Author/Presenter: Michael Palin
If you thought there would never be
another journey like Around the World in 80 Days you and Michael Palin's family
have a lot in common. However, less than three years after being shut out of the Reform
Club, Palin was offered a journey that would be harder, longer and more dangerous. He was
immediately hooked. The result is Pole to Pole, the second of Michael Palin's Great
Twentieth-Century Adventures. Setting out to travel from one end of the earth to the
other, following the 30 degree east line of longitude, Palin and his team, using aircraft
only as a last resort, endured extremes of heat and cold, as they crossed 17 countries on
trains, trucks, ships, rafts, ski-doos, buses, barges, bicycles and balloons.
Lavishly illustrated with photographs by
Basil Pao - Michael's friend and fellow- traveller on Around the World in 80 Days
- Pole to Pole is Michael Palin's own record of the pain and pleasure of an
extraordinary journey. If you have an insatiable love of travel, an overdeveloped sense of
humour or just enjoy reading about someone else's mis-fortunes, then this is the book for
you.
Cover photographs by Basil Pao except back, top left, by Fraser
Barber.
This first leg takes Palin to the Russian border by ski
plane, snow scooter and ice breaker. On the way, he talks to Santa Claus, and
has his life saved by a trapper.
The second leg of the trip takes Michael Palin by bus, train
and barge across Russia from the cities of St Petersburg in the north to Odessa
in the south.
The third leg of his journey takes Michael Palin through
Istanbul on the Bosporus to Aswan on the Nile. Along the way he views the
British garrison in Cyprus, visits a real Turkish bath and attends a Greek
Orthodox wedding.
Michael Palin prepares to cross the Sudan, with the difficult
choice of traversing either a desert or a war zone.
The team reach Ethiopia, where the political situation is
unstable. The armed remnants of fallen dictator Mengistu's forces are still at
large and Palin's route lies directly through perilous bandit country. Only at
the border with Kenya will the anxiety lessen.
Palin continues his trek with a safari in Kenya, before
travelling by train through Tanzania, then by ferry across Lake Tanganyika, down
through Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, hoping to catch the annual sailing
from Cape Town to the Antarctic.
Palin travels to South Africa's largest city, Johannesburg,
where he finds that there are no places left on the once-a-year sailing to the
Antarctic. Does this mean that he will be unable to complete his journey?
After five months and 13,000 miles, Michael Palin arrives in
Cape Town to embark on the final leg of his journey. But the only ship to Antarctica
has no available berths and he realises he will have to bend his own rules.
Web Owner.
Copyright © Michael Palin 1992.
Revised: 09 September, 2005.
