Wandering after Wanda
After A Fish Called Wanda in 1988, actor and Monty Python star Michael Palin found that "there were no movies as good as Wanda waiting to be made." So he took what was supposed to be a temporary job—as a professional tour guide for the BBC, which asked him to star in a travel documentary called Around the World in 80 Days. The last of the seven episodes drew 12 million viewers. Since then, Palin has made five more epic journeys for the BBC, trekking through all seven continents while facing fatigue, disease, altitude sickness, political unrest, and charging animals. His latest adventure, Himalaya, airs in its entirety on the Travel Channel on July 24 and was released in a three-disk DVD set this month.
Q. Your trip to the Himalayas begins along the dangerous Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Your journey could have ended pretty quickly.
A. We were advised not to make any journeys there by both the British Foreign Office and the American State Department. But the whole idea of doing the Himalayas was doing the mountain range from one end to the other—not just the well-known middle bits. So I thought we had to go there. The Pakistani government was very helpful. We had police escorts, which I'm slightly ambivalent about. If you've got 10 policemen around you, you're more likely to be a target. But we had no problems.
Q. You visited several geopolitical flashpoints on this trip, including Chinese-occupied Tibet and the disputed area of Kashmir. How does a lighthearted tour guide approach these subjects?
A. It's difficult to deal with all the political problems you're going to find. I'm sort of traveling like an Everyman, with a certain amount of knowledge, but I want to learn about what's happening from the people I talk to. For the most part, people we met just want to get on with their lives. I suppose the program is educational, but the way to take people in is to entertain them.
Q. Do your skills as an entertainer also help you bridge the cultural gap?
A. Being able to make people laugh is a great help. I don't speak Tibetan, and I don't speak Chinese. I always accept the food or drink they offer and smile and make a joke on myself—maybe playing football with kids and missing the ball and falling on my backside. I have never been anywhere in the world—apart from military barracks or a customs post—where people haven't been prepared to laugh.
Q. In Himalaya you were nearly run over by a bull and suffered from the effects of high altitude and fatigue. Did you ever lose your sense of humor?
A. I would mislay it every now and then, certainly. When we were traveling up to the base camp of the mountain Annapurna. On the second day, I got very sick, but because of the filming schedule we had to keep moving. On the night of the fourth day, I just crawled into my sleeping bag. I woke up and it was pitch dark in my stone hut and absolutely silent. I thought this was it; I've crossed the River Styx. For a moment, I really did think for the first time in any of my journeys, the conditions, the environment had beaten me.
Q. Was that the most frightened you've been?
A. We've had a number of quite serious situations. When we went down through Sudan on [the series] Pole to Pole, a cameraman took a picture out of the car window and a local guy objected for one reason or another. He began shouting, and soon other people began shouting. A kind of hysteria began. They started to try to roll our cars. Fortunately, our driver got us out of there. Human violence is much more frightening than being on top of a mountain or being in a gorge or white-water rafting. You feel much more under threat.
Q. So what's left to see?
A. There's huge, huge tracts of land, to quote Monty Python & the Holy Grail. I'm thinking of areas like South America, Brazil, Argentina. I've never been to the Middle East and all those countries that end in stan. There's plenty to see. I'm going to take a break this year, but I've certainly got quite itchy feet already. —Bret Schulte
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