March 17th - Travel to dangerous places: your questions answered.
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many of you, I know, are the thrill-seeking kind that go off to far-flung places looking for adventure. Others of you sometimes have to travel to areas where unrest is frequent and a few of you wind up in dangerous situations by pure bad luck. Never fear though, in this episode I answer your questions on what to do when visiting dangerous places.
This podcast is free, as is my weekly newsletter, which you can get every Friday by signing up here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. |
| 0:05.8 | The last one of the week, of course, from me. |
| 0:08.0 | And it's going to be a bit of a surprising one. |
| 0:10.2 | This, for me, at least, because my excellent colleague, Charlotte Hindle, is going to ask me lots of questions which I haven't yet seen on the subject of safe travel in dangerous places. |
| 0:25.8 | Charlotte, hello, how can I? How can I help? Yes, hi. So not everywhere in the world is safe. |
| 0:34.7 | So how do we first of all check that where we want to travel to is a safe spot? |
| 0:41.0 | Well, first of all, I have to state the obvious, which is that nowhere is completely safe |
| 0:45.9 | wherever you are in the world. There are going to be risks. What you can do is minimise them. |
| 0:52.2 | And yes, it is fair to say that there is a fairly blurred boundary |
| 0:58.1 | between tolerable, acceptable risks and when those risks become too much. And actually, in terms of |
| 1:07.2 | how the travel industry calibrates that, it's very straightforward. |
| 1:11.7 | If the foreign office warns against a particular location, that might be an entire country. |
| 1:17.3 | It might be just a portion of that country and says, we really don't advise you to go there. |
| 1:23.2 | Then that is the boundary and anybody who does go there will quite possibly find that their travel insurance is invalidated, for example. |
| 1:34.7 | But I'm sure we'll come on to that. |
| 1:36.7 | Can we just, how do you check that? How do you check the advice? |
| 1:39.8 | Oh, you just search online. It takes two seconds. |
| 1:43.1 | Search online for the name of the country and then |
| 1:45.6 | f cdo which is short for the foreign commonwealth and development office but foreign office |
| 1:53.5 | will do and the name of the country and that's the easy thing to do but it's also worth i find |
| 1:59.2 | seeing what other countries are saying. In particular, if you're |
| 2:02.8 | travelling to the Americas, then the US State Department has its own system of warnings, and they tend |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.