ANNA WALKER
The TV presenter takes
the tough with the luxurious, from cobras' hearts to bath tub panoramas
SUNDAY 15 AUGUST 1999
There is a huge
difference between local people suggesting I join some activity and a TV
director pushing me into something. I am conscious of the fine line between
sampling the local culture and dressing up in silly costumes. I will not do
anything that my director and producer are not willing to do themselves.
One of the less pleasant things I did for TV
was to dine in a snake restaurant in Vietnam . You had to choose
your own snake from a tank - I went for a cobra. The difficult part was being
presented with the drained blood of the creature decanted into a glass with
alcohol. I was then served the snake's heart, still warm and beating. I had to
pick it up with my chop-sticks, drop into the glass of blood and alcohol, and
down it in one. My director got the gall-bladder. I was in no position to
complain or protest - after all, we were being treated to great luxury.
On filming trips I do everything, from the
ridiculously opulent to the extremely tough. My favourite hotel was probably in
Vancouver , where one wall of my 20th-floor
room was made of glass. I took a bath in the window overlooking the city.
Some people assume that when filming in less
comfortable circumstances (a tent in the Andes for example), we
get air-lifted off to five-star hotels every night. In fact, it's very
important that we do stay in those places, so we know what we are talking
about. And so I can be filmed waking up at dawn on some freezing hillside.
I've never lost my passport but a while ago
I made the mistake of having my married name put into my passport and
forgetting to tell my office about it. They bought all my tickets for a filming
trip across America and the Pacific in
the wrong name. Travelling with your tickets and passport in different names is
no joke: there was a huge panic to get all the tickets changed at the last
minute.
Other than that, the only mistake I've made
was to travel to Germany on an expired
passport. I was in a panic about how I was going to get home, but in the end
they didn't even bother to look inside my passport. Strange, because I must
have had such a guilty look on my face. I'd never make a criminal.
Having said that, I did once inadvertently
carry some coca leaves back into the UK , which could
theoretically have been used to make cocaine. We had been shooting in Peru , where I had brewed
coca leaves before a trek, in the local custom. It never occurred to me that
there would be any harm in bringing a few leaves back with me.
Anna Walker is presenting `Holidaymaker'
today at 7pm on ITV.
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