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Michael Palin – Travel books

March 2, 2010 on 3:17 am | In Books | No Comments

Another review of books from yours truly!

This time I decided to take a look at a series of books by Michael Palin.

Michael Palin established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty Python, as well as The Missionary, A Private Function, and an award-winning performance as the hapless Ken in A Fish Called Wanda and, more recently, American Friends and Fierce Creatures. His television credits include two films for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, the plays East of Ipswichand Number 27, and Alan Bleasdale’s GBH.

He has written books to accompany his seven very successful travel series, Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe. Most have been No 1 bestsellers ad Himalaya was No 1 for eleven weeks. In 2006 the first volume of his diaries 1969-1979, The Python Years also spent several weeks on the bestseller lists. He is the author of a number of children’s stories, the play The Weekend and the novel Hemingway’s Chair. (Palin’s Travels)

Around the world in 80 days ★★★★★★
Pole to Pole ★★★★★★
Full Circle ★★★★★★

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Around the world in 80 days.

Michael Palin was asked by the BBC to follow in the footsteps of the (fictitious) Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne book Around the World in Eighty Days. The use of aeroplanes was not allowed, a self-imposed restriction. Steam liners don’t exist anymore, so all of the long sea journeys had to be on container ships or freighters. The one exception was the trip from Dubai to Mumbai (Bombay) on a dhow, a high point of the trip.

To some extent the book reads like a diary, as Michael Palin starts each section of the book with a heading like “Day 42 – Hong Kong”. This reflects the fact that the whole trip was a kind of “race against time” effort, and being aware of how many days have passed and how many days are left before the magic number 80 arrives adds extra excitement.

An interesting aspect of this trip is that almost 3/4 of the time (59 days) was spent getting around the first half of the globe (Europe, Middle East, Asia, Pacific to the International Date Line) and only 1/4 of the time (21 days) for the last half of the trip (rest of the Pacific, U.S.A., Atlantic). This is also reflected in the number of pages in this book: 180 for the first half of the trip, 60 for the last half.

There are a couple of reasons for this discrepancy. Traveling across the Pacific and the Atlantic was done on fast modern container ships. The trip across the U.S.A. was done by train, which was fairly fast, and this stretch was presumably considered to be less interesting for Western TV viewers (the intended audience) than the more exotic parts in the Middle East and Asia.

One major difference between this trip and the following Michael Palin trips for the BBC was the desire to follow a preordained route that involved a lot of time traveling at sea. Day after day of sailing does not make for very exciting TV. For example, in an almost grotesque sequence, Michael Palin arrives in Singapore harbor on one ship at midnight, rushes through immigration and departure processing, and embarks on the next ship at 2:45 a.m. Neither Palin nor the viewers get to see a single view of Singapore.

The text of this book is available free to read online on Michael Palin’s official web site. (Wikipedia)

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Pole to Pole.

Eighty Days was intended to be a one off, and after completing it I went back to being an actor, making a film called American Friends and a Channel Four drama series called GBH. But the lure of the atlas was irresistible and at a lunch with Clem Vallance, the man who dreamt up Around The World In Eighty Days, we hatched a new plan. Having bisected the world horizontally, why not try it vertically.

I was sold on the idea simply by the prospect of standing on both Poles. In fact, getting to the Poles was to involve some of the hairiest moments of my travelling life, and even the journey in between made Eighty Days look like a luxury cruise. We must have been one of the last film crews to work in the Soviet Union before it collapsed and we worked on the edge of war zones in Sudan and Ethiopia. I shudder at the memory of how things went wrong after visiting a witch doctor, and can remember the bitter anti-climax of being told there was no room for us on the boat from Cape Town to Antarctica.

We were away from home for almost five months, and when we returned I was adamant that this was the last travel documentary I was ever going to do.

That was 1991. By 1992, the bites and the chilblains had healed and my memory was filled only with memories of extraordinary locations and experiences. Safaris, steam baths, mud baths, white-water rafting below the Victoria Falls, the mighty temples at Luxor, the legendarily comfortable Blue Train in South Africa, and the pristine beauty of the polar ice-caps. And when the series was put together, it ran to nine episodes instead of eight.

Michael Palin, 25th September 2002. (Palin’s Travels)

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Full Circle.

The book contains one chapter for each country/region visited, as follows: USA (Alaska), Russia (Siberia), Japan, South Korea, China (Shanghai to Vietnam), Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, USA (California), Canada (British Columbia), USA (Alaska).

To some extent the book reads like a diary, as Michael Palin starts each section of the book with a heading like “Day 43 – Huis Ten Bosch”. But in a departure from the previous two books there are occasional breaks where a day is not mentioned.

This was the longest of all of Michael Palin’s trips, covering 50,000 miles (80,000 km) through 17 countries in ten months.

The diversity of the many countries and places is amazing. Arctic wilderness, tropics, deserts, cramped cities, huge rivers, high mountains, etc., etc. There are many high points along the way, the most exciting being when Michael Palin had to lasso a camel while standing in the back of a pickup truck that was going over bumps and around bends at break-neck speed.

The text of this book is available free to read online on Michael Palin’s official web site. (Wikipedia)

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All the books are really well written and you get a sense of adventure when you read about what he is experiencing. In difference to the TV series of the travels, we hear a lot about what is actually going on in between shots and what the camera crew is doing while shooting. A lot of humor is put in to the books as well, which you could kind of expect from one of the members of Monty Python.

I find the books quite worth reading, though I must say that the first, Around the world in 80 days, is the best of them. I expect to be buying the rest of the series when I can get hold of them. In the mean time, you guys can go read them for free on his webpage. I kind of have to wait to get them on audio.