Emerging from the lift in his plush Hong Kong hotel, film star, professional traveller, author, former member of the Monty Python team and all-round nice guy Michael Palin beams a characteristically benevolent smile at the jet-lagged tourists thronging the lobby.
Midway through an around-the-world sprint to promote Fierce Creatures, the newly finished 'equal not a sequel' to the hit film A Fish Called Wanda, Palin visited the territory last week to see an old friend and collaborator, the noted local photographer Basil Pao.
Pao first joined the Briton on the epic televised Pole to Pole journey from Norway to Antarctica. Now Palin is helping him sort out the photographs from their latest trek - around the Pacific Rim for a BBC series called Full Circle. Pao's pictures will fill two books to accompany the series, due to be aired in Britain in autumn.
'I'd travelled with Basil before, just as friends,' said the 53-year-old Palin. 'He enjoys travel, and life generally. He's a bloody good photographer, he's very serious about getting his work done and his shots taken.' Palin was obviously glad to have a mate along for the ride. 'He's a really excellent companion from the point of view of the relaxing side of it,' he said. 'The dinners at the end of the day, and all that.
'And of course because we were travelling round the Pacific Rim this time - it's an area that Basil knows extremely well - he was invaluable in Japan, China and Vietnam, but he also knows Australia and the United States.' Palin explained that there were some problems: 'It isn't easy for a stills photographer on a shoot like this. Once the television cameras are turning and the sound's on, they don't really want people clicking their stills cameras. Basil has a good Zen-ish approach to that sort of thing - doesn't let it get on top of him too much. Apart from that, he's a bastard.' Last year's Full Circle journey took more than nine months: from the frozen Bering Straits between Russia and the US, down through East Asia to Australia, and up the coastlines of South and North America back to Alaska.
'I felt the one thing that was missing on Pole to Pole was a real richness of culture,' Palin said. 'And a lot of it was very similar - dry, arid savannah through Africa, and at the north and south poles biting cold, white and shapeless.
