340a Joanna Lumley's Nile; Open Phones: Fantastic Travels
Travel with Rick Steves
Rick Steves
4.5 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2016
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actress Joanna Lumley details her trip of a lifetime: a 4,000-mile trek up the Nile River all the way to its source, the swampy highlands of Rwanda. We'll hear how the river's personality varies over its course — past Cairo and Luxor, through Sudan and Lake Victoria — and about the sights she saw and people she met along the way. Plus, listeners share surprises they encountered on their own memorable adventures around the world.
For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Rick Steeves. It's been about 150 years now since Dr Livingstone failed to find the source of the Nile River. |
| 0:08.0 | But now a few hearty souls can finally claim to having seen the headwaters of the world's longest river. |
| 0:14.6 | One of them is a remarkable woman who's played the part of a Bond girl in the movies and is probably |
| 0:19.0 | best known as a co-star on the Britcom, absolutely fabulous. |
| 0:23.5 | Joanna Lumley joins us in a moment on Travel with Rick Steves |
| 0:26.6 | to tell us what 4,000 miles of the Nile River |
| 0:29.8 | had to show her, including the moment she finally got a glimpse of the river's notorious |
| 0:34.4 | crocodiles. It wasn't until we reached Uganda where we saw them basking in all |
| 0:39.1 | their majestic glory, keeping their mouths wide open to let the cool air flow into their bodies |
| 0:45.0 | and to see them slipping with a slight bubble from the nostril into the river and then just slip, slip, slip, and you think, |
| 0:51.0 | oohoo, I'll keep my hand out of the water. |
| 0:53.2 | We'll also open up the phones to hear where listeners like you are traveling. |
| 0:56.7 | It's all just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. |
| 0:59.5 | The world's longest river has been the lifeline for North Africa longer than recorded history. |
| 1:05.0 | It's true, the Nile River was the conduit for the spread of advanced societies from present-day Sudan, Ethiopia, and Egypt thousands of years ago. And even though Egypt's |
| 1:15.0 | latest round of political strife has brought that country's important tourism |
| 1:18.6 | industry to a halt, denial continues to nurture the land as it always has on its 4,000-mile run to the Mediterranean Sea. |
| 1:26.0 | Long before the space race of the 1960s, explorers in the 19th century set their sights on being the first to locate the true source of the Nile. |
| 1:35.0 | Now, with a little help from GPS and inflatable power boats, |
| 1:39.0 | a handful of determined adventures have actually been able to locate the very place where the waters that feed the Nile originate. |
| 1:46.0 | One of those select feud attorney all the way to the headwaters of the Nile is a remarkable British woman named Joanna Lumbly. |
| 1:53.0 | She's been honored with the Order of the British Empire. |
... |
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