Rhodesia and his influence is still very much disputed. His legacy, as we see later on, is viewed very differently by white Zimbabweans compared to how black Zimbabweans see him. Zimbabwe's problems with racist white leaders didn't end with Rhodes. Far from it. Ian Smith, the country's PM from 1964 to 1979, once said he didn't believe, ever, in black majority rule for the country.
After a quick visit to Rhodes' final resting place, Romesh and Chipo head to Harare. It's not a city full of tourists but they seem to enjoy their trip to the massive and lively township market of Mbare. After that there's just time to visit Lake Kariba, the world's largest artificial lake, and then Romesh is on the plane home. As with everywhere else he's visited he's learned a fair bit about the country and so have we.
Mongolia, the next destination, isn't somewhere I've ever seriously considered and I've not really heard of anyone I know going there. It's genuinely perceived as one of the most remote places on Earth and if you asked some to tell you something about Mongolia they'd probably mention Genghis Khan.
Who does, indeed, crop up. Rom's guide is Ider, a lawyer who freelances as a taxi driver, and Ider promises him to show him a different side of Mongolia (a country he describes as "memorable") to the incredibly polluted and overpopulated capital city of Ulaanbaatar. While Ulaanbaatar is overcrowded, the rest of Mongolia feels almost completely empty.
To the sound of evocative throat singing, Ider explains that Mongolia's three big sports are archery, horse riding, and wrestling. Wrestling in tight pants of course. Which Romesh gamely gets changed into before proving he's not cut out for the wrestling life.
The Genghis Khan statue knocks Zimbabwe's Rhodes memorial into a cocked hat but then Genghis Khan's empire was, at its time, the second largest the world had ever seen. We learn about Shamanism as a forebear of Buddhism and we watch as Ider and Romesh visit the Gobi desert. Itself, five times the size of the entire UK.
There is, many say, an energy there. What's beyond doubt is that there is a rather large statue of a cock and balls there too. Nobody seems to know where it came from and nobody, in Mongolia at least, seems remotely interested in finding out either.
When Romesh and Ider visit a small town dance party they're tasked with being wing men for Ider's friend Erkhmee and when they head up in the mountains to meet hunters who use eagles to hunt foxes, Romesh - a vegan - finds himself compromised. He comes up with an amusing enough solution in the form of a toy fox but the eagle can't smell it so isn't interested. Rubbing meat on the toy fox seems to somewhat defeat the principle but it's what they do.
Ider says, of this mountainous region, "you will find your own beauty in absolute isolation" but when they get very lost near the borders with China, Russia, and Kazakhstan it doesn't look particularly beautiful. Just very dark and more than a bit discombobulating.
The fact that next week Romesh is in Bosnia and Herzegovina will tell you that he did, of course, regain his bearings eventually. When you think of Bosnia you tend to think of the recent, horrific, war and it's not something that Romesh, or his guide Skender, shy away from. The war may have ended nearly thirty years ago but the memory of it is still powerful.
When I visited Sarajevo, the scene of the longest siege in modern history, the bomb damage was still visible everywhere and the graveyards were full of men who died in the war and would be about the same age as me now. It's snowy when Romesh arrives and he's taken, almost immediately it seems, to a bunker.
Or a recreation of bunker from the siege of Sarajevo. In the bunker it's 1992 all over again. Real bombing sounds are pumped out 24/7, visitors eat war doughnuts, and wash with war soap. The whole thing's overseen by a man who calls himself Zero One! Romesh doesn't last long. He's as built for war as he is for wrestling.
Rom and Skender visit a very unsafe and dilapidated looking bobsleigh track. It turns out to be the one that was used for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Their bobsleigh skills aren't great and when Rom has a crack at skiing he's not much good at that either. On safer ground they visit Sarajevo's beautiful old town and the site where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, the event that triggered the start of World War I.
They even take a ride in a replica of Ferdinand's car and Romesh is given the dubious honour of being able to wear a costume that is supposed to be like the one Ferdinand was wearing. He looks like a bellboy in it! Still at least that's genuine history. When Skender and Rom visit a hill that a local eccentric claims is a pyramid it's obvious that it isn't a pyramid from the off. There are more people prepared to believe that the town of Medjugorje, near Mostar, is a holy site where an apparition of the Virgin Mary was once seen than believe a hill is a pyramid but it's equally unlikely to be true.
It's a bit of light relief before the understandably grim visit to Srebrenica where in 1995, over a period of just under two weeks, 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were murdered by the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. The town is now, essentially, one huge graveyard. When I was in Bosnia I looked into visiting and was strongly advised that it would be insensitive to do so.
Making a television programme, I guess, justifies Romesh Ranganathan's visit. Herzegovina is, I recall, even more scenic than Bosnia and it's a place for good wine too. Strong wine as well/ Judging by how pissed Romesh gets. They end their visit with a trip to Mostar itself. There's a statue of Bruce Lee there (!) and, of course, there are people jumping off the famous Stari Most bridge. As there were when I visited.
Preconceptions when it comes to Colombia come in the form of Pablo Escobar, drugs, and kidnappings. Of course they do. I visited Colombia and people seemed genuinely worried before I went. The country has that kind of reputation. The worst thing that happened to me was that I had to listen to my travel companion banging on about Hackney council endlessly and constantly subjecting me to some fairly rubbish supposedly psychedelic music.
Romesh has got a better guide in Heisel and she starts his visit in the capital, Bogota is big, it's sprawling, and, apparently - though I had no trouble at all there, it's dangerous. Though nowhere as dangerous as it was in the 80s/90s when the city averaged about 4,000 murders a year. Barrio Egipto, near to where I stayed, has a bit of a bad reputation still. Heisel takes Rom there, they listen to some amazing cumbia sounds and look at some colourful graffiti.
Before heading to a downtown dance club. Romesh's dance moves are up there with his wrestling ones. There's a trip to the Plaza Bolivar, a trawl round the plastic Jesus shops, and a game of tejo (a popular sport in Colombia in which you through metal pucks on to a board full of gunpowder - with predictable results), before relaxing with an Aguila beer.
Via the coffee growing zones, where people show off in town squares by doing (actually quite incredible) wheelies in 4x4s loaded with coffee sacks, we arrive in Colombia's second city Medellin. The former home of Pablo Escobar and another place I visited eight years ago. It was actually lovely. A beautiful city full of Fernando Botero sculptures and one of the most amazing cable car systems I've ever been on.
Or even seen. Even though I've never visited San Diego, Medellin reminded me of it! Escobar's villa is not far from Medellin. It's huge and it would be impressive if you didn't know how many people died so that it could be built. These days you can play paintball on the grounds! The Colombia episode ended a bit quickly. It felt a bit rushed at the end when Heisel and Rom visited the coastal Caribbean city of Cartagena, the beaches of Tayrona, and a volcano full of people caked in mud.
But it reminded me how great Colombia was and how I'd like to visit again one day. There's still a lot of Colombia I didn't see. I saw more of it than I did the Sahara (when I visited Egypt) though. The Sahara covers 3,600,000,000 square miles and ten countries but three of them (Libya, Mali, and Niger) were off limits for filming due to terrorist threats.
So Romesh, and his Berber quide Bobo (pronounced Boo Boo, yes Yogi Bear's wingman, what do you think the chances are that Romesh will resist a Yogi joke?), start in Morocco. In Marrakesh. It's 50 degrees centigrade as they cross the Atlas mountains into the disputed Western Sahara region for a ride in a hot air balloon which Rom describes as "shitting your pants in a basket".
In the Sahara desert you can die of dehydration, you can die from a snake bite, and there are some very bad sandstorms (Arabian goggles won't help you). Scorpions won't kill you though. It's just very very painful if one stings you. The desert looks amazing though.
Bobo boasts that he sleeps in trees in the desert and the two of them sledge on the dunes before the inevitable serious straight to camera bit about Morocco's invasion of Western Sahara. Further south on the African continent, and following a near three year hiatus - blame Covid, Romesh arrives in Sierra Leone. A country with a lot of preconceptions and few of them positive. Ebola, civil war, blood diamonds, child soldiers.
It's not a country that is generally considered safe to visit, the packed and rusty ferry alone looks risky enough, but Romesh's guide, Gwyn Jay Allan - an architect and musician who was born in Loughborough, is out to prove there's a lot more to Sierra Leone than that. For a start, he believes Sierra Leone has the world's best beaches and they certainly do look impressive.
One they visit was the location for the filming of the famous Bounty advert. Gwyn teaches Romesh some Krio (the local creole language) and gives him a bottle of poyo (a local palm wine) to drink and tells him it works like Viagra. It doesn't.
Things become markedly more serious when they visit a former slave port from which 30,000 slaves, though I prefer the term people, were forcibly taken from Sierra Leone to the Americas. It's the site of an absolutely horrific history and Romesh, to his credit, not only confronts this but confronts his own role in it.
He doesn't just say he's Sri Lankan so it's nothing to do with him. He accepts that he's been fortunate to grow up in a wealthy country, the UK, and he accepts that much of the UK's prosperity was built on colonialism, exploitation, and slavery. Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital city, gets its name because it was formed as a town for freed slaves. The celebrated cotton tree in the heart of the city is where the early residents would pray.
It's now nested by a large colony of bats. Next they're off to a national park where the hope, or fear, is they may see pygmy hippos, crocodiles, and snakes and where they definitely do see lots of monkeys and apes. After that a visit to a diamond mine. There's no bonus for any miners working there who find a diamond but some people, all outside of Sierra Leone it seems, get very rich on the back of their very hard work. Despite the diamonds, Sierra Leone is the ninth poorest country in the world.
The diamonds, and the money they generate, played a major role in a horrific civil war that lasted nearly a decade, saw one in three women in Sierra Leone raped, and seven year old girls forced to become sex slaves. Gwyn, Rom's guide, tells Rom that he was personally taken captive and thought he was going to be killed.
The history of slavery and the civil war still cast a long shadow over Sierra Leone but even in the darkest of places there is still light. We're introduced to a football team consisting of players who have all lost limbs during the war. Many of them fought against each other so it's very moving when they, almost as one, talk about peace and forgiveness being the only way forward.
A lesson we should surely all learn from. There's just time to visit a very remote, very isolated island. It's one of the Turtle Islands and it looks like paradise. Like everywhere really, Sierra Leone is a land of contrasts and it certainly contracts quite heavily with the final destination in this batch of shows.
Romania. Rom in Romania. The journey starts at Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament. The heaviest building on Earth, 20% of Bucharest was razed to build it and it goes 90 metres below ground. Romesh jokes it looks like Jimmy Carr's house. When it comes to Romania, his preconceptions involve Transylvania, Dracula, the Cheeky Girls, and Nicolae Ceausecu.
Rom's guide, Angi - a political activist and social media expert, is obviously out to prove there's more to Romania than those things and she tells Romesh that his Dracula impression, "I vant to bite your finger" or similar, sounds more Russian than Romanian.
Though Dracula's not real, Romania is home to 60% of Europe's wild bears so it seems there's still a chance of being mauled. More surprisingly perhaps, it's home to one of our continent's most impressive bits of road building. Fearing Soviet invasion, Ceausescu had them built. The invasion never came so the road had no real reason to be built and it cost the country millions.
At least it looks good. As does the ornate cemetery they visit. Some of the illustrations on the tombs are certainly eye catching. If someone I loved had been murdered I'm not sure I'd want a depiction of that actual murder to be part of the grave but each to their own.
We break off for some history about the Habsburgs and how they tried to get Romanians to convert from Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism and then there's a visit to a former prison where, under Ceausescu, activists were imprisoned. Often without trial.
Many would die there but on Christmas Day, 1989, it was Ceausescu himself, and his wife, who were executed by a firing squad. Back then Romania felt a long way from Western Europe (politically at least) but now it's part of the EU and it finds being part of the EU to be a very positive thing. With one disadvantage/ Many Romanians have taken advantage of freedom of movement to leave the country and earn more money elsewhere.
Romania's also home to the Danube delta (though there's a small part in Ukraine also). The area where the Danube flows into the Black Sea is Europe's largest wetlands. Pelicans fly freely. A complete change of scenery comes in the Carpathian Mountains where Rom and Angi meet with Roma brass musicians playing some really good stuff.
Romania has the world's largest population of gypsies, 90% of whom live below the poverty line. After this it's quite a jump to a visit to Bran Castle near the city of Brasov for a date with Dracula. They get in coffins (Rom:- "imagine if your bed had a roof") and Romesh repeats Bill Bailey's old joke about being able to take the castle by entering via the gift shop.
Then it's all over. Like any trip it ends too quickly but it'd been an interesting one. Some of the places Romesh visited I'd like to visit (or revisit), others less so. But the whole thing was interesting and, of course, what we learn is that there are friendly, hospitable, interesting, and curious people wherever you may go in the world. Travel certainly does broaden the mind (if you let it) but having not left England and Wales since 2019 (a wedding in Greece) I'm letting travel programmes broaden my mind for now.
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