Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest

news on travelling, whether you're dreaming of a great escape or away and having the time of your life,

or, and this is the subject of today's final podcast of the week, feeling really quite apprehensive about travelling.

The reason I mention it is that I was going to call this episode making sense of the conflict

in Ukraine. But of course, that's ridiculous. You cannot make any sense of a nation being bombarded by its neighbour for no reason other than

some kind of personal vendetta by Vladimir Putin.

But we are seeing a situation where there's a great deal of uncertainty, trepidation about travel.

I know that because people who are going from the UK to Vilnius in Lithuania,

to Krakow in Poland, to Prague to Budapest, have been in touch with me to say,

would you go? Absolutely I would.

And I'll try to explain why. And that's partly because, obviously being 3,000 years old or wherever I am,

I've been in situations and I'm actually thinking back to the early 1990s, whenever they were,

in Central America, where it was a fantastic region in which to travel, but there were lots of people

with lots of guns not very far away. Sure, they didn't have any nuclear missiles, but even so, it did not seem to

constitute too much of a risk. And furthermore, I suppose, you know, you would say that there were

fewer people than there might have been,

so it was a more rewarding experience.

And I can give you another parallel, which was later on in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia.

Horrible things happening, the whole place being torn apart.

And yet, just across the Adriatic, sometimes 50 miles away, people were having a lovely

time, certainly in the rest of the Balkans, in northern Greece, in Bulgaria and Romania, there was no sense of danger.

But I absolutely accept that when there are big international conflicts, international travel

...