Some say London spreads out forever and I say, 'Have you been to Cairo?' It's just a blinder — it's home to 18 million people and is twice the density of London. I've been to Egypt several times and it has bewitched me, although crossing the road is rather intense.
I've stayed in some wonderful places over the years. When I went to India, I stayed in a sensational old palace in Udaipur. It was a family home and beyond fabulous.
From the air, Namibia looks like a scrubby nowhere land. It's twice the size of France but doesn't even seem to have any trees.
Then you get down there, and there are animals walking around everywhere. It's such a fantastic, extraordinary country.
The people of Nepal are special. They are hill people, tough, yet also generous, kind and good-humoured. I went there after the Gurkha campaign last year and I'm planning on going back and doing some trekking in the mountains.
I love rough-and-tumble travel. It was 53°C when I was in Sudan recently for a TV series and we were wilting. We couldn't even sleep at night, but we had to work through it.
People from Hampstead and Highgate probably wouldn't dream of coming to my neck of the woods. I live in Stockwell in south London, and my neighbours and I can boast that we can hear Big Ben chiming from our gardens. London truly is an exceptional city.
Having grown up in the Far East, I love foreign food. I always go straight to street vendors — that's where you can get the best.
I helped dart [to anaesthetise] a giraffe in Kenya once when I was filming. The second a giraffe hits the ground, it begins to die, so we quickly got it upright and drove it halfway across Africa — or so it seemed. It looked like a great big willowing sea monster. It was a rare Rothschild giraffe, and the locals had never seen one before. Children were standing by the side of the road shouting, 'Look at that!'
Joanna Lumley is appearing in La Bête on Broadway later in the year.
