Michael Palin - Full Circle

For almost a year, Michael Palin travelled through 18 countries on the perimeter of the world's largest ocean, in a spectacular journey of contrasts, drama and beauty.

From head-hunters in Borneo to a meal of maggots in Mexico, his route takes him to some of the most politically volatile and physically demanding places on Earth. Whether climbing the Exalted Mountains in China, dodging icebergs in Chile, or being taken short on the banks of the Amazon, Michael Palin paints a vivid picture of the people and places around him.

It was a journey of dazzling surprises and jarring extremes. Beauty and ugliness, sophistication and squalor, unceasing urban noise and monastic tranquility This is a record of a year of wonder Michael Palin.

Michael Palin

ePub r1.0

Editor 11.07.15

Michael Palin, 1999

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ePub base r1.2

First and foremost, my undying gratitude to my fellow travellers. Most of them have trudged round the world with me before and they know that I can never convey in words my esteem for their work, their ability, and the fact that none of them makes a lot of noise at breakfast.

Clem Vallance, once again, set about the onerous task of pulling all the strands of the production together, as well as directing half the series. Roger Mills marched at the head of the troops for five of the ten episodes. Nigel Meakin, on camera, and Fraser Barber, on sound, maintained their legendary high standards in often impossible conditions. Nigels assistant, Stephen Robinson, was calm in every crisis and Jude Tyrell and Vanessa Courtney quite brilliantly smoothed our way around the Pacific despite recalcitrant hotels, waiters, immigration officials and others less convinced of our purpose than ourselves. Basil Pao, our photographer and gastronomic adviser was, as usual, indispensable.

It is quite something to spend two hundred and seventy days of the year with six other people. To enjoy it as well is a credit to our simple rule of travelthat everyone depends on everyone else.

Along the way there were many others we depended on to help us through, over and between tight spots. We greatly miss Igor Nosov, who conquered Siberia for us, and who sadly died a year and a half later. Enormous thanks to him and to all who helped us round the Rimespecially Yukiko Shimahara, Shin-Na, John Lee and Susan Xu Xu, Mai Thu Ha, Marissa Floirendo, Philip Yung, Eko Binarso, Stephanie Hutchinson, Patricio Lanfranco Leverton, Barry Walker, Marcela Gaviria Quigley, Chloe Sayer and Bill Boatman of the US Coast Guard.

Mirabel Brook and Jane Sayers held things together at the London base and Emily Lodge arranged the currency deals.

At Prominent Television Anne James was both a beady eye and a great inspiration, and Eddie Mirzoeff at the BBC was always a guiding hand. My thanks too, to the patient editing team who put the series togetherDavid Thomas, Alex Richardson, Victoria Trow and Kathy Rodwell.

The short sharp shock of putting this book together has been made immeasurably easier for me by the tireless patience of my assistants Kath James and Kirsten Whiting and my hardworking and long-suffering editorial and production team at BBC Books, especially Sheila Ableman, Anna Ottewill and our designer Bobby Birchall.

And last but not least, my thanks to Suzanna Zsohar for letting the world know its been written.

Travel Note: Thanks to the Lonely Planet Guides for information on almost everywhere. The Rough Guides and the Insight Guides were invaluable too.

The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the worlds surface and around it lives one-third of the worlds population. Its 70 million square miles of water spill onto the shores of a richly contrasting assortment of countries. Some are global giantsRussia, China, Japan and the United States. Others, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Chile and Canada, are becoming increasingly important and influential. The coastline that unites them is now more than just a physical entity. It is a political and economic state of mind, called, for want of something more poetic, the Pacific Rim.

Experts predict that the Pacific Rim will be the power-house of the twenty-first century. Commentators point to the final decline of the Mediterranean-Atlantic axis which has dominated the world these past two thousand years. The future, we are told, belongs to the other side of the earth. The Pacific century is about to begin.

Many times, over the last couple of years, I have found myself nodding in agreement with these sage judgements without being at all sure what I was nodding about. Where exactly is the Pacific Rim everyone talks about with such authority? Which countries does it include? What are the people like in these countries? Do they share a sense of the destiny so many think lies ahead of them? I felt it was time to stop nodding and to learn something.

After Around The World In 80 Days and Pole to Pole, the question I was most often asked was Is there anywhere you havent been?. As soon as I started getting out my Pacific maps, it became clear that there were lots of places, and that a journey round the Pacific Rim would cover a great many of them, as well as shedding some light on a huge part of the world I knew so embarrassingly little about. Having made the decision to set out again, with much the same team, we began to join up a few dots on the map. The more closely we looked, the more the journey grew in size and scale. A circle may sound a neat controllable entity, like a hub-cap or the face of Big Ben, but when its diameter is 11,000 miles it takes on epic proportions. And Full Circle indeed proved to be an epic.

The eventual distance we covered was around 50,000 miles, more than all the mileage on 80 Days and Pole to Pole put together. We set ourselves the deadline of one calendar year and were on the road for more than two hundred and seventy days of that year, returning home briefly to do some laundry and save our marriages.

There were times when resources ran low and the whole effort seemed overwhelming. But, as with the best journeys, this was often because there was no let-up in the sheer richness of what we saw and experienced. It was a journey of dazzling surprises and jarring extremes. Beauty and ugliness, sophistication and squalor, unceasing urban noise and monastic tranquillity were often to be found within a few miles of each other. It was not always easy to keep an account of all this and yet I managed to write something in my little black notebooks each day. These diaries, spotted with sand, curled by sea-water, besmirched with everything from Japanese rice-wine to chicha beer from the Andes, form the basis of Full Circle, augmented by my tape recordings, postcards and letters home.

If Full Circle succeeds in painting a portrait of life around the Pacific Rim, it is through the eyes of a traveller looking for enlightenment, not an expert dispensing it. Often I learned the hard way. But I learned, and now the countries on the other side of the earth are less of a mystery and more of a revelation. This is a record of a year of wonder.

Michael Palin