Travel Interview With Simon Reeve

With a new series for the BBC on the way, which sees him travel to the brightest and harshest places in the Caribbean, we thought it was about time we caught up with our favourite explorer, Simon Reeve. A travel journalist often associated with Australia, he tells us how his travels altered his ideas of the land down under, why people should see it today, and what this new adventure has to offer…

You’ve travelled all over the world, making programmes and writing books based on your journeys, so why did you decide to do an entire series just on Australia?
It’s big and it’s amazing and it’s packed with extraordinary wildlife creatures and lovely, eccentric characters, so who on earth would not want to do it?

What surprised you the most when you were there?
For a long time, Brits thought of Australia as being some sort of quaint European backwater on the other side of the planet, and now the reality is it’s on the edge of the most dynamic region in the world – Asia. It’s become a really multicultural nation; a quarter of Australians were born overseas, Asian-Australians account for more than 10% of the population, so it’s changed and that was the biggest surprise.

Did your own ideas and preconceptions of Australia change?
I’ve grown up in Blighty being fed an Australian diet of Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee, and while they’re fun, they create a one-dimensional view of the place. So what we wanted to do on the series was to challenge the preconceptions and show that Australia is a much more interesting place than people think. It’s got more issues, extraordinary landscapes than people realise, it’s more of everything. It was the great joy of doing the series.

Why do you think people should travel Australia now?
The way I like to travel is to push myself out of my comfort zone, so I like being forced to do things that tweak my buttons, that can be trying different food, getting out there and having experiences. Australia’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s absolutely enormous, you’ve got to get out and enjoy it, and you’re not going to do that sitting on the lovely beaches of the southeast coast. You have to travel with your mind and your eyes open, and not ignore problems when confronted by them.

Your new series sees you travelling the Caribbean; as your work always focuses on more than just sightseeing, what sort of things did you experience and discover?
We started our Caribbean journey on the island of Hispaniola, which is the island between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and we went clockwise from there through Puerto Rico, into Barbados, and along the mainland coast of Central America and through Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras and finished in Jamaica. It was a pretty extreme journey – I don’t think I’ve been in a region quite like it because it’s got an array of experiences. One day I was diving into coral reef off the coast of Honduras helping scientists to take samples from parrotfish, and the next day I was walking onto the gang wing of a prison in the most dangerous city of the world outside of a war zone, meeting some of the most dangerous criminals, murderers and gangsters in the world, so that was the idea, to incorporate the light and the shade, all aspects of life, whether they’re glossy and sunny or dark and scary.

Was there anything that particularly struck a chord with you or stayed with you since returning?
I can relive the journey pretty much day by day because when we’re filming, what we’re doing every day is extraordinary and memorable, so there’s a thousand things we did that stick in the memory. I really loved getting in the water and having the chance to dive down onto the coral reef in the Caribbean. In Barbados, we went down with a local marine biologist, to show me the absolute wealth of biodiversity that’s down there. He took me to hunt down a Lionfish that is threatening life on coral reefs in the Caribbean because he eats all of the young of almost every other fish, and nothing can eat it because it’s got a venomous spine.

Why did you choose the Caribbean?
It’s a beautiful part of the world and who wouldn’t want to travel around it? The real reason was because we could incorporate dark and light issues.

And what adventures do you have lined up for 2015?
Nothing planned for 2015 – come up with ideas and let me know!

Caribbean With Simon Reeve starts 22nd March on BBC2 (UK)