We are pleased to publish these messages from Michael Palin
( ex Monty Python ) a long-time favourite of ours .. and for the last few years, responsible for enlightening many people to the joys of travelling to
out-of-the-way places on his fascinating TV programmes.

     Website : http://www.palinstravels.co.uk        

Received 5th July 2010

Still (working like) Crazy After All These Years.

Thanks to Simon and Garfunkel for most of the title.

Way back last October I told you of my plans to write a novel. Well, I still have plans and more words to show for it. But it's difficult to clear the days and just concentrate on writing. Being President of The Royal Geographical Society (I started a three-year term in June last year) involves a lot of appearances at the Society to introduce speakers and occasionally give talks myself and this last year, a lot of time spent fund-raising for improvements to the Society's headquarters just along from the Albert Hall. Which is where I joined Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam as one-night guest stars in Eric and John Du Prez's take on The Life Of Brian called Not The Messiah. So for the second time in my life (the first being at the Concert for George) I found myself singing The Lumberjack Song at the Albert Hall. Only this time I got the words of the chorus wrong! Must be old age!

There was also a Python reunion in New York, so the old bugger is still alive and well and giving me yet another excuse for not finishing the novel.

Recent interruptions have included a brilliant visit to Bologna in Italy for a Film Festival celebrating the work of Peter Sellers. Every time I see work by him and Spike Milligan I realise how much I've been influenced by them both in acting and writing. In a rare clip from 1953, one of their sketches begins with two men banging coconuts together. "Give the horses some water", someone says, and they drop the coconuts into a bucket.

Also to Warsaw last month to promote the publication of the book of my journey Around The World In Eighty Days which now joins Himalaya and Sahara (and my first novel Hemingway's Chair) in a specially translated Polish edition. And earlier in the year, as the ash clouds gathered over Europe, to Paris to promote the first French language edition of Pole to Pole.

Have tried hard to resist the temptations of book festivals. I feel that I should write the book first and then go to the festivals. But I've been seduced by the delights of southern Ireland to attend the West Cork Literary Festival to which I'm paying a flying visit this Thursday, 8th July.

That same day sees the publication of the easy-to-read, lightweight, all-singing, all-dancing paperback edition of my Diaries from the 1980s, Halfway To Hollywood, so I'll be doing some signings and radio and TV interviews over the next two weeks. Again, instead of writing the novel!

Two bits of travel news. If negotiations work out well I plan to reunite with the team next year to shoot a three-part BBC1 series in Brazil. I hope we can sort it all out satisfactorily as I shall soon be too old to move unaided. (Though whenever I think I'm too old I look at David Attenborough, now into his eighties and still showing us whippersnappers a clean pair of heels!)

In late March I spent a week in Orissa, a state on the Eastern side of India, south of Kolkata and north of Chennai. I can recommend it. Little known by tourists from outside India, the capital Bhubaneswar has plenty of accommodation and some of the finest Hindu temples I've ever seen. Beautiful craftsmanship dating back nearly 2000 years. There's wildlife and dolphins in an inland sea-water lake nearby and further upstate are forested hills which are home to the adivasis - the oldest indigenous tribes of India. They are sadly not being left alone. The hills amongst which they have lived for many centuries contain valuable minerals and a huge aluminium refinery was built near the Nyamgiri Hills recently. The mining company want to get at reserves of bauxite, and a particularly rich seam runs through the Nyamgiri Hills. Unfortunately several indigenous peoples still live there including the Dongria Kondh, for whom the hills gave always been sacred.

The company is currently awaiting a decision from the Indian government which they hope will allow it to begin mining, which will involve bulldozing and blasting the top of the hills to a depth of some 30 metres. The villages of the Dongria Kondh will be destroyed if the project goes through. Depressing because we all use aluminium so we're all to an extent complicit. But for the people who have lived here for so long, and whose way of life doesn't need aluminium, the impact of what is to happen is impossible for them to understand.

I found this head-on collision of ancient and modern ways of life deeply sad. Recently in the Independent newspaper the business section advised that the shares of the company that is mining in Orissa might be a good buy despite its record and reputation. I wrote this letter in protest and it was published in the paper last Thursday 1st July:

"At least your Business Section is commendably honest about claiming the moral low ground. "If You Can Stomach It, Vedanta Is A Good Buy" Independent 30.06.10.

I certainly couldn't stomach it. But then I've been to the Nyamgiri Hills in Orissa and seen the forces of money and power that Vedanta Resources have arrayed against a people who have occupied their land for thousands of years, who husband the forest sustainably and make no great demands on the state or the government. The tribe I visited simply want to carry on living in the villages that they and their ancestors have always lived in. Vedanta shares will doubtless go up when and if permission is granted to bulldoze their sacred hills in order to extract bauxite. If you want to make some money out of that, as the Independent recommends, that's up to you. If, on the other hand you have any reservations about destroying a way of life, you might wish to pause, think and read a little more about what's going on in the Nyamgiri Hills".

It's a story to watch.

Now I'm escaping into the wonderful world of fiction to avoid all this awfulness. Or better still, to confront it.

Love to all. Thanks for continuing to join me on the site and, whatever you do, never lose interest in the world!

Michael

July 5th, 2010

Received 16th January 2009

To Travel or Not to Travel

Times are hard, but we must resist the temptation to stay at home, pull up the drawbridge and look after number one. The economic crisis, this time around, is global. And to understand it we need, more than ever, to keep in touch with the rest of the world, to see how others are coping and hopefully to learn something along the way.

And let's face it, you wouldn't be logging onto this Website if you didn't feel, like me, that the urge to travel is not a tap that can be switched on and off at will. It's a persistent, niggling feeling, fed by curiosity and, hopefully by concern as well.

Those of you who caught Around The World In Twenty Years, our BBC One documentary at Christmas, will have seen the joy and pleasure on all our faces when I showed the old Eighty Days DVD to some of the dhow crew we tracked down in North-East India. I was as moved as they were. Despite being able to share very little of each other's language, the re-union showed that it's worth reaching out, and that the effort to re-connect can be reciprocated.
It wasn't life-changing for either side, but the shared laughter and the enjoyment of our differences made me feel happy and safe, several thousand miles from home.

On that same journey we came very close to seeing the other side of the coin. Only three weeks after we'd filmed in the Taj Hotel and Leopold's Bar in Mumbai, those who prefer to live by hatred and division had turned both places into killing grounds. And it's no coincidence that the Taj Hotel and Leopold's were both places in which people from all over the world came together to meet and talk.

This, it seems was the very reason they were targeted. For those with closed minds, places like these represent an intolerable threat to their own malign sense of certainty.

The attacks in Mumbai, and anywhere else in the world where people are prepared to kill rather than listen, are as clear a reason as there ever need be to keep meeting, talking, travelling and connecting.

As for me, well, I've no great projects in the pipeline right now. Much of the year ahead will be spent getting Diaries Volume Two 1980 -1988, the Film Years (working title) together.
It's due to be published in September, and I've no doubt it will send me on some promotional travels come the autumn. But I haven't stopped buying maps or cancelled my subscriptions to Geographical, Geo or The National Geographic magazine. Nor have I stopped reading the wise and wonderful experiences of the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. His latest,
"Travels With Herodotus" has so much wit and wisdom, and he tells a darned good story too. Check him out.

And check out a slim, evocative volume called Traveller by Michael Katakis (published by Burton and Park of San Francisco). I wrote the introduction because Michael represents all the best things about travelling. He listens, he learns, he writes about his love of the world simply, clearly and with feeling. And he loves eating !

Happy travels. See you on the road.

Michael, London, January 16th 2009

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Received 10th October 2008

I'm conscious, as ever, that a lot of water has flown under the bridge since my last message. Since then I've been working hard at an edit of my Diaries 1980 -1988 in time for publication next year, whilst watching Archie grow up and trying to come to terms with my identity theft by a hockey mum in Alaska. And no, Sarah Palin is not my sister, daughter or alias. And I'm Sahara Palin not Sarah.

After a grey old summer in London I'm about to set out for the heat again with some of the old team, on a new journey, currently called 80 Days Revisited, which will hopefully be shown as a one-hour special on BBC-1 around Christmas. At the same time Weidenfeld and Nicolson are publishing a new edition of Around The World In Eighty Days. Because some of the original pictures have gone missing in the twenty years since, we've trawled the archives and found some great new photographs and the book will be completely re-designed. I've written some new material, including a new preface and a short new chapter describing our return visit. So here, good and patient Website friends, is the latest on the latest journey.

Eighty Days Revisited

A new look at an old adventure

In Eighty Days Revisited we may not be going back to the Reform Club or ballooning over the Rockies, but we will be returning to the scene of one of the best-remembered sequences of any of my travel adventures, the dhow journey From Dubai to Bombay, episode three of Around The World In Eighty Days. As we sailed agonisingly slowly down the Persian Gulf on board one of world's oldest surviving traditional sailing ships we formed a unique relationship with our Indian crew. Mutual incomprehension gradually gave way to friendship and affection, as we accepted the fact that our lives, and the success of our journey Around The World In Eighty Days was in the hands of this band of ragged, under-paid sailors from Gujerat.

After a week at sea together, I found our farewell at Bombay to be one of the most emotional moments on all of my travels. As I said on film at the time : "It's almost impossible to accept that I shall never see them again".

Well, twenty years after we waved each other good-bye in the crowded waters off Bombay I'm trying to prove that nothing is impossible by setting out on a search for the crew of the Al-Sharma.

With the same cameraman who shot the original dhow journey we shall re-visit Dubai and meet those who found us the dhow in the first place, and then on to Bombay, now Mumbai, to see if, in the intervening twenty years that great teeming city has changed in more than just name. From Mumbai we take the over-night train north and west to the little town on the Indian Ocean from where many of Al-Sharma's crew hailed.

What happens here is far from certain, but I'm hoping to make contact with as many as possible of my old ship-mates. If all goes well we'll renew a unique friendship by sitting down together to watch, marvel and laugh ourselves silly at our adventures of twenty years' ago, when, together, we made our slow but happy way from the Middle East to India.

This return journey, the first I've ever attempted, will be as much of a challenge as the originals. There are plenty of if's and but's on the way, but, for me, and hopefully for you, this promises to make Eighty Days Revisited all the more exciting.

Michael P, September 2008

Received 12th May 2008

Passing Time

Thanks to all of you who remembered my birthday and sent nice messages. Especially big thanks to all those on Project Palin who signed my card. I may be very old, but it's great to know that people in places as far afield as St. Petersburg, Connecticut, Melbourne, London and Toronto bothered to wish me well and the card has survived its travels much better than I have!

The last few months have seen me complete a one-hour BBC documentary for the Timewatch slot. It's called The Last Day of The First World War and tells the story of what happened between the agreement to end the war at 5.15 in the morning, and the actual time of the cease-fire 6 hours later. The tragedy is that many thousands were killed, even though the war was officially over.

A tough story, but gave me the chance to visit the First World War sites in Belgium and Northern France and to see where it was on the Somme battlefield that my Great-Uncle Harry Palin was killed. It seems hard to comprehend what it must have been like for the soldiers fighting trench warfare. The neatly ploughed fields of today saw an unimaginable scale of slaughter only 90 years ago.

I'm also working on a preliminary edit of the second volume of my Diaries - covering the 1980s, when all I seemed to do was make films - Time Bandits, Meaning Of Life, Brazil, The Missionary, Private Function and a Fish Called Wanda - until the offer came to present a programme called Around The World In Eighty Days, which led to... well, Palin's travels.

We set off from the Reform Club in September 1988, so this autumn will be the Twentieth anniversary and we're planning a one-off special programme which will be based around a return to some of the places and the people I filmed all those years ago. No details yet , but, if it all works out, I'll let you know.

Archie is now two years old and a trainspotter. I'm a bit embarrassed about this as it all started when I lifted him on my shoulders to look over a railway bridge near our home. Since then he shouts "Wailway!" whenever I see him.

I'm not in any great hurry to hop on a plane. I like London in May, and I'd rather give Heathrow a wide berth until they sort out all the problems following the Terminal Five lurch, sorry, launch. Meanwhile, I've been using Eurostar as much as possible. The successful opening of the new terminal at the old St. Pancras shows that the railways can teach the airports a thing or two when it comes to efficiency. Mind you, I should think a team of reasonably educated herrings could teach BAA a thing or two.

After twenty years on the road, or more generally on the dirt-track, I feel quite content spending more time at home. Just keeping on travelling for the sake of it is not the point for me. I'm not so interested in ticking off the big names (North Pole, South Pole, Tierra Del Fuego, the Amazon) just for the sake of it. You have to get something out of each encounter, a wider knowledge, a sense of history and a feeling for the people and their way of life as well as just the T-shirt.

So I've a lot of memories and impressions, and I'm enjoying putting them in order, sealing them in my mind so they don't just drift away from my memory. Mind you, I still get very tempted when I hear of other people's adventures. John Hemming was on Excess Baggage on Radio 4 last weekend, talking about the Amazon (which he knows so well) and making my feet itch to get back there and experience once again the magical beauty and natural wealth of the great river and its rainforest.

But then Archie shouted "Wailway!" and I knew where my next trip was going to be!

Have a good summer. Be curious and be careful !

Michael

Received 31st January 2008

Calm after the Storm

I realise it's over four months since my last message. Since then New Europe has been out, both on television and in the bookshops and, increasingly, in supermarkets and on internet retailers.

The response has been very gratifying. The largest single audience for a documentary on UK TV last year (7.8 million for Episode 1), and with the BBC 2 and BBC 4 repeats, a weekly audience average of around 8 million for the series as a whole. The book has just slipped out of the Top 10 after 17 healthy weeks there and total world wide sales are looking to hit 350,000.

The pressure of publicity, especially book signings, catapulted me up to Christmas, and it's only now that the dust of filming, production and marketing has begun to settle and I can look back on New Europe and begin to assess its strengths and weaknesses.

I was very happy with the production values, which remained as high as ever. In terms of the material, well maybe there just was too much to chew on. Although the BBC gave us an extra programme, the material we saw en route was richer than any of us expected, and we would have needed another four or five programmes to cover all the countries as they fully deserved.

So, my apologies to some of the countries on our route that were not covered sufficiently. All of them are in the book, and many good sequences we just didn't have space for can be seen on the DVD. Maybe we were a little over-ambitious to take on twenty countries, all of which have such different characters and identities, histories and cultures, but the series was intended, like all the series I've made, to open a few windows on the world, and there was nowhere I didn't enjoy visiting, or learning about.

I hope that where we have succeeded is to reveal Central and Eastern Europe to audiences in such places as Britain, Australia, New Zealand and America, who knew very little about it, and now hopefully will know more. We can't do everything, but I'm happy if we've done enough to stimulate the curiosity of those who, like the Palin's Travel Website fans, like to do some finding out for themselves.

As often happens after a series, my appetite for finding out more of the background to what I've just seen, is very strong, and I'm currently enjoying a Dutch writer's trip through 20th century Europe. It's called In Europe, by Geert Mak (Harvill-Secker) and is a terrific and very readable insight into the turbulent history of Europe's last three generations. And there's a gem of a movie from Romania called "12.08, East of Bucharest". Bleak and very funny.

For all of those out there who might suspect that all I do these days is play with grandson Archie, I've already been on the move in 2008, visiting Lisbon to see the world premiere of Terry Jones's weird and wonderful opera "Evil Machines", and then further south to take Mrs Palin for a few days in one of my favourite places - Marrakesh. My feet itch and the wanderlust certainly hasn't cleared up, but this year I want to have time for other things - like catching up on movies and books and art and generally seeing what everyone else is doing.

After 18 solid months on New Europe, the thought of a new long series is far from my mind, but as long as there are maps I shall be looking at them.

Meanwhile, keep travelling - by train and canoe, if possible. Watch out for anything with Bruce Parry in it (he likes suffering almost as much as I used to) and have a restless 2008 !

Michael P, London, January 31st 2008

Received 25th October 2007

New Europe hits the silver (computer) screen

Hello everyone,

We just wanted to send you a quick e-mail to announce, with not a little pride, that Michael's latest series, New Europe with Michael Palin, is now available on Palin's Travels.

You now have access to the entire book text, supplemented by Basil Pao's stunning photographs. Not to mention Michael's reading matter, route maps, terrifyingly accurate photo and text searches and much, much more. And, we hear you ask, how much will all of this set you back? Not one penny. Not a single bean. It's all available at the nigh on unbeatable price of free.

We'll be running a new competition in the near future, as well as New Europe polls and scenes from the BBC programme itself. So keep checking back, and see for yourself the excitement and hope borne out of New Europe...

Join us in New Europe at www.palinstravels.co.uk

Happy travels - the Palin's Travels Team