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/

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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

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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/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 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/@thecatchmeifyoucan

https://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

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, runs through everything Aziz has done since. He guided tourists through the Old City at nine years old with no English. He’s been hospitalised for panic attacks after his experiences in war zones. His way of looking at the world brought him a reception with two popes and a commendation for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On Travel That Made Me, Aziz tells Rajan Datar how he turned some of his darkest places into a way of seeing the world, one where curiosity beats fear, and crossing uncrossable borders is a practice, not a leap. It’s a lesson in how peace gets built: one step at a time, starting from the moment you leave home.

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

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 unrecognised in a Mallorcan fishing village.

So why, when Rajan Datar asks what he loves most about travel, does this restless wanderer answer with a single word: coming back?

A punk legend, a secret home bird, and stories you will not see coming.

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'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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com

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 subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit travelthatmademe.substack.com