Father-son team shows the beauty of destinations your travel agent would never recommend.
When Bob ’83 and Mack ’13 Woodruff hit the road for their new travel show Rogue Trip, they weren’t taking your typical family vacation. In Ethiopia, the father-and-son team allowed a hyena whisperer to dangle meat so close to their necks that the wild hyenas nuzzled them. When in Papua New Guinea, they hunted crocodiles. In Ukraine, they visited the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
They saw parts of these countries — and others — most Americans have never seen: the verdant mountains of Ethiopia, the stunning Attabad Lake in Pakistan, and the forests of Lebanon. That’s the whole point of the show. “These are important parts of the world that Americans need to know about,” Bob says. “Not just because they experienced conflict or were engaged in war.”
For Bob, this is an especially important message. While Mack was growing up at home with his sisters and mother, Lee McConaughy Woodruff ’82, Bob was an ABC war correspondent. He covered conflicts in Asia and the Middle East, and most famously in Iraq, where he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2006.
As Bob reported on wars, famines, and environmental collapse, he knew the media reports didn’t show the full story. The countries he covered are also places where people live, have deep traditions, and take pride and joy in their homeland. So when an ABC colleague suggested that Bob do a National Geographic show revisiting former conflict zones, Bob jumped at the idea. He soon realized he needed a traveling partner as adventurous as he was: his son, Mack.
“I wanted him to see that I wasn’t risking my life all the time, despite the fact that I had four awesome little kids at home,” says Bob, “just for the adrenaline.”
The six-episode show, which began streaming on Disney+ in July, follows the duo as they visit three countries that Bob previously covered — Lebanon, Pakistan, and Colombia — and three he’d always wanted to see: Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, and Ukraine.
Rogue Trip has a Bourdain-esque feel, as the Woodruffs deliberately bypass tourist destinations and focus on the authentic, unique, or just plain adventurous — so yes, there’s adrenaline. It’s also filled with the poignancy, humor, and frustrations of the father-son relationship, while showcasing each man’s talents.
After graduating from Colgate with a philosophy degree, Mack worked in the NBA’s marketing department, where he “fell in love with production.” He became a full-time video producer and photographer for a meditation app before moving to Sydney, Australia, to be a freelance photographer. In Rogue Trip, his captivating photos of people and places are interspersed throughout.
Bob and Mack visited the six countries in four months, from July to October of 2019. “We roughed it a lot,” Mack says. The two always shared a room, often in 95-degree heat and bunking beneath mosquito netting. Sometimes, they woke covered in bug bites or to discover they were cohabitating with bedbugs. In Pakistan, they took multiple 13-hour car trips on perilous mountain roads.
Bob and Mack learned a few things about each other while they were on the road. Bob witnessed Mack’s work ethic and passion behind the camera — and that “he brings a lot of shoes.” Mack saw his dad’s “incredibly disarming way of going up to people, not being intimidated, and just asking them any question he thinks will help tell a good story.”
In the end, both men wanted to show that these countries recovered from difficult times, a theme that feels particularly resonant now. “Everyone’s so resilient,” Mack says. “That’s one of the messages we wanted to convey, and that is especially important in this COVID time. All these countries bounced back, and we will too.”