Camel Tours and Sliding Doors
Life Changing
BBC
4.6 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jacqui Furneaux had enjoyed a happy marriage, bringing up two daughters and working as a nurse. Sadly, the marriage broke down, and feeling guilty, Jacqui decided to get out of people’s way and go travelling. As a woman in her late 40s , the back-packing life was a novelty. But while visiting the golden city of Jaisalmer in north-western India - and preparing to take a camel tour into the nearby desert - she met a Dutch biker. It was a chance encounter, sparked by their mutual interest in motorbikes . It led to Jacqui abandoning the camel plans and joining her new companion on a short tour of the frontier desert of northern India.
With stops and starts and a few glitches on the way, Jacqui tells Dr Sian Williams how that sliding door moment turned out to be life-changing, leading to seven years on the open road and a journey of rediscovery and adventure.
Producer: Tom Alban
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | My Christmas Mix is pure 90s festive nostalgia. |
| 0:11.1 | You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat. |
| 0:14.0 | Ho! |
| 0:14.3 | Ho! Ho! No, no, no. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems. |
| 0:20.4 | Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really slay? It's Christmas kitchen disco season, surely. |
| 0:26.4 | Give me hip-hip-christmas bangers every day. Those Christmas tracks that are straight out of Lapland. |
| 0:30.9 | Get all kinds of Christmassy. Just search Christmas music on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.9 | You're about to listen to Life-changing. Episodes will be |
| 0:39.1 | released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest |
| 0:44.9 | episodes first on BBC Sounds. Hello, most of us have probably experienced a sliding |
| 0:52.1 | doors moment, the late arrival of a train, the missing of a bus, |
| 0:56.6 | something small that takes you in an entirely new direction. |
| 1:01.5 | My guest today had one of those, |
| 1:03.1 | although it was a more exotic travel miss than most, |
| 1:06.9 | a camel ride in northern India. |
| 1:09.2 | But what followed was a different, dramatic, uncertain path, |
| 1:13.6 | and she had no idea where the road might lead. Jackie Furno is here now. Hello, Jackie. Hello, |
| 1:19.6 | Sean. How are you? Very well, thank you. Good. And down from Bristol today. Absolutely, yes. |
| 1:25.3 | Where you're living a happy retired life after being a nurse for a long time. |
| 1:29.3 | That's right, pretty much. That sliding door moment I talked about was back in the 90s. |
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