It’s hard not to feel gloomy while everyone concerned for their safety remains cooped up indoors as the pandemic rages on. Perhaps a vacation or a trip abroad was in the plans, maybe a New Year’s resolution to go out with friends more, only to be mercilessly dashed by this horrible event. Maybe even a VR headset is out of the budget, cutting off access to some of the available virtual worlds to fully immerse oneself in.
However, with the right subscriptions and a healthy dose of imagination, one still has the ability to travel the world, so to speak. Travel shows are in no short supply, so the proper show can occupy a fair bit of the day in desperate times and help its viewer to feel a little less home-stuck. Compiled below is a list of travel shows worth exploring while the world waits for the COVID-19 pandemic to stop ruining everything.
The loss of Anthony Bourdain is still a fresh wound for a lot of people who spent many afternoons with his travel documentaries. A graduate from The Culinary Institute of America, his career was a prolific one. He wrote quite a few books, including a couple of murder mysteries (with a culinary slant) and a graphic novel (with a culinary slant). He was, however, most well known for his travel shows, a career path that started in 2002 and continued on all the way until his death in 2018.
No Reservations and Parts Unknown were the longest running of his shows, spanning 9 and 12 seasons, respectively. In them, Anthony Bourdain lives the dream by traveling the world, seeing the sights, meeting people, and trying out different cuisines. The food for the most part takes a backseat and the focus is mostly on giving people a taste of the country itself. These shows had the unapologetic element of Anthony Bourdain’s personality to them in his narration over the episodes. He swears (bleeped out, of course), talks frankly about how he’s feeling, and frequently decries the messed-up nature of the situations the local citizens may find themselves in. Occasionally, he even directly intervenes and helps people, showing that a good documentarian doesn’t need to stand idly by and film suffering. There’s always an undeniable human component to the episodes. Those who live in the places he visits aren’t mere set-dressing – they’re people, deserving of compassion, dignity, and respect.
The differences between No Reservations and Parts Unknown are slight, but they are worth knowing. No Reservations does tend to have more of a focus on the food and the people, it also tends to explore the nature, the culture, grassroots movements, and local events of the area. It gives a good idea of what’s going on in the place he’s in right at the current moment the episode was filmed. Parts Unknown has a tendency to do a deeper dive into the regions, explaining the politics, history, and geopolitical relations. It’s more contextual, and is a great introduction to the history of his destinations, helping to paint a picture of the why of the people and cultures, not just the what.
Anthony Bourdain’s: Part’s Unknown can be streamed on HBO Max, and the entire catalogue of Anthony Bourdain’s: No Reservations is available to watch on Travel Channel’s official streaming, no TV subscription required.
What’s it like to travel with somebody who doesn’t actually like anything and would rather be at home watching the show about traveling there instead? In the case of An Idiot Abroad, it can be pretty entertaining. Less a travel show and more an extended, laser-focused game of Fear Factor, each episode is essentially about Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant trying to figure out how to best torture Karl Pilkington, the titular “idiot”, who they have shipped out to a random country for the week. While on these travels, Gervais and Merchant spice things up by booking activities for Pilkington that even a well-seasoned traveler might be afraid to partake in. The episodes are frequently punctuated by calls where Gervais and Merchant check in. In these calls, Pilkington complains about everything they’re making him do while Gervais and Merchant laugh at his misery.
The series has the occasional problematic elements and Ricky Gervais is no stranger to controversy, though Karl Pilkington is 95% the focus of the show. The audience is treated to a look into his mind as he is repeatedly subjected to the sensation of fearing for his life. The thing about Karl is that he seems to be, by nature, a relentless curmudgeon and a man who wants for very little, least of all to be globe-trotting and experiencing all the amazing and unforgettable things that he has thrust on him by his successful friends. There’s also, on occasion, a strange brilliance to Karl’s observations. It’s one thing to have a travel show host spruce up the description of an event with wondrous prose and purple poetry, but it’s another to hear them succinctly sum up a life-changing event in a direct, unfiltered, and oftentimes negative manner. Karl thinks differently than most people, but on occasion what he says as a result is a rare instance of unvarnished truth.
An Idiot Abroad currently isn’t packaged with any streaming service, though individual episodes or seasons can be purchased from various services like Amazon Prime, Youtube, iTunes, Vudu, and several others.
Presented by the ever-affable Richard Ayoade, Travel Man: 48 Hours In… is exactly what it says on the tin. In each episode, Richard, a man, travels (there’s the first word) to a place and spends 2 days there. Individual episodes focus on a city in various regions of the world, accompanied by a celebrity guest, frequently from England, in tow. They visit points of interest while cracking wise the whole time. The show sprinkles in extra bits of info with on-screen tags, displaying various things like names of sculptures, dates of significance, and the price of the rooms they’re staying in among other things.
With 30-minute episodes edited in a manner that keeps a jaunty speed to the whole affair (though there are several hour-long Christmas specials edited to a similarly jaunty pace), the focus of the episodes do tend to be more on entertainment than education, but that’s not a bad thing if the intent of watching the show is to have fun and pass the time. Richard Ayoade is fantastically and effortlessly glib, often mocking the activity they are participating in and even poking fun at the very conventions of travel show formats. Few shows of this genre will feature the traveler spitting their food back out, but it’s not hard to find an episode of Travel Man where this occurs. Still, the show is a solid and quick primer on each destination and could be useful once we’re able to safely leave our homes again.
Seasons 1 through 7 of Travel Man: 48 Hours In… are available for streaming on Hulu.
This one is a little different from other travel shows, because it’s is less a detailing of the exploits of the host in different locations and more of a guided tour through the featured cities’ oft-overlooked landmarks. This is probably because the host, Timothy “Speed” Levitch, is an actual licensed and well-renowned tour guide. Directed by Richard Linklater, Up to Speed is an original 6-episode series produced by Hulu back in 2012, a year after the beginning of their push to produce original content. Every episode is full of fanciful editing, goofy skits, landmarks that talk back, and is capped with Speed singing with a local band.
When initially starting the show, one might fear that Speed’s voice and manner of speaking could be off-putting – yet by the end of his opening monologue in the first episode the viewer is more likely to find him incredibly endearing. He’s a comforting guide full of knowledge, wit, and poetic language that reveals a deep love and respect for the subject matter, the occupants of each city, as well as the struggles and sacrifices of the past made in the name of progress. The presentation of some of the sites somehow seems to effortlessly straddle the line between humorous and reverent, and he’s not shy to lament when capitalism has cast a shadow over some of the beauty that once was in the local neighborhoods. Up to Speed may not be everybody’s cup of tea since some folks aren’t watching travel shows expecting to see segments where the goofy host asks a historical landmark questions and the landmark answers back. But some will undoubtedly enjoy the show for its fresh perspective on what a travel show can be.
Up to Speed is available for streaming on Hulu.
Samantha Brown worked for the travel channel for over 15 years before eventually switching over to PBS. In that time, she’s hosted a plethora of travel shoes, including Girl Meets Hawaii, Great Hotels, and Samantha Brown’s Great Weekends. She’s also hosted several Passport To shows where she spends 19 episodes on specific regions like Europe, Latin America, and China. Samantha Brown’s Places to Love started airing on PBS in 2018, and a fourth season was announced roughly a month before the pandemic shut everything down.
Places to Love features numerous places all over the world, with most episodes focusing on a single city or specific region. While the show has a squeaky clean presentation and absolutely no edge, sometimes it’s nice to watch something wholesome that so purely exemplifies the joy of being in a new place. Samantha’s narration frequently dwells on the natural beauty to be found wherever she’s traveling, and it’s not hard to understand why she’s so captivated by the majesty of it all. Each episode showcases not just destinations, but sometimes quirks that are unique to the places, like a mail carrier that has to hand-deliver the mail by boat, a man who maintains a clock tower daily, or an enthusiast who spends his time hand-crafting maps of places that don’t exist. If somebody is looking for a pleasant and inoffensive look at the world, this show should do nicely.
Samantha Brown’s Places to Love is available to watch on Samantha-Brown.com.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Expedition Happiness details a journey undertaken by Selima Taibi and Felix Starck, who live together in Berlin, Germany. That journey spans a large amount of the North American continent with a bus that they souped up themselves. Felix had previously done a documentary titled Pedal the World, which is available for streaming on Netflix, in which he travels 18,000-kilometers in 22 countries by bike after quitting his job at Mercedes. Selima is a musician who grew up singing opera and goes by the name of Mogli. They met each other during Felix’s filming of Pedal the World.
Expedition Happiness is very much a film where the creators, restless and yearning to leave their very comfortable and stationary lives, decide that the best way to find joy is to never be stuck in the same place for too long. In it we see them fix up their bus with all the amenities they’ll require for their trip before embarking on a journey with no pre-planned route that seems to mostly involve driving for long periods of time. In the film, they drive up from New York to Canada, then across Canada to Alaska, and then down south with the intentions of making it all the way to Panama. One doesn’t really get a sense for how long the trip has been taking them until, somewhere around the movie’s halfway mark, one of them mentions that at that point they’d been traveling for 7 months. Currently it’s difficult to imagine traveling for a single day, let alone over half a year.
The film itself doesn’t provide much context for most of the places they go, and the viewer is never given a historical record of things, and there’s no real intention to the film besides documenting their journey. It’s an unadulterated view of some successful, bored 20-somethings mostly improvising a trip to see North and Central America. Lots of beautiful photography and drone shots accompany their stops along the way, and we’re treated to some of their experiences with people who are eager to help out. Not everything goes smoothly, however. They have issues with visas, borders, the bus, and medical issues that arise with their dog Rudi, who is a very good boy (the dog is fine at the end of the movie, by the way). This helps to give a sense of what can really happen when traveling – complications and sometimes scary moments, tucked away in a cavalcade of amazing, one-of-a-kind moments in life.
Expedition Happiness is available for streaming on Netflix.
Sometimes while sitting in quarantine it’s easy to forget that there’s a whole world out there. Things can feel hopeless at times, and currently it’s scary just making a simple trip to the grocery store. By maintaining safe practices, having empathy for one another, and keeping a healthy mindset, there will be an opportunity to see it all again. It’s not hard to imagine that there are many people ready to take the plunge who weren’t quite in that mindset before all of this. If there is anything to learn from this strange, scary, and unusual moment in world history, it’s that there’s never a moment to waste.
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