Back from his latest arduous travels for the BBC Michael Palin tells Gerald Isaaman how he battled illness, debilitating cold, guerillas and a mad microlight pilot for our armchair delight...
Thursday 7th October 2004, Camden New Journal
He is back from the Himalayas. And you will again find the ubiquitous Michael Palin jogging on Hampstead Heath, still a favourite haunt after experiencing the majesty of the world’s highest mountains and all the strange and exotic places he has visited around the world.
"I do love coming back and I do find that Hampstead Heath fulfills an awful lot of my needs," he confesses at his home in Gospel Oak. "I go jogging twice sometimes three times a week, depending on how the day pans out.
"Early morning runs can be beautiful. Later in the day can be quite nice, early autumn evening too. But later in the day can be a bit tricky because suddenly you can find yourself in Kenwood and the gates are locked. It happened to me once."
That’s hardly on a par with the drama of six months of hard and sometimes dangerous trek of 18,000 miles from the borders of Afghanistan to south west China, taking in the Khyber Pass, Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and the eastern Indian states of Nagaland and Assam in what was his sixth and undoubtedly his most arduous journey yet.
Now 61 and remarkably fit, the former Monty Python star was taken ill on the slopes of the Annapurna range, climbed almost 18,000 feet up Everest, found himself frozen in a hotel without heating in Lhasa, was quizzed by Maoist guerillas, who abducted a British officer, and had the most frightening experience of his life flying through the clouds in a microlight. You can see it all in the current Sunday evening BBC1 series and read his thoughts and diaries in the book of the series.
Palin will be heading for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature next month and similar events round the country, promoting his book.
This is a civilised experienced he enjoys, especially meeting his admirers and other writers. And being asked searching personal questions. "People seem to be fascinated with my wife, Helen," he reveals. "Some of them doubt whether I have a wife at all.
"They ask how long I have been away and what’s it like to be back. I hope they are inferring that I didn’t have a sex life while I was away. Of course I never do."
He is now in a quiet time following what he describes as "four years of rushing around," his Himalayan epic beginning in May last year virtually on the tail of his Sahara expedition, the two almost fusing into one.
Since his home-coming in April he has been working on the TV series and writing his book. In some ways, he is a surrogate traveller off the beaten track for the armchair watcher who wants to see something more than a holiday programme.
There are those who want to emulate him, if they can, because they too enjoy roughing it themselves. "Then there are those for whom my programmes are confirmation of why they don’t travel, why they should never travel because, they say, look at what happens to him ending up with dysentry forever. People do like to see a bit of scheudenfreud, they like to see someone in trouble. But that can be confusing. Someone said that I hated Nepal."
Hate Nepal, "a most beautiful place? What of course come across in the book is that is where we trudged up Annapurna and I got an awful chest infection. It was just the most painful thing I’ve had and it did really make me think seriously about being able to make it to the top. But I did. And I got to nearly 18,000 ft on Everest. By then I was all right.
"So one really bad experience does make people think you hated the place. If you’re going to write a subjective book, then that is going to come out. At times the unfamiliarity of the place or the food or whatever can get to you. In Tibet everything is compounded just by the height. You don’t sleep at all well because of the altitude. So you’re tired. Every movement is much more of an effort. But the thing that really got me most of all was the cold, which I just hadn’t expected at all.
"I thought it would be cold outside but nowadays you have the most fantastic gear that weighs nothing and opens up into a three-piece climbing suit complete with waistcoat and goggles. But the buildings in Tibet had no heating at all. When you walk into the wonderful Himalaya Hotel in Lhasa everyone is wearing great coats, all the people inside, at reception, the waitresses. They were all in mountain climbing gear. You never really feel warm and comfortable when it is cold, and deprived of warmth makes the whole thing more relentless and arduous."
It reminded him of his early days growing up in Sheffield. "My father fought to keep the house warm on one paraffin stove and an open fire," he remembered. "But of course it was always cold. My father would say just go and put another three sweaters on."
His brush with Maoist guerillas came when the team walked two miles through paddy fields to a tiny village, to film the hazardous endurance tests recruits to the Gurkha Regiment go through, the guerillas abducting the British officer who was serving with the Ghurkas.
"These people weren’t gun-toting or anything like that," he recalled. "They looked like students with clipboards and lots of pens, real idealogues. And yet they put the fear of God into the sherpas and the village people.
"They didn’t threaten us but there was an implied threat in everything they did. They released Adrian Griffith, our officer in the Ghurkas, after 48 hours. He said what they wanted was a good old fashioned bit of brain washing about their cause, about the problems of Nepal and how they wanted to change society."
Then came his microlight flight with a grinning Russian pilot with a huge moustache who kept giving him a thumbs up gesture as they climbed higher and higher, Palin held in with just one seat strap as a cameraman took film from a microlight flying alongside.
"Yes, I was very, very scared then," he admitted. "The side of the thing only came up to my hips and it was open to the wind. I thought, what am I doing here? We seemed to be flying higher and higher towards the mountains for no apparent reason other than to get a great picture of me at 15,000 ft falling out of a frail microlight? Just describing it now makes me go sweaty palms."
He remembers a moment from his youth on a walkway half way up the tower of Liverpool Cathedral when a classmate kept saying, "Sir, sir, Palin’s gone green!" and vulnerable moments flying in a hot air balloon in Around the World in Eighty Days, back in 1998.
He remains intrepid and prefers to take an optimistic attitude, though landing on an ice flow at the North Pole remains equally intimidating since the pilot admitted that he took a chance after failing with his first two landing attempts.
"It’s not as if I was doing it in some glorious moment of fighting for my country, or discovering something important or saving somebody," he insists. "I’m doing it for the opening of a television series. That isn’t a good enough excuse to put your life at risk. I felt slightly shameful that this was not a worthy cause in which to risk my life and all the inconvenience that would cause my bank manager.
"I think I’ve got more keen on self preservation now. I’m slightly less reckless. On the other hand, I’m still impulsive and that’s part of my nature. I will probably do something very stupid one of these days when I go travelling."
That’s why he tries to maintain a tough physical and mental discipline on his journeys. "They are very, very tough work and there’s no switching off," he says. "You curse and swear sometimes. Yes, I do get angry. I am probably prone to the tempers that my father used to fly into every now and then, but not so much now. I can just remember certain times when you crack. But that happens very, very rarely, and certainly it’s never worth cracking up!"
So in the coming year he is going to rest up and possibly write a novel. There are no new travel plans at present, and no desire to go off to some personal Shangri-La in a far-fetched foreign or fantasy land.
He gives a giggle and declares: "I always thought the Peak District was fine. I am still very loyal to Sheffield in some strange sort of way. I’d never think of living there again but in Sheffield we lived 800 feet up and I used to go on my bike out on to the moors.
"That was just a tremendous liberation for me when I was young. Off I went into Derbyshire and the Peak District. And to me that is as good as being in the Himalayas or being in the Sahara. It is the great outdoors."
