Hi, I'm Lale Aricoglu, and this is a brand new episode from Women Who Travel.

I'm speaking to Lise Doucette, the BBC's chief international correspondent, whose career has taken her to places like Afghanistan, Ukraine and Brazil,

often leaving for an assignment at a moment's notice to cover natural disasters

and the turbulence of war. If you follow the BBC World Service or BBC News, then her voice

is likely familiar to you, thanks to her decades of work spent bringing the stories of people and places around the globe

into our living rooms.

But it's not often that she talks about her own life and work.

Hello, this is Leis Doucette.

Thank you very much for having me on your travel podcast.

Well, we are going to dive into a lot of travel stories. I am very familiar with your voice,

and so it feels a little surreal to be actually chatting with you. I'm such an admirer of your

career and fascinated by the stories you tell and the places that your job has taken you.

It's interesting that when you said with your job, you have traveled all around the world.

And I think that I would say that that is the first issue about travel.

To be a real traveler, it can't just be a job.

It has to be about something essential within you that wants to go, wants to leave

almost everything behind, to go to new places, to leave your preconceptions, your ideas of

stories, your idea of what lies ahead. I think of the BBC is my passport, which has allowed

me to go to so many places and to have the privilege of telling the news, the stories, to share

my experiences of so many different cultures and countries, which can seem so far away in

every which way, but actually are in so many ways so much closer to us. I want to begin with the fact that you started your life in Canada.

And you have a Canadian background and I'm interested to know how you got from Canada to now.

...