Michael Palin and the Holy Globe

Comedy fans may have immortalized Michael Palin for his work as an actor and screenwriter, but his post-”Monty Python” career as a writer and travel documentarian has taken him around the globe—to both poles, the Sahara Desert, the Himalayas, and Brazil. It’s been 25 years since the BBC first asked Palin to hop on a boat as host of “Around the World in 80 Days,” and he’s had the Hong Kong photographer Basil Pao as his travel companion ever since. Palin was in town last week to unveil “Around the World in 8,000 Days”—a stunning exhibition at the Maritime Museum that displays Pao’s finest snaps from a quarter-century on the road. We sat down with Palin to chat about why he’s still traveling, and why the Palin-Pao connection is so strong.

An afternoon jog over the Patriot Hills, Antarctica. This was one of the final stops on
Palin and Pao’s six-month trek from one pole to another, which took them through Iceland,
Scandinavia, the Middle East, East and South Africa, and Patagonia. (Pole to Pole, 1991)

Palin and his television crew traverse the caiman-infested waters of the Rio Negra
in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands. The photo was snapped in late 2011 on the pair’s latest journey;
the four-part BBC series “Brazil with Michael Palin” aired last fall in the UK. (Brazil, 2012)

HK Magazine: Few people establish such a successful second career as you did with your travel documentaries. How did you go from comedy legend to globetrotter?
Michael Palin: The documentaries happened kind of serendipitously. The films I made in the early 80s—“A Fish Called Wanda” with John Cleese, and “Brazil” and all that—all required publicity. It was getting fairly predictable, with Python being successful and the films being successful: you see the same faces and the same places and the same theaters and the same studios, so you’re not really seeing the world. Someone just rang up from the BBC by chance and said, “We’ve got this series called ‘Around the World in 80 Days’—would you come and be the presenter? We’ll follow you around the world.” Going around the world and someone else pays? It sounded great.

HK: How did your relationship with Basil Pao start?
MP: In 1978, Basil was a designer in Los Angeles, and one of the Python team—Eric Idle—asked if he would design the Monty Python [“Life of Brian”] book. I was a contributor to the book, corresponded with Basil, and met him that year when he came to London. Ten years later when we were doing “Around the World in 80 Days,” we came to Hong Kong, and the director said, “is there anyone in Hong Kong you know who could come in and create a story around all of this?” Basil was living in Cheung Chau, and his daughter was born the day we left London on that trip—so by the time we got to Hong Kong she was exactly 40 days old. Now she’s 25 years old, and I’m still with Basil.

HK: How has that relationship evolved? Have the miles turned you into close friends?
MP: Yeah. We always got on pretty well, and because he turned out to be such a great travel companion, I just kept asking him back. For a start, both of us are curious about the world. We both like getting away from home and seeing what’s happening off the beaten track. We like drinking, like eating, and we’re generally celebrators of life—or used to be, in my younger days. I get a real pleasure out of travelling with Baz, and I really admire the stuff he does. He makes me laugh, and vice versa. We end up in some wonderful place, like overlooking the huge meteoric Ngorongoro Crater in Africa, and we just nudge each other and go, “We are lucky, chavvy bastards.” We need that. We both celebrate what we do, and we never take it too seriously. It’s been a very strong friendship.

In 1998, Palin and Pao travelled to sites that had been favorites of Ernest Hemingway,
including Spain, Chicago, Paris, Italy, Cuba, Idaho and the land around Mount Kilimanjaro,
where the author used to hunt on safari. In this shot, a man fishes in the waters off
Cojimar—a small village east of Havana and the spiritual home of
“Old Man and The Sea.” (Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure, 1998)