Disney’s ‘Rogue Trip’ sees two for the road
Former anchorman Woodruff, son bond traveling to nations off the beaten path
Bob Woodruff has been with ABC News since 1996, most famously surviving a roadside bomb attack in 2006 while reporting on the Iraq War as the network’s coanchor.
As the opening of his new limited series “Rogue Trip” notes, Woodruff ’s trip back from a catastrophic brain injury during that incident was long and arduous; he had to relearn how to walk and speak. At the time, his son, Mack, was a teenager; now Mack is 28 and a production photographer.
So “Rogue Trip,” which premieres all six episodes on Disney Plus on Friday, July 24, was a chance for father and son to bond by traveling to six countries off the beaten path of most vacationers: Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Ukraine.
Woodruff, 58, covers Asia and files longform stories for “Nightline” and “20/20.” He also heads the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which works closely with organizations and charities that help veterans.
He spoke to The Chronicle from his home in Westchester County, N.Y., where he pointed out that Mack was born in San Francisco (”We lived there for two years before I was a journalist”) and that his 26yearold daughter, Cathryn, was moving to Berkeley — but made clear he’s not playing favorites. (Woodruff also has 20yearold twin girls, Claire and Nora, with his wife of 32 years, Lee Woodruff.)
Q: How did you pick the six countries you went to in the series?
A: Three of the countries that we went to were ones I’d been to before, covering wars or conflicts, like Lebanon and Pakistan and Colombia. But the “Rogue Trip” premieres on Disney Plus on Friday, July 24. three other countries were ones I had not been to, and were ones I wanted to see.
There were a bunch of other countries that were on our list but we were not able to get visas to get into them, like Iran and Algeria, or Sudan. Or there were some conflicts that brewed right when we were looking at them, so they were not ones we could safely travel to.
Q: In theory, are these places anybody could travel to, with proper planning?
A: Everyone needs to know that countries can change in an instant . ... But I just know that the people and the places have a lot more beauty to them and intelligence to them than they get depicted, as in a lot of the reporting we’ve done in terms of covering crises and wars and starvation.
But, yes, I think it’d be safe to go to every one of these countries we went to.
Q: I think many American viewers might be surprised by the amount of gorgeous country there is in the places you visit.
A:
Yeah. In Pakistan, all you remember is some sort of terrorism from reports; in Ethiopia, you think of the decades of starvation, that’s the image, but you don’t think about the high mountains of Africa generally. They’re just beautiful.
Parts of Colombia were not accessible because of conflicts with FARC (a Colombian rebel group), essentially a war they had with them for decades. Now in Colombia you can go to this flat land where you can go ride horses, and you can go to the Amazon in Colombia, which everybody just assumes it’s just Brazil that has the Amazon.
So we just wanted to show parts of countries that people don’t generally know about.
Q: You state in the series that a big reason for you to do this was to bond with your son, Mack. What did you learn about him during the shoot?
A:
Well, he’s sitting right next to me, so I gotta say something nice! (Laughs) Actually, a lot of things we learned about each other. One thing I learned
is that he’s very much like me. I think he’s got a hunger to tell stories. He’s got a good eye as a photographer and a good heart.
I had this great gift to be able to spend five months in unique places with my son. Actually sleeping in the same rooms, traveling in the same cars, meeting the same people. That doesn’t mean it was perfect. Q: You have three daughters. You didn’t invite them along? Cathryn did join you in Ukraine, but not the other places. A: Well, really, Mack and I created this project. He’s in production, he’s a photographer, and he’s got this addiction to travel like me, so we fit in together on this.
Listen, I’m not saying he’s my favorite child, that’s not actually the case! (Laughs) The twin girls were tied down with college. Q: Which was your favorite of the six countries you visited? A: I really loved Papua New Guinea. In some ways we had remarkable range of going deep into these tribal zones of the country that had not gotten any real tourism. You’ve got a culture that had not been disturbed by the development of the world, so we saw something very unique.
And then beautiful, beautiful oceans that are being now studied by scientists.
I also loved Ethiopia. It’s not a country that was really colonialized, like most of the countries in Africa. So it’s unique.
Q: Do you have any tips for Westerners traveling in countries such as these?
A: I always make a clear point to people when they ask about how to stay safe in countries (that it) is not so much exactly which country you’re going to, but where you go and how you act when get there. Because one thing that can trigger off some retaliation against an outsider is (when) you try and impose your own culture on theirs.
So I just listen to them. I think that’s the most important thing.