Traveling to Exotic Locations - with a Film Crew and No Money!

In his book, Naked in Dangerous Places: The Chronicles of a Hungry, Scared, Lost, Homesick, but Otherwise Perfectly Happy Traveler, radio personality Cash Peters shares his mis-adventures to 32 exotic locations as host of a quickly cancelled travel show.

Commitment:  Naked in Dangerous Places: The Chronicles of a Hungry, Scared, Lost, Homesick, but Otherwise Perfectly Happy Traveler is a memoir of your experiences as you filmed All Washed Up (later retitled Stranded), a reality TV show in which you were taken – penniless - to a series of exotic locales and forced to coexist with indigenous cultures, brace the elements and live on your wits.  Yet, you state in your book that you don't enjoy traveling and you're not adventurous.  How did you end up starring in a reality adventure show?

Cash Peters:  No, I do enjoy traveling, especially when someone else is paying. I love stuff when it’s free. It’s a major failing of mine. It’s the whole getting-there bullcrap that I don’t like. All the attendant red-tape, hassle, and worries. The packing, the planning, the arguing with people at check-in desks when I’m trying to get a free upgrade. Stuff like that. But once I’m there I’m fine. 

I got the show because I’d written a previous book, called Gullible’s Travels, in which I visited some of the weirdest, stupidest, and kitchiest museums and tours across America and Europe. The book, which has since become a cult hit (I heard recently that soldiers in Afghanistan have copies and read the funnier parts aloud to each other to keep their spirits up), was read by someone from Travel Channel, who decided that he’d like me to do the same thing for them, only this time it would be around the world, visiting different cultures and tribes. I spent about 15 months shooting the series, and the new book is based on that.

Commitment:  Some of your imagery is hysterical, in part because you juxtapose images of modern life with the remote locales you were visiting, i.e., “[The sun slid dramatically into the ocean in a tantrum of citrus hues, before finally throwing itself over the horizon like a hysterical soprano;” “[D]aylight in Vanuatu is greeted with the same heightened sense of relief I imagine rich people must feel after a night of rioting, as they emerge from the basement to find that their Mercedes didn't get torched after all;” and at one point a person responds to you “with the mild disdain of a Best Buy assistant who's been asked one too many questions about photocopy paper and is about to snap.” Did it seem strange to be thinking of luxury cars or copy machines when you were on an island so remote, there was no telephone service?

Cash:  Thanks. Actually, no. It’s when you’re stuck on a remote island with zero facilities – z-e-r-o - that you become aware of how much you take for granted back home. Before I did this TV show and book, I was a nervous, pampered writer living in California. I mean, when do I ever NOT have access to hot water or a phone or a microwave oven or a toilet? Whereas people in these alien cultures happily tear a live goat apart for dinner; breakfast is warm blood drunk straight from a cow; they sleep on a slab of fresh-laid dung; and they wake up in the morning to find that a couple of their neighbors were eaten by lions during the night. That never happens in Hollywood.

Trust me, when you’re lying flat on a dung bed in Kenya with bugs crawling all over your face, I defy anyone not to wish they had a phone so they could call Dial-A-Mattress. 

Commitment:  Some of your experiences are probably unimaginable to most people. For example, you watched as a naked baby spewed diarrhea over its mom’s shoulders which was then quickly consumed by an emaciated dog. In your wildest dreams, did you even think you would witness such things?

Cash:  Ugh, you had to go and remind me of that.

Don’t forget, I’d worked in radio as a travel reporter for twenty years before this, so I’d seen a whole bunch of beastly ghastliness over the course of that. But I was still naïve about so much, especially the discomfort, the starvation, and lack of facilities that is the norm for other cultures. I mean, my God, in some places people just poop where they stand. And mothers let their little babies ride piglets instead of go-karts. And in Vanuatu, women are sold at market for pigs. (The exchange rate when I was there was appalling. About three pigs to one woman.)

Foreigners are outrageous. I couldn’t wait to get home. 

Commitment:  You filmed episodes of Stranded in such disparate locales as Russia, Dubai, Vanuatu and the Idaho wilderness. What do these locales have in common?

Cash:  They’re all places I would never go back to. That’s what they have in common.

Dubai in particular. It’s like Las Vegas, only fifty thousand times phonier. Everything’s a put-on. Bloated, boastful, soulless. They’re trying to seem all westernized to bring in business; meanwhile, if a guy kisses his boyfriend in public, he could be thrown in the slammer for five years then deported. They’re so up-tight and frickin’ backward. And by the way, somebody should tell them that those little islands they just built off the coast of Dubai – The Palm, The World, The Universe – are doomed. By the time global warming’s done with them, they’ll by under ten feet of sea-water.

Basically, Dubaians need to grow up.

Commitment: You list among your phobias, fears of heights, enclosed spaces, spiders, wild animals and flying. Yet you encountered all of these things while filming Stranded. How did you overcome your fears?

Cash:  The crew will insist that I didn’t overcome them at all and whined like a two-year old the whole time.

But the truth is, TV makes you do the craziest things. It’s pride, I guess. Nobody – not even an un-scared person – should be made to climb a volcano while it’s erupting.  Nobody should go white water rafting over rapids that are known to kill people, or at the very least knock them unconscious. And nobody should sleep in a dung hut when there are wild lions and hyenas prowling outside the door. Yet I did all these things.

The only thing I didn’t do was bungee jump. And now I kinda wish I had.  

Commitment:  While making Stranded, you drank kava (made in part with young boys' spit), you alienated Americans of Danish ancestry, searched for lesbians on the Greek Island of Lesbos, and had a drunken woman beg to have your baby! Of all your adventures, which were the most memorable?

Cash:  Those four would pretty much sum it up, actually.

Though probably the most memorable is when I was coming home from Morocco and got stuck in London with no money because I’d forgotten to bring my green card with me and so British Airways wouldn’t let me flight home. I was genuinely stranded and it sucked.

Commitment:  There were times, such as when you were in Barrow, Alaska 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, when you felt homesick. How did you deal with this?

Cash:  Lots of phone-calls home. My roaming charges were astronomical. The rest of the time I just stayed focused on the work. There’s so much to do when you’re hosting a TV show like Stranded that you don’t have a whole lot of time left over for self-pity. It was hard-going, though.

Commitment:  You left your partner back in California while you toured the world for Stranded. How did this affect your relationship?

Cash:  I know now why celebrities are constantly breaking up and remarrying. Life on the road is pretty farging tough. I met up with other TV hosts at an event, and they were all complaining about the hellish schedule. I was away for the best part of 15 months, shooting 32 shows, so the personal ties did begin to get strained towards the end. Luckily, I have a great guy waiting for me when I return from my trips. He’s ultra-patient and pragmatic. All the same, I’m glad now there wasn’t a third season. I’m not sure our relationship would have stood up to my being away so much.

Commitment:  Although you'd been on radio for decades, it wasn't until Stranded started being shown on cable TV that you became a celebrity. What was it like to be recognized at Starbucks or on the street?

Cash:  Beyond weird. Fans would stalk me constantly around supermarkets or shout at me from escalators at the mall, or stare at me nonstop in restaurants. At the time, I didn’t even drive a car, so I used to ride the bus in L.A. And people kept trying to take my photo with their camera phones. It became overwhelming.

The show was cancelled, supposedly, because it wasn’t popular enough, but I’ve never believed that. I was harassed constantly. Total strangers would come running down the street, screaming how much they adored the show. And I still receive emails every week, asking when it’s coming back.

Commitment:  You spent a year living near a live volcano, riding on elephants with strangers and touring the benign dictatorship of Dubai.  What are you up to these days?

Cash:  I just went back to my day job after the show. I’m the BBC’s entertainment correspondent in Hollywood, so I broadcast every week for them. I’ve just completed a novel – a mystery thriller – that will be published next year, and I’ve already packed in a whole bunch of new travels for the follow-up to Naked in Dangerous Places. So I’m busy busy busy.  

CASH PETERS is an author and broadcaster based in Los Angeles, California.

Born in Stockport, England, he launched his career at the age of 15, writing for The Two Ronnies, a TV comedy show in the UK.
Jokes he wrote on his way to school appeared on several other major radio and TV shows too, as well as in The Two Ronnies books.

In the early 70s, he won the BBC's Young Filmmaker of the Year Contest (only to be disqualified on a stupid technicality, grrrr).
By the time he hit college, he had his own weekly radio show on the BBC and was a regular movie reviewer on Radio 1.
As well as working for Capital Radio and BBC TV in London, he co-hosted ITV's Talking Telephone Numbers with Phillip Schofield and Emma Forbes, and It's Been a Bad Week with Chris Tarrant.
In the U.S. he was a reporter on CNN (for a day) and had his own travel show on cable TV (for a year).
He can currently be heard on Marketplace on American public radio, and every week live on BBC Radio 5 Live.

Visit Cash at website at www.cashpeters.com.

To purchase Naked in Dangerous Places, click here.