Netflix description:
“Intrepid adventurer Michael Palin treks the majestic Himalayas in this installment of his popular video travelogue. In this six-episode collection, Palin journeys through Afghanistan, across India to the region near Mount Everest’s base known as the Death Zone and on to the Bhutanese capital before arriving in the Bay of Bengal.”
My thoughts…
There are film and book versions of Palin’s adventures.
The Film
It focused too much on Palin as entertainer, which would have been fine if he’d been his usual brilliant self. I guess it’s hard to be funny when you’re oxygen-deprived. It was entertaining, though, to see the Dalai Lama go into an extended fit of giggles when he met Palin, and to learn that His Holiness is a Monty Python fan. Forced humor aside, the film was exceptionally insightful and illuminating about many cultural and political aspects of the countries Palin passed through. And of course there was the scenery…
The Book
I liked the Nepal chapter of the book better than the equivalent parts of the film. The photographs are stunning. His writing has subtlety and personality, and his vignettes can be captivating. It’s cool that he doesn’t try to overdo it with flowery language about the physical splendor of the place. About leaving, he writes simply:
“I realize how extraordinarily lucky I am to have seen all this.”
In a way, that tells me more about the impact of being there than the most eloquent description.
I was a little disappointed to read that he trekked only long enough to get good footage, and then he and his crew got a nice helicopter ride out. For some reason, that diminished my opinion of his documentary work. But I love his bird’s-eye view as he flies back down toward the Kathmandu Valley:
“After circling the massif, we turn due south, following coiling glaciers, until they melt into streams that cross the spiky grassland and grow into small rivers, which disappear first into coniferous then tropical rain forest, re-emerging where the trees have been cut back to make room for cultivated clearings. Then the first isolated settlements appear and the clearings grow into terraces and the settlements grow into mountain villages with marked tracks, and the terraces become rice paddies in all shades of green and yellow and the marked tracks become paved roads, with power lines running beside them through the tin-shack slums around the airport. And the rivers become a lake.
“The evolution of human settlement in 22 minutes…”
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