Joanna Lumley's Postcards From My Travels s01e05 Episode Script

1 'With a lifetime of globetrotting, I'm not a timid traveller.
' Get over it and just do it.
'I'm game for most things.
I like getting back to nature meeting new people' Yassas.
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but also taking the time to stop and drink in unfamiliar surroundings' It is absolutely staggering.
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different skies, different waters' The sun's beginning to go.
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watching the sun set from all angles across the globe, and taking you with me' Fantastic.
Extraordinary journey.
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sending you a taste of my adventures by postcard.
' I'm on the peak of the world.
And over there, to the north, are two of the most colossal empires on earth.
This is Hong Kong.
I was here when I was a little girl and I haven't been back since.
And I'm about to start on one of the most exciting journeys you can make on land, which is through China and Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Express.
'Hong Kong -- once a British colony and protected by the British army and my father, who was stationed here with his Gurkha regiment.
' Of course, Hong Kong is bound to have changed, but I think, more than any city in the world, Hong Kong is the one that has altered its whole nature.
So much land reclamation.
You see that big, scooping building, like a great biscuit with the tower behind it? All that has been stolen back from the sea.
And where we're going now was water and it's now been grown out.
It's thrilling to be back.
It's terribly beautiful.
And I don't remember any of it.
It's as if I've been in a dream.
'All I know is that we lived on Chatham Road.
It used to be on the water's edge.
' It's the strangest thing in the world because I've got a picture of me as a little girl .
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in Hong Kong with my mother and my older sister.
And we're standing, I think, somewhere pretty near Chatham Road.
But here you can see the coastline so close to us, and now we're in the middle of a city.
It was a block of rather Victorian-y flats with little balconies.
And we kept guinea pigs called Sammy and Michael.
And the guinea pigs whistled.
Mummy taught them how to whistle.
And sometimes sailors would come onto shore, on their shore leave.
Walking past, they'd hear the guinea pigs whistling and they'd whistle back, thinking there were girls whistling down to them.
What is the top of your travel bucket list? What do you want to see in the world before you turn to stardust? Well, I'll tell you.
On most people's list is the Great Wall of China and the other is Outer Mongolia.
Where's more remote than that? You wouldn't have one without the other because the Great Wall was built to keep out its neighbours, principally the Mongolians.
Now, you can travel between the two provinces because the Trans-Mongolia Railway forms the first leg of the Trans-Siberian journey, which in itself is a trek that most of us would think once in a lifetime! And you can do it.
And I did it, I did it the whole way.
And I started in Beijing.
'New Beijing is officially still Communist, but it's embraced consumerism with open arms.
It's a shopper's paradise.
Luxury labels are everywhere.
And British brands are top sellers, with a 30% hike on London prices.
' Is this the silver Wraith, this one here? 'Mr Wilson runs the most successful Rolls-Royce dealership in the world here in the capital of Communist China.
He introduces me to one of his favourite clients, Madam Liu, to whom he recently sold his 1,000th Rolls-Royce.
You can buy them here for half a million quid.
The average annual wage is just over £2,000.
' Wow! Look, we've got stars on the ceiling! This is the stars at night.
~ This is what she likes most.
The glitter, the bling, the starry, starry night.
How do I get to close the door? Joanna, you can just press that button.
I never thought I'd see Beijing from the heart of a Rolls-Royce.
It seems extraordinary.
Who buys them? Where does the money come from? Cos this is riches beyond belief.
Definitely from the very rapid economic development in China.
For sure.
Darling, I think probably not with the mobile phone at the moment.
Because now we have so many successful, rich people in China.
- Yes.
- And then they enjoy the finer things.
Darling, not the phone.
You must just Wilson, will you ask Madam Liu very kindly? Ah.
Madam Liu, what is it that you love about the Rolls-Royce? ~ Because she believes that Rolls-Royce is the pinnacle.
And then it's a symbol of success and status.
'Beijing, once famous for its millions of bicycles, in now cars bumper to bumper.
' - ~ - Sorry, Joanna.
- No, it's them.
- ~ - She said, if we were doing it in her home town - Yeah? .
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she could arrange blocking the roads .
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for us to do the filming.
Because she has the connections with the authorities.
Beijing -- much to film here.
So hot, that I do remember.
The low-lying lanes which still criss-cross the city are steadily being replaced by astonishingly tall and eye-opening buildings.
The were out of this world.
Honestly, it was like being in a sort of cyber city.
Skyscrapers, endless wide ring roads, which make walking anywhere impossible.
Supper at a Mao-themed restaurant, that was astonishing.
'Now, I've travelled the world and eaten in every type of restaurant imaginable, but this one is by far the weirdest.
' ~ 'In the form of the most bizarre cabaret, large helpings of Mao's cultural revolution are served with wild enthusiasm, along with pizza and cold beer, if you wish.
' 'It's an odd atmosphere, given that in Mao's cultural revolution in the '60s, some 1.
5 million people were killed and countless millions of others suffered banishment, imprisonment and torture.
' Tell me, what did you enjoy most about this evening? ~ What are your thoughts now of Chairman Mao? 'If you're ever in Beijing and you fancy Chairman Mao and chips, then this is the restaurant for you.
' Now, back to the bucket list and the Great Wall.
It stretches 5,500 miles, which is here to New York and back again! Built on the most perilous mountain ridges, it's sensational.
When visiting dignitaries come to the wall -- there's a concrete coach park, some nice steps made up and it's all been cleared away -- they can stand there and this beautiful view of the wall is snaking away behind.
I didn't want to go there.
I wanted to go to one of the wilder parts.
So I met with an Englishman called William Lindsay, who's got a Chinese wife, and he's made it his life study to know everything about the wall.
And I think he's walked it twice, or something.
Unbelievable.
I went with him, climbing up through the wild, jungly bits, before dawn broke to see the Great Wall as the sun came up.
So it's just before four in the morning.
The moon is still up, but it's sinking down.
I can hear cocks beginning to crow.
We've got an hour's walk ahead of us.
You can see, it's quite cold.
The path is wet with dew.
So this is onwards and upwards to the Great Wall of China.
Yeah, it's a bit er This is the steepest part and er - .
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once we're through here - This is the steepest part.
Good.
The next corner, we may have a view.
Wonderful.
The sky is beginning to become paler.
Oh, my God, there is the wall.
This is extraordinary.
Even though I've seen this hundreds of times, it's still magnificent.
Worth getting up in the middle of the night to see.
I would say so.
Next, I have postcards from magical Mongolia, just over the border, and a close-up of a statue of Genghis Khan.
For most of the 20th century, Mongolia was shrouded in secrecy.
You couldn't get in.
It was the byword for remoteness and the back of the world.
But in the 21st century, it opened up and the people from Mongolia began to travel out and tourists began to flock in to see the ravishing landscapes.
And, of course, the best way to get into Mongolia is on the Trans-Mongolian Railway.
'I've leapt off the train to spend some time with a family of nomads.
There are twice as many wild horses as people in Mongolia and I'm hoping not too wild.
' I don't know why I feel my enormous English bottom is going to have a bit of a struggle in there.
My father, who was quite horseman, always said that when you're on top of a horse, to stop it ever knowing that you're feeling nervous, or anything like that, you've got to sing.
So it might be a bit of melody, the hills might be alive with the sound of music.
There we go.
There we are.
It's the same the whole world over It's the poor what gets the blame 'The nomadic lifestyle has hardly changed for thousands of years in Mongolia, where a third of the population are still herdsmen.
' 'It's not only the cows that are milked, mare's milk is big business in Mongolia.
And milking occurs four times a day and it's quite an art.
Foals are used to stimulate the mare to milk and then pulled away.
' It seems fairly hazardous, this milking, cos you just go in amongst the herd of horses.
You can see that this young one was suckling, the foal was suckling anyway.
You just leap in there, balance the bucket on your knee, sort of shout at the other horses if they come too close and look a bit rough.
Shall I have a go? Yeah? ~ - No? Put my bucket over there? - ~ - ~ - Oh, my love, I can't do it.
I'm not doing it properly.
- I'm not doing it properly.
- Oh, that was feeble.
'Some of the mare's milk makes a lethal brew.
' Oh, the smell! This has got the most So, when it's cool, the milk goes in here.
And you zhoosh it about and it turns into alcohol.
This is like a kind of still.
'I can't wait to try the alcoholic sour mare's milk nomadic cocktail.
' Delicious! This looks like beautiful, very thick cream, I guess.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
- Mm-mm! Mm-mm! - That's delicious! It's rather like eating a scone, I guess.
It's wonderful.
'They kindly invited me to stay the night.
Nomadic people are famous for their hospitality.
And if they're away, they'll leave the gere unlocked in order to allow any passer-by to rest and enjoy the treats which are left on the table for visitors.
' A lovely night here.
It got jolly cold, even though I had a beautiful extra quilt over my sleeping bag.
But something lovely happened.
There was a great kind of bump at about two or three in the morning.
That kind of phrrp! That lovely heavy breathing sound of a big beast coming along and standing and breathing beside me.
I've only ever had that before in a tent with a lion, so it was nice to be up in Mongolia, and it was a cow.
'Morning rituals with a modern twist.
As Mr Ochure gets up and Mrs Ochure makes the cheese, their son goes out early to round up the distant horses.
By the time he's back, Dad is up and ready.
And in a beautifully-coordinated dance, ancient and modern herding methods combine.
' It's been extraordinary staying here for the night.
There's something really pared down and simple, hardworking, disciplined, a sense of order An extraordinarily simple life, which I suppose all our ancestors lived.
So all of us used to live like this.
How different it is from the world today! But most impressive of all is something that I've found around the world, which is that the poorer and the simpler people are, the more they welcome you into their homes and the kinder they are, the more they give you the best place to sit or to eat, the best bit of food, the best bed.
We've pulled away from this in our smart, civilised world and I wonder if we haven't gone too far.
When we were out in the plains, we went, towards evening, into a wood to visit a shaman.
He was actually a young man who seemed to be possessed by a voice which was pretty weird.
One of those sort of voices.
And all the people, the local people, were sitting around with absolute belief, waiting to hear what the shaman would say to them.
I was secretly dreading that he'd call me up.
Of course, he did call me up and then, oddly, he told me something about my mother which he couldn't have known.
Yes, she was.
And at the end, when he kind of came out of his trance, he said to me, in an ordinary, ordinary boy voice, "Was that OK?" While in the towns of Mongolia, everything's burgeoning and modern and new, they've kept in touch with all their old arts.
China lost all its crafts under Communism, they were all stamped out and disappeared.
But in Mongolia they didn't have a great regime to have to follow.
And so they've kept everything alive and fresh and sweet, including a two-stringed fiddle and a kind of singing called kumi.
'I'm under strict instructions from my musician husband to track down the legendary Mongolian throat singers.
This group play traditional instruments and do a form of throat singing that's quite incredible to hear.
' Bravissimi! That was wonderful.
'That throaty sound and that pure, high overtone sound are both coming from this one man.
' Will you stand and teach me to do this? Very poor.
But, you see, I'm trying to be a man as well as singing.
The capital of Mongolia is Ulaanbaatar and the people there have just suddenly reawakened their pride in the warlord Genghis Khan.
He slaughtered millions.
They've named a square after him in Ulaanbaatar.
I mean, here in London we gave Nelson a column.
Wait till you see what they gave Genghis Khan.
'60 miles from Ulaanbaatar, on the plains, I met one of the most powerful men in Mongolia, Mr Batalga.
He's a politician and hugely wealthy businessman who dreamt up and then had built this tribute to Geghis Khan.
Almost as high as Nelson's Column, it dominates the landscape.
' It looks as though it's made from silver, - but what is it? Aluminium? - ~ So it's been made of stainless steel.
- So it will always gleam like this.
- Actually, you can - You can go up.
- You can go up onto there? - So we can get onto the horse's head? - Er yes.
Joanna, he's going to tell you to turn around and open your eyes.
Then can you look at it.
- ~ - OK, turn around.
That's extraordinary! Incredible expression of determination, authority, kindliness Probably not kindliness.
'"Chingis Khan", as he's pronounced here, and his armies are estimated to have slaughtered 40 million people.
So his status as hero is, of course, subjective.
' Why did you think it was important to have a statue of Genghis Khan? Since we came here and I've seen what Mongolia is like, I mean, it is just literally endless, this phenomenal statue seems to be to scale.
You can understand why this man, Genghis Khan, 800 years ago, ruled the world.
His army stretched from the Pacific right across into Europe, from what is now Russia right down to India.
An empire that's never really been matched.
So it's rather good to be here looking up at his huge silver face.
This is Genghis Khan and this is his Mongolia.
Who knew that Mongolia would be such a dream destination if, like me, you like outdoor living.
You get space and peace and a vast blue sky.
Join me again for more concise correspondence in my postcards.