Description
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
longer, harder, 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.
Arriving in Ethiopia at the end of a
30-year civil war, Zambia on the day of
Kenneth Kaunda’s downfall and witnessing
the end of apartheid in South Africa and
Communism in the USSR, they saw history
in the making and made history as well.
Palin became the first British television
presenter to throw himself, literally, into a
Russian kissing dance in ovgorod, a mud
bath in Odessa, white-water rapids on the
Zambesi and a squash game at 100 degrees
Fahrenheit in Khartoum. He became the
first, but surely not the last, Sheffield
Wednesday supporter to consult a witch
doctor, the only member of the Monty
Python team to try and buy a camel, the first
person in his street to pan, successfully, for
gold, and the only man with a cat called
Albert to have stood on both Poles.
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
misfortunes, then this is the book for you.
MICHAEL P ALIN’s comic reputation was
established by the ever-popular Monty Python’s
Frying Circus. His work also includes several
films: The Missionary, A Private Function, an
award-winning performance as the hapless
Ken in A Fish Called Wanda, and more
recently American Friends and GBH. He has
also written many books, notably Around the
World in 80 Days, Ripping Yams with Terry
jones, and a number of children’s books
including The Mirrorstone, Limericks and
Small Harry and the Toothache Pills.
In excellent preloved condition (as new)
Hardcover
320 pages.
Orig, sold for $49.95 in NZ. Hard to find first edition copy.
