Travel That Made Me

Indio Media
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How has travel shaped your life? BBC broadcaster Rajan Datar asks the world's most fascinating people how travel made them who they are. travelthatmademe.substack.com

  1. 18h ago

    Why the Best Travel Means Losing Yourself

    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 the Best Travel Means Losing Yourself

  2. Sep 3

    What Travel Does To Your Mind

    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

    What Travel Does To Your Mind

  3. Aug 27

    The Journey to Jamaica That Saved 400 Lives

    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/SaulLehrfreund https://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

    The Journey to Jamaica That Saved 400 Lives

  4. Aug 20

    Travel and the Power of Awe: Dacher Keltner

    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

    Travel and the Power of Awe: Dacher Keltner

  5. Aug 13

    I Do Not Wish To Be Good. I Wish To Be Hell on Wheels: Sara Wheeler

    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

    I Do Not Wish To Be Good. I Wish To Be Hell on Wheels: Sara Wheeler

  6. Aug 6

    Three Minutes From Watching a Civilian Plane Get Shot Down: Mandy Hickson

    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

    Three Minutes From Watching a Civilian Plane Get Shot Down: Mandy Hickson

  7. Jul 30

    He Took the World's First Selfie With Jesus to Save His Business: Lee Thompson

    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/flashpacklee https://www.facebook.com/theflashpack https://x.com/flashpack https://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 Took the World's First Selfie With Jesus to Save His Business: Lee Thompson

  8. Jul 18

    Sweden to the Sahara By Kayak - with Johan Ernst Nilson

    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

    Sweden to the Sahara By Kayak - with Johan Ernst Nilson
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About

How has travel shaped your life? BBC broadcaster Rajan Datar asks the world's most fascinating people how travel made them who they are. travelthatmademe.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Indio Media
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Indio
  • Show Website
    Travel That Made Me

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