Travel without fear: the world should be accessible to everybody, no matter how you identify
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To round off the week, I'm talking to travel expert Rob Staines about queer travel around the world. He and his partner have just returned from India – a nation that, he reports, has become much more enlightened in recent years. “There's lots of places in the world that we can go and visit where we can feel safe and be free and actually enjoy who we are and celebrate who we are with wonderful people,” he tells me.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 3rd of April. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm with my very good friend Rob Staines, a great travel figure. How would you describe yourself? |
| 0:17.5 | Rob, apart from obviously, young and handsome. Well, professionally, I've described myself as a travel expert. |
| 0:24.1 | I love travel. I've been doing it for many years. I've got lots of experience within the |
| 0:27.6 | travel industry, lots of different sectors within the travel industry, mostly aviation, but I have |
| 0:32.2 | worked around. But yes, I am a travel expert and travel is my passion. |
| 0:36.5 | Now, what I want to talk to you today is about queer |
| 0:40.4 | travel because you have, for example, just been with your partner to India, a country which, |
| 0:48.8 | from what I could tell, but as a heteroperson, I just don't know, was perhaps not in the vanguard of being |
| 0:57.4 | gay friendly. Yeah, absolutely. And me and my partner, Mininda, we've been going to India for many |
| 1:03.9 | years. We've been together 11 years. The first trip together was 11 years ago. And actually, |
| 1:07.9 | it's really interesting to see how the culture in India, and actually |
| 1:11.9 | the law, has really, really shifted. So when I first went to India, you know, it was outlawed, |
| 1:17.1 | so homosexuality was legal. It's not the case now. And actually, India, interestingly, |
| 1:22.4 | has come really long way. They're really becoming aware of sort of like queer rights, |
| 1:30.3 | how to protect queer people within their own communities. It's a really joyous thing to see. |
| 1:32.3 | When we used to start going to India, we'd check into a hotel and we booked a double room and it would always turn out to be a single. |
| 1:38.3 | We'd have those really awkward conversations and people wouldn't necessarily get it. |
| 1:42.3 | But now it's a completely different story. |
| 1:45.1 | I mean, Delhi had its first ever gay pride a few years ago. And actually, a couple of years ago, |
| 1:50.0 | we went to Delhi's first ever gay nightclub. First. First ever. It was great. It was a wonderful |
| 1:55.5 | experience. It's called Kitty Sue. It's still there. And it's there for the, you know, to celebrate and protect and for the |
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