There are some places you recognise before anyone tells you where they are.
The canals of Venice. The pyramids of Egypt. The New York skyline. The whitewashed villages of the Greek islands. The mountains of Switzerland.
We have seen them in films, photographs and television programmes so many times that they can feel strangely familiar, even if we’ve never actually been there.
But seeing a photograph and being there are two very different things.
That is the idea behind our new Bucket List special, See The World.
It’s not a countdown of the world’s best destinations, and we’re not going to tell you that one country is number seven while another has somehow managed to reach number three.
Travel doesn’t really work like that.
Instead, we’ve gone through our films and recordings from around the world to put together a journey through some of the places and experiences that make you think: I’d like to see that for myself.
Some are famous. Some are considerably less obvious.
There are extraordinary landscapes, great cities, remarkable buildings and places where sometimes the pleasure is simply getting there.
And that’s an important part of The Bucket List.
A bucket list doesn’t have to mean climbing Everest, jumping out of an aeroplane or doing something sufficiently dangerous that your travel insurance company stops returning your calls.
It might be taking one of the world’s great railway journeys. Seeing a wild animal in its natural habitat. Walking through a rainforest. Watching the sun disappear behind a city you’ve always wanted to visit. Or finally standing in front of something you’ve seen in photographs for most of your life.
For more than forty years, we’ve been fortunate enough to take cameras to some remarkable places.
We’ve travelled by trains, boats, aircraft and occasionally methods of transport that seemed like a good idea when somebody suggested them.
Along the way, we’ve accumulated thousands of hours of recordings.
For See The World, we’ve gone back into that archive, combined it with new material and created something slightly different: not so much a travel guide as a reminder of just how much there is out there.
You won’t need to pack anything.
There are no airport queues.
And nobody is going to ask whether you packed your own suitcase.
But we can’t guarantee you won’t start looking at holidays before the programme has finished.
THE BUCKET LIST: SEE THE WORLD
See The World is a new Bucket List Special, now showing on RODtv.
From extraordinary places to once-in-a-lifetime experiences, it’s a journey around a world that’s rather larger — and considerably more interesting — than the bit we see every day.
The only question is:
How much of it have you really seen?
