May 30th - Would you go on a Political Tour – or is the news quite bad enough for you without spoiling a holiday?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm talking to Nicholas Wood, director of Political Tours, who organises trips to various frontlines around the world. The 2026 offering has just been published. It includes Taiwan, under threat from China; Poland and Lithuania, bordering on Russia; and the US for the mid-term elections late next year.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Caller. It's Friday the 30th of May. |
| 0:06.9 | The big news on the tour operator front this week, which I've been excited by, is the release by |
| 0:13.9 | political tours of their program for 2026. If you're kind enough to be a regular listener to the podcast, you will know |
| 0:22.9 | that I've spoken in the past to Nicholas Wutt, the journalist who began political tours. |
| 0:29.7 | And Nicholas joins me. I'm fascinated, first of all, with your trip to Taiwan ahead of a possible |
| 0:36.9 | invasion by China. And apparently, it's a tour that sells extremely well. |
| 0:43.3 | Why is that? |
| 0:44.5 | So the end of the year, we've got two back-to-back tours that have sold out already. |
| 0:48.2 | We've got another one in the spring of next year. |
| 0:51.6 | And it's the question, what is China going to do with Taiwan? And if you go to |
| 0:56.3 | Taiwan, and I'm about to very shortly, life carries on as normal. It's like there's no idea of |
| 1:01.5 | some invasion seems completely absurd. Yet you have these Chinese military drills. You've got these |
| 1:06.7 | big naval operations going around the island, regularly stuff going on the air. So there's stuff going on all the time. |
| 1:12.2 | And with Trump in the White House, apparently not backing his allies in the same way he used |
| 1:17.6 | to, does that leave a free pass to China? |
| 1:19.9 | The experts would say nothing's going to happen yet and there's plenty of time to go and explore it |
| 1:24.0 | and see what the Taiwanese think at the moment. |
| 1:26.4 | If you get into the weeds on this, so the best plan of action for the Chinese is to sit back and wait and just see how things go. And we're actually quite a cautious company. We don't go to places where we really think that there's going to be a threat to our customers. I don't think anything's going to be happening for a good year or so, and obviously we'll assess things |
| 1:44.2 | ahead of each trip, but I think we're pretty safe. Well, let's move to other conflict zones in Europe, |
| 1:50.1 | three years on from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and you've got a tour which is looking at, well, |
| 1:56.9 | Europe's front line going to Poland and Lithuania, and in particular looking at the |
| 2:02.6 | Savalchi gap. This is the relatively narrow neck of territory between Kaliningrad on the coast, |
... |
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