Joanna Lumley embarks on Spice Trail Adventure

Joanna Lumley has filmed her latest travel series Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure, set to premiere in the UK.

The four-part series through the world’s greatest spice continents visits Indonesia, Zanzibar & Jordan, India and Madagascar.

She begins in the remote Indonesian island, Banda, which was once the only place on earth where nutmeg grew, before travelling to her birthplace, India, in search of ‘black gold’.

The next stop is the African island of Madagascar, on the trail of the second most expensive spice in the world, vanilla, before the vast plains of Wadi Rum in Jordan on the back of a camel and the ancient city of Petra.

“The original idea was to follow the story of spices, because in this country we can now get every spice under the sun and we revel in them,” she said.

“But we used to only have salt and pepper and mustard and that was about it. For this trip we thought, let’s see where all these astonishing spices came from and how they came to be in this country and the history of that. We had done the silk road adventure and so we called this series the spice trail, because there is something about spices, that they are usually ground into powder when we get them, that had a gorgeous sense of following a trail of them.”

But there was also a darker side to the spice trade.

“We all know about colonialism which has been going on since time began. Somebody going somewhere else and saying, ‘I like what you’ve got, I’ll take it’. In those days people were killed and treated abominably as slaves. It was very violent and a dreadful time and seeing paintings depicting that on this trip broke my heart. But it was in every country of the world. It was important for us to acknowledge that in this series.”

An Australian premiere is yet to be announced.