Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Friday the 1st of August and that means we're on the verge of a great television event.

Tomorrow on Saturday the 2nd at 6.30 in the evening on 5 you will be able to watch seven wonders of the Ancient World with the great television historian

Bettany Hughes. And the great news is that she's actually on the phone to me right now.

Bettany, you're actually speaking from Switzerland, I understand.

I am speaking from Switzerland, so I'm actually speaking from the back of a van in Switzerland, somewhere between Byrne and Lucerne, and it's lovely to speak to you. So, yeah, I'm looking at the wonders of Switzerland at the moment, but you're quite right. We're talking about the seven wonders of the ancient world. Well, what an exciting professional time you have. Anyway, okay, let's forget about being in the back of a van. Tell me

the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, can you still find them? Yeah, I mean, it's really

interesting. I think something to say about the Seven Wonders is that when you mention

that frame, people somehow imagine their fantasies, a few of them are legends, they're made up, they're scattered across the earth.

But the real seven ones exist are seven extraordinary places that range from the Great Pyramid of Eva that was built 4,000, 600 years ago, to the youngest of them, Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, also in Egypt,

on the northern coast of Egypt, in the beautiful city of Alexandria.

And we do have evidence on the ground for all seven.

Ironically, the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is the oldest, is the only one that is still standing

pretty much intact, but you can go and visit the fragments of the footprints of all of the other.

Must be quite challenging from a visual point of view if you're looking at desert, sand, dust, whatever it is,

because the thing that you've come to see, unless it's a socking great big pyramid,

you can't actually make out.

You know me, Simon.

I get enthusiastic about like a tiny broken beat.

So I think, frankly, whatever evidence there is, actually we can use that to build

the kind of bigger picture of people and histories and the stories of their lives and of the monuments. But we have tried

something else with this particular series that because, as you say, you can visit the locations

of them, but they are still standing. We've commissioned these really post, impressive,

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