Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

You will be aware that this is the year of elections, almost certainly in the UK and many key nations around the world.

So there's a lot of interest in politics. So you might well be thinking,

what on earth has this got to do with travel? And the answer is, there is a company that specialises

in political tours. It's called political tours. And the founder, the journalist Nicholas Wood,

joins me. Hello, Nicholas. Hello, Simon. Tell me this extraordinary thing. I've never heard of anything like it. What do you do and how did it start?

So we take small groups of people to many, many countries around the world, and their guide is not a tour guide.

Their guide is a reporter, a journalist. And the basic premise is that journalists have incredible access.

They can take you to places you can't go, take you to meet people you can't ordinarily meet, and provide

you an understanding of a place that you wouldn't get otherwise. How did I come up with the idea?

I was a reporter. I used to work in the Balkans. I worked for the New York Times and before that

with the BBC. And one day I picked up a backpacker in Slovenia and I took him all the way to Kosovo and he followed

me for three days and he was blown away. He couldn't believe what he was seeing and that really

crystallised an idea that I'd been thinking about for some time. I had family and friends used to come out

and visit me there and they really enjoyed it and so so I thought, why not put the two together?

So just to clarify, this was a hitchhiker.

You were driving through Slovenia, picked him up and...

Well, it was a bit more deliberate than that.

I had a 900km, I've got what that was in miles, probably about 750 miles to drive, and it took about nine hours to do it, or even longer, that nine hours would be very quick. And I couldn't bear the drive by myself. So I literally went to the youth hostel, which was near where we lived. And I found the backpacker, and he said he wanted to go to Dubrovnik, the most beautiful city in the Balkans, arguably. And I said,

no, mate, you want to go to Pristina, which is arguably the most ugly city in the Balkans. And, yeah,

we shared the drive, and then he followed me down, and he followed me as I did my job. And

Kosovo was at a really critical point that. It was just up to before it declared independence.

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