Travel Desk Tuesday: top tips for '26 from Global Travel Editor Annabel Grossman
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Uganda and northern Argentina are off the tourism mainstream, but high on Annabel's recommendations for the year ahead. Adventure travel in Africa and South America sounds a joy – can't wait to find out for myself.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Cawnda, Tuesday the 6th of January, Travel Desk Tuesday, with our global travel editor, Annabel Grossman. Happy New Year, Simon. Looking forward to lots of good travels in 2026. |
| 0:18.3 | Well, yes, and I've been looking at your particular recommendations, and I'd love |
| 0:22.9 | to find out more about them, because they are very much off the beaten track. Shall we start with |
| 0:28.8 | Ginger in Uganda? Yes, so I last went to Ginger the year before last in 2024, and it was probably my favourite trip of the year. |
| 0:41.1 | I didn't really have any expectations for this part of Uganda. |
| 0:45.1 | I know that Uganda has been a very popular travel destination, |
| 0:48.7 | but people usually go to see the guerrillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. |
| 0:55.7 | How impenetrable is Bwindi impenetrable National Park? Because if it's completely impenetrable, |
| 1:01.2 | I don't suppose I'm going to have a great touristic experience there. It's penetrable now, |
| 1:06.5 | I guess you could say. Guerrilla tourism is something the government has actually |
| 1:10.4 | infested in. |
| 1:11.7 | It's still controlled, which it should be, but it is rather more accessible now for travellers. |
| 1:17.6 | But my recommendation for Uganda is rather different. I would recommend visiting Ginger, which is |
| 1:23.8 | close to the capital Kampala and Intebe, which is where you'll fly into. It's a roughly two-hour |
| 1:30.1 | drive, sometimes three hours when the traffic's quite bad, which it can be. And here you're on |
| 1:35.3 | the Nile River. It's often said it is the source of the Nile, although that is contested. And I love |
| 1:42.1 | adventure travel and I love going somewhere that's a little bit, as you say, |
| 1:46.3 | off the beaten path and I really found that in Ginger. It used to be a very popular stop on the |
| 1:52.1 | backpack trail and that's because this part of the Nile has really exciting rapids. They're high |
| 1:59.2 | grade rapids between grade three to five, which means |
| 2:02.5 | they're brilliant for whitewater rafting and kayaking. It did drop off the tourist trail a little |
| 2:07.8 | because the river was dammed, which made the rapids slightly less exciting. But on the flip side, |
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