The woman has been to ______ countries.

M: How many different countries do you think you’ve been to?
F: Once I made a count of how many countries I’d hitchhiked through and it came to twenty eight. So if you add on a few more for those where I haven’t hitched, I imagine it comes to about forty by now.
M: About forty! And are there any of these that you feel you really would like to go back to?
F: Two that I could actually live in I think. One would be the west coast of Canada because I think that had everything to offer. It was rich culturally, it was very bright, it had a very pleasant climate, slightly improved on Britain. It had the Rocky Mountain behind, loads of coastline, a lot going on both day and night, a large university, and it was just near America if you felt like crossing the border. The other place I like, but more for a holiday, was Sardinia, which I found was one of the quietest, most unspoilt parts of Europe that I’ve seen.
M: What is it about traveling that makes you want to keep doing it?
F: I think it’s the one time when I feel completely alive every minute of the day. I also feel I have a tremendous amount of experience to bring back every time I’ve traveled, there’s so much to share with other people. I feel I’ve got, sort of, two hundred percent me to give once I come back. But when I’m actually doing it, you’re free from all the bounds of routine, you’re free from the assumptions people make about you. You’re free from the inhibitions that cause you not to fully be yourself and enjoy yourself because of what people might think and so on.
M: But it can also be a little bit dangerous at times too, can’t it?
F: It can certainly be dangerous if you’re doing it alone. I avoid traveling alone wherever I can. I mostly go with people I know very well and this is part of the travel discovering the person you’re traveling with and discovering the differences in taste and the similarities in taste. But, the most dangerous situation I found myself in was nearly being knifed here in Devon. But apart from that, I was on a train in Hungary where there was a murder in the loo, and we were kept for two hours while they investigated why somebody had been stabbed in the loo, I’ve also slept, voluntarily, in a prison in Norway and another prison in Germany. And in one of them we were locked in and heard the other prisoners shouting and banging on the doors and that felt quite frightening. I managed to get right into the center of the Middle East war through no choice of my own. They wouldn’t let us out of the plane and we were caught throughout the whole war in the country and couldn’t get around at all. That felt as if you were living on a knife edge; we were lying there contemplating quite coolly whether, if there was an air raid, we should actually go into the shelter or allow ourselves to be killed on the spot. And, there are certainly risks and I think more so when you do travel alone, so I try to avoid it.