Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 18th of June.

I've talked quite a lot on my podcast about, for example, expedition cruising. But what I'm very keen to find out more about today is the concept of small ships on big rivers.

There's one person who knows all about this, and that is Powell

Ettinger. He is the founder and director of the small cruise ship collection at his office in

lovely Hereford. A river cruise is different. The river cruise is very different. One of the key

things that a lot of people ask us about is, I don't want to go on a ship because I get seasick. And that's not going to happen on a river cruise. You'll buy land all the time. You know, you have views off both sides of the boat. Most of those cruises will have a naturalist on board because of the wildlife you see or hear in a lot of places. If you're in the jungle, you hear a lot more wildlife than

you see. And the people who live along the rivers as well, they tend to be in very small,

remote villages and a lot of these places, and no one else visits them. And that's really the

joy of it for me. Tell us about a recent cruise, I understand, you undertook a river cruise in

India. That's right. I had a week on the, well, it's correctly, it's the Hooghly, which is sort of the

southern part of the Ganji that runs from Kolkata to up to Faraka.

It's a cruise that runs most weeks from around September through till April, and you just

spend a week being extremely well looked after, but visiting some of the bits of India that no one really gets to. Including I understand what used to be one of the biggest cities in the world. Yeah, I'd never heard of it to be honest before I went. It's a city called Gore, G-A-U-R. I knew there was some cattle called G-A-U-R. They're one of the biggest cows in the world. But it was this huge city from many hundreds of years ago that was really lost and rediscovered. Unlike, you know, Machu Piccha, though, it wasn't rediscovered by an American, so no one's ever heard of it. Any other rivers in India that you would particularly recommend? Yeah, we also, the Brahmaputra. It's a very different experience in northern India.

That's much more about wildlife. You're sailing through Kazaranga National Park, which is where

they have two, a couple of thousand Asian one-horn rhinos, they have tigers and many other

great wildlife sightings as well. Moving west to Africa, I guess lots of people will know that there's

plenty of river cruises on the Nile going upstream to Luxor and to Aswan. Are there any other

African rivers that people perhaps don't know that you can take a small ship on?

My current favourite new river cruises is on the Congo, not in the DRC, in the Republic of Congo,

up from Brazzaville. It's a very remote part of the world. Hardly anyone visits, and you really do

get right out into wilderness, proper jungle. In South America, I think it's fair to say that

the Amazon is the world's mightiest river and I imagine there's fair choice

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