‘SA WOMEN ARE AMAZONS’
The British actress recalls her impressions of Cape Town, white nights in Iceland and being trapped on holiday with the wrong person
People say Paris is amazing for fashion but for me it’s all about Antwerp. I was filming Baptiste there recently and fell in love with it. The shops are amazing, it has a relaxed, Scandi vibe and it’s really walkable too.
The year I spent teaching English in Thailand was the making of me. I went there alone when I was 21 to teach in Nong Khai, next to the Mekong River and close to the Laos border. When I arrived at 3am there was no one there to meet me and a taxi driver dropped me off at this vague, middle-ofnowhere place outside a bar full of white men with fairly young Thai women — right next to the teaching facility. It was the best possible start to the trip, as I realised I only had myself to rely on. The experience gave me confidence.
Cape Town was a bizarre mix of geographically beautiful landscapes and questionable politics. We filmed The Last Post there and I became great friends with my costar Jessie Buckley. We spent most of our time exploring restaurants or going to intense Pilates classes, where these Amazonian South African women would watch us scrawny, pale Europeans with bemusement.
I nearly died when ascending Table Mountain. I’m not generally an adrenaline seeker, but a friend and I decided to climb it without a guide, which in retrospect wasn’t the best idea, as people do die up there. Trekking on our own was exhilarating but at one point we took a wrong turn on to a treacherous path near a spot called Devil’s Ladder. We had a brief, “Oh my God, how are we going to get out of here?” moment before eventually doubling back and making our way home safely.
Daytime drinking takes on a new meaning in Reydarfjordur, a small town on Iceland’s east coast. I was there filming Fortitude for about six months, so I saw the light change from 23 hours of night to 23 hours of day — which plays havoc with your body clock. On more than one occasion, I found myself in the bar at 3am, having completely failed to appreciate that it was actually the middle of the night.
Maybe I’m naive but I’m optimistic about travelling with my new baby. When they’re this young, you can go anywhere, because they’re not at school and they are fully dependent on you. Over the next couple of years, my aim is to target really beautiful, relaxing places that aren’t too physically taxing.
The most magical place I’ve ever visited is St Martin’s in the Isles of Scilly, England. Your entire day there is dictated by the tide, which is totally alien to a busy, cosmopolitan person like me. To my surprise, I found the restriction oddly liberating.
For book lovers like me, there’s no better town to visit in Britain than Hay-on-Wye. I grew up there and every time I return I lose myself amid all those wonderful independent bookshops.
We spent our honeymoon at a perfume hotel called Coqui Coqui in Mexico. There’s a perfume shop beneath the rooms, which is outfitted with hand-painted tiles and weathered colonial furniture. It’s the most romantic place I have ever stayed.
Sightseeing makes me really hungry so it’s important to know exactly where I’m eating. I remember getting very lost before a theatre trip in New York once. We’d wandered a few blocks east into this incredibly rough area and, in desperation, decided to eat in this very unimpressive-looking steakhouse. When the food arrived, it totally blew my socks off.
I was in Morocco when 9/11 happened so I watched the whole thing unfold on a bank of TV screens in a market stall in Marrakech, surrounded entirely by locals. I was quite young and it was the first time I’d really gone travelling. To my shame, I didn’t even know what the Twin Towers were.
If your expectations of a holiday are too high it will inevitably fall short. I like reading up on places before I visit, but I try not to ruin the spontaneity by drafting minute-by-minute itineraries. The best plan is to let loose and just go with the flow.
Being with the wrong person on holiday is torture. If you’re with a friend or someone who is not quite on the same wavelength as you, it can end very badly. I speak from personal experience of having been trapped with someone I didn’t like very much, in a country I didn’t know particularly well. ● L S.
© Telegraph Media Group Limited [2019]