tv The Travel Show BBC News August 9, 2020 1:30pm-2:01pm BST
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this is bbc news with the latest headlines at 2pm hot weather, borisjohnson says it would be g dry hot weather, particularly in eastern areas. as the cloud clears more readily across northern morally indefensible to keep england, the heat is expected to spread northwards and that is the schools in england closed. increasing chance for showers in he's pledged to make reopening them a national priority. south—western england and pushing to add northern ireland and scotland, i'm very pleased that the north—west of england as well. the prime minister is making higher temperatures for england, schools a priority. heat gripping a little further north as well. some of those understands i've been arguing for some time that my fear was that children could be torrential. we are starting were being left behind in this relaxation of lockdown. the first resignation to see pressure the warning and any following the wave of anger and mass demonstrations over beirut‘s catastophic explosion. settled situation breaking down. we the country's information are watching that pressure on the bay of biscay quite closely because, minister quits. by tuesday, we have got that chance new arrivals of migrants of some showers, probably at the on the uk coast this morning, adding to the more than five hundred midlands, northwards up the greatest people crossing the channel risk of those are thundery by boat since thursday. torrential downpours, but we cannot relate one or two further south a public apology by the operator where the heat stays with us. it is still hot here. the heat is creeping of the stranded japanese tanker that a little further north the temperatures in scotland and northern ireland are creeping up a degree so as well as that heat is northwards with these terms. this is the area of low pressure i talked
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about any beer biscay, which will bring, we think, in my general thundery break —— bay of biscay, milling through wednesday night, bringing thundery rain. we could well see the heat starting to break by that stage in the south, but not without some rather torrential rain to go with it. as ever, more details on the warnings online.
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hello, this is bbc news. the headlines: borisjohnson says it would be morally indefensible to keep schools in england closed, and has pledged to make reopening them a national priority. iam very i am very pleased that the prime minister is making schools a priority. i have been arguing sometime that my fear was that children were being left behind in this relaxation of lockdown.
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amid growing anger at the lebanese government and mass demonstrations over last week's catastophic explosion in beirut, the country's information minister resigns. there's been fresh arrivals of migrants on the uk coast this morning — adding to the more than five hundred people crossing the channel by boat since thursday. 400 taliban militants are to be released after a vote by afghanistan's loya jirga or grand assembly in kabul. now on bbc new: the travel show‘s injapan, as ceremonies take place to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks on hiroshima and nagasaki. it's been 75 years, but survivors argue their memories of nuclear attack still need to be heard. this week hiroshima and nagasaki and the anniversary too important to cancel.
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hello and welcome to the travel show, coming to you this week from hiroshima, around 900 kilometres south—west of tokyo. 75 years ago the world's first atomic bomb fell on this city, killing tens of thousands of people in a blinding flash of light and, three days later, another bomb fell on nagasaki. in this week's show we'll be meeting the survivors of those attacks and seeing how events designed to mark the 75th anniversary have faired during the global pandemic. also coming up on this week's show: christa uncovers
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the wartime secrets buried deep beneath gibraltar. we meet the people still trapped a long way from home because of covid—i9. we feel like hostage here on board as we have no choice except to being in ourcabin. and rajan gets to grips with the new gadgets designed for a perfectly socially distanced holiday. i have come to a city injapan that's known all around the world, but it's known forjust one event — the devastation and destruction caused by an american nuclear bomb dropped on this city 75 years ago this month during the final days of the second world war. today, though, much of hiroshima looks like any other japanese city. in fact, coronavirus aside, it's doing well.
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so this is to remember the dead. this is in honour of those who died and families come here and offer prayers for the souls of those who died. at hiroshima's peace park, an area that was once one of the city's busiest commercial hubs but was flattened by the blast has been made into a focus for its annual commemorations. about 60,000 or 70,000 people were killed on that day and mostly because of the radiation and injuries up to 100,000 people died by the end of 1945. what's been the effect on hiroshima today? it has scarred the city. people were terrified of radiation and people stayed away from hiroshima. people who were from here were discriminated against and it took the town a long time to rebuild but in its rebuilding one of its focuses was on trying to seek to eliminate
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nuclear weapons in the world. so it's really always remained a central defining aspect of this city's experience and the city's focus. the testimony of survivors here can reveal japan's difficult relationship with memories of the second world the number of survivors are dwindling every year and this year's ceremonies will be the last significant anniversary many will attend. but despite the limitations placed on proceedings because of the pandemic, many are still eager to come
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across the city, a piano tuner was preparing his special piano that had been exposed to the blast 75 years ago for this year's scaled—down ceremony in the peace park. on august 6, the peace park ceremony went ahead, but with a socially distanced set up, allowing just 10% of the 11,000 attendees that
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well, the anniversaries here in hiroshima and nagasaki aren't the only wwii commemorations to be affected by the coronavirus pandemic this year. celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory in europe day back in may were also relatively low—key. up next, though, while travel returns to normal in some parts of the world, elsewhere some people are still stranded a very long way from home. we've been to meet some of them. marooned off the coast of brazil and in the south atlantic ocean are three cruise ships. trapped on board are a total of 103 mauritian and madagascan crewmembers. all passengers and some of the crew left in march, but those left on board have been unable to return home since the borders to their countries closed. i wanted to get home to mauritius because i'm missing my family and my loving one.
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i want to get home to mauritius because i belong there. i want to get home to mauritius because my mother just passed away. all: please lift the restrictions and let us go back to mauritius. to be stranded on board far from our country, far from our family is very difficult because we are stressed here and we don't know exactly when we are going to be repatriated. we feel very lonely and depressed to get home and praying to be on land soon. we feel like hostage here on board as we have no choice except being in our cabin, on our balcony, and taking our meal all the day. now, another group of people who have been particularly hard hit by changing government policies are australians. as cases rise, strict arrival caps have been imposed, leaving people stranded.
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airlines have been forced to limit the number of passengers on their flights, pushing up ticket prices and making returning home even more out of reach. i'm originally from the uk but i've lived in australia now for a number of years and i'm married to an australian, we're all australian citizens, we have four kids. we came on holiday initially in early march for a three week holiday to visit family in the uk and we've been trapped here ever since, stranded. and it's now getting on for about four and a half months. the main challenges we've got a small house and there are six of us. so we are filming this where i actually sleep. this is my dad's study in a shed in the garden. and the uncertainty of not knowing when that would stop has been particularly difficult. when the australians decided to put limitations on the number of people arriving because of pressures on quarantine, the airlines have actually been forced to discriminate against the economy passengers and so we've actually been
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removed from a couple of flights. so it's not that we don't want to get home, it's not that we haven't been trying to get home. we've done everything in our financial means to get home, but we'rejust not able to. british citizen tom russell has been stranded in accra, ghana where his week research trip turned into a five—month aid operation. i was due to fly out of ghana the day after it closed, and i've had ten flights cancelled since. the trick is to accept you are stuck somewhere, and as soon as you do that, you just get on with life as much as you can, as opposed to kind of dwelling on it. and that's exactly what tom did by setting up give back ghana. he set up boxes giving enough food for ten families for one week, which he gave back to locals to help funding for his trek. five months on tom and his business partner have put
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together thousands of boxes to help people across the town. i think it has completely changed my experience for the positive. i've met so many people through this. everyone i've met has given it some value as well. i'd like to see my friends and family, but the project is on here, and i've got to run with what i've started. well, let's hope they all make it home safely soon. still to come: rajan has some suggestions to keep your travel bubble intact if you are off on holiday, and christa finds there's more to gibraltar than first meets the eye. with the world slowly returning to some kind of normality,
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it's only natural that people are wondering where they can go on their next trip. but what do you do if you want to remain socially distanced from others but are still desperate for some kind of holiday? rajan might just have the answer. well, yes, with fears of a second imminent wave of the virus and spikes being reported across the globe, the idea of social distancing while travelling does sound like a good one. conventional crowded summer hotspots like beaches, theme parks and busy cities are being avoided by many people in favour of more rural locations to allow for social distancing. so with all of this going on, it's hardly surprising that some fun but pretty unconventional ways of travelling are rising in popularity. around the world, businesses have been creating innovative ways for people to still have fun travelling while remaining safe.
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according to manufacturers, the ququq camping module is a mini mobile home in a box, which means everything you need is in one place to set off on a wild adventure without seeing a single soul if that's your thing. how easy is it to turn this into a mobile home? developed by a husband—and—wife duo in germany in 2011, the boxes are now being used all over the globe. well, voila. amazing. as easy as that. tell me, where did the idea come from? prior to this, pretty much if someone wanted to use their own vehicle, it was air bed, mattresses, lying on a cold floor — not very convenient, not all of their kit in one space. it's a proper stove. it will allow you to have an adventure effectively in the vehicle you already own and be able to social distance if you needed to or wished to. and moving directly from the campsite to the open water. what if i told you you could
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buy a caravan and you could move from land to water and sail it out to sea? kind of james bond for campers, right? where did the idea for the sealander come from? it was bringing an innovative craft to an old—fashioned caravan market for people looking for more freedom and more flexibility in their leisure time. this solution is a kind of dream of everybody, so it's notjust physical, it's also symbolic for possibilities to follow your own path. i guess ultimately the beauty of this is you can travel across land and in water without meeting other people. that's the soul of our product. you are free to do whatever you want to wherever you want. with hotel occupancy rates down globally and the virus not showing any signs of leaving us anytime soon, is the uptrend and socially distanced
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travelling a fad? i don't think it will be a trend. i think the quicker we find a vaccine, there is a possibility we will go back to as it was before. if it takes longer, we will actually learn a lesson about this. we will appreciate travel more. everything has become very homogeneous, and the reason behind travelling in the first place is that we wanted to explore and see something different, not something the same, and i think we've lost the plot about this way. what kind of activities or holidays can you see prospering in the future in this world? 0utdoor travel will become big. adventure travel will become big. touring holidays where you have small groups — about four or five people per guide. there's a lot of stuff on our doorstep that looks like it's overseas. one of my favourite countries is canada. i absolutely adore it. i'm not going to go to it this year, but scotland is like a mini canada. so there are lots of places that will resonate, and we've got plenty of opportunity to social
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distance, whatever our budget. to finish up this week we head back to some of the darkest days of world war ii. the british territory of gibraltar was vital for allied access to the mediterranean, but it's very location made it vulnerable to enemy attacks, which is why a secret network of tunnels was built there. but before lockdown, christa headed there to discover some of its hidden past. this tiny territory on europe's southern tip has been the subject of fierce diplomatic wrangling for years. spain claims sovereignty, but it's been ruled by britain since 1713. tourists have always come here to take in the sunshine and feed the famous barbary
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macaques, and it's not hard to see why this rock has been such a prized military asset too, especially during the second world war. up here on top of the rock, you really get a sense of why this was so strategically important during the war. as we follow the map, you can see the mountains of africa to one side, and we've got spain on the other side of the rock, and of course the entrance to the mediterranean from the atlantic, so a really important place, this. inside the rock itself, work has been going on which is revealing 1000 years of history, including information on how this place was repurposed as a military hq. gibraltar is a fortress and it's covered in fortifications, but notjust on the outside. in fact gibraltar is honeycombed with tunnels, and there's 44 miles of tunnel inside the rock, which is more than double the amount of roads we've got on the outside. so yes, gibraltar
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is a living fortress. these tunnels, they all connect up, and there are hospitals, there's kitchens, there's a bakery, there's frozen food stores. the plan was to be able to house and caterfor 16,000 men and women. 16,000? yes. these rooms used to be the king's regiment headquarters. but one discovery in the 1990s stunned gibraltarians: the infamous stay behind cave. all to do with an urban myth that was hanging around town, people used to talk about this, about hidden tunnels, secret tunnels. so for many years people were looking for them, but no—one ever found anything, so by the 1990s it was dismissed as an urban myth — until one day some of the cavers found something.
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if gibraltar were to fall into enemy hands, a top—secret plan called 0peration tracer was to bury six men in the rock with one year's supply of food. the job was to spy and radio back intelligence to the uk. what do we have here? this is what would have been the main living chamber. if you look at the floor, it's been covered by cork tiles. now, the idea of this was to suppress any noise so the men wouldn't make any noise while they were living here. this would have been the radio shack. and the latrines. of the six people chosen, there were two radio operators, a doctor, an officer and a signalman. and here we have the remains of a bicycle.
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and instead of a bicycle chain, it had a leather strap, and that would have provided a means of generating electricity to power their radio. also at the back you can see there is a fan attached to what would have been the back wheel, and the idea was that was going to provide ventilation. the plan was for the men to hide and monitor air traffic on and off the runway, and shipping movements into the med, the bay of gibraltar and the atlantic. this was their only access to daylight. this is a really plum spot. that's why they chose this particular point of view. access here is limited, but through the gibraltar museum, 30 people a year are able to visit the stay behind cave on a first—come, first—served basis. christa exploring some hidden world war ii history there in gibraltar. that's it for this week.
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we'll be back with a new travel show very soon. next week there's another chance to see rajan making his way down the mighty river sava in the balkans. join rajan for that if you can. but from me and the rest of the team here injapan, it's goodbye. another hot date, hot and humid across southern and eastern areas with temperatures in a pile with
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lows of yesterday. and an abundance of strong august sunshine. more co mforta ble, of strong august sunshine. more comfortable, low 20s further north in the sunshine but in between we have had some stubborn cloud. very slow to clear across east wales, the north of england and some could linger near the north sea coast. it will return as we go through this evening and overnight. just the outside risk of some showers. tentative increase to the night. being drawn up in the south and west and the odd one further north but the big talking point again tonight is how warm and oppressive the night will be. more so for northern ireland and scotland. humidity is higher here for the coming night compared to the wondrous console warm start to the new working week but there is an increased chance now of some thunderstorms. a met office warning about that for the next two 01’ warning about that for the next two or three days, in fact. still a lot of dry and settled and quite hot weather again particularly in eastern areas. that is the heat. as a low cloud clears more readily today the heat is expected to spread
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northwards. an increasing chance of showers for south—west england, pushing towards scotland, perhaps the north west of england as well. you see that i attempt as in england, some of that heat creeping further north as well. some of those thunderstorms could be torrential, giving some localised flooding. that is because we are starting to see pressure lowering in the settled situation starting to break down and we are watching that low pressure in the bay quite quickly because again, by tuesday, we have got that chance of showers. probably the midlands northwards the greatest risk of those torrential downpours but we cannot rule out one or two further south. weather he stays with us it is still hot here and you can see the heat is keeping a little bit further north so temperatures creeping up by a degree or so as well as the heat moves northwards with the storms. this is the area of low pressure we talked about which will bring a more general thundery breakdown. thundery rain moving
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