Michael Palin tells Herald Travel Editor Stephanie Holmes that despite the challenges of the past few years, he’s not done with the world yet.
He's visited close to a hundred countries and made a career out of travelling, so it's surprising to hear that Monty Python alum Sir Michael Palin enjoyed being stuck in one place during lockdown. The much-loved broadcaster, writer, actor and comedian says he actually found closed borders a refreshing change.
"It was quite nice," he says, over Zoom, from his home in northwest London. "I suddenly realised I had travelled a lot in my life, and I had very little time to think about where I'd been, and to take it in."
The pandemic hit just as he was feeling ready for his next adventure. He'd spent the previous six months recovering from heart surgery and, just as he began talking to his film crew about new projects, lockdown forced him to stay sitting still. It gave him cause to reflect – were his days of travel behind him?
"I was getting older, and you know, there's the family, I've got grandchildren. I didn't want to be away for a long period," Palin says.
"But ... I hate to say it because it sounds a bit glib, but it is an adventure. And life can get pretty dull here, you know? It's very comfortable, but the news is pretty dreadful, and politics is pretty dreadful. So to go to another country is a bit of an escape really. I think that's why I was tempted into going to countries with difficult stories to tell."
Palin's last travel series prior to the pandemic documented his travels in North Korea, a place not many outsiders get to visit … and somewhere not many of us would want to. But Palin loved the experience.
"People say you come away from North Korea, saying, 'Phew! I got out'. I think [my crew and I were] the only people who said, 'Sure, I'd like to go back there'."
So when borders reopened, it wasn't the easy, "revenge travel" destinations Palin was dreaming about – no quick hops across to Spain or the Greek Islands for him. Adventure was calling from much further afield, from a place that first captivated his imagination when he was a child.
“The first book I was ever given was Tales from the Arabian Nights,” he writes in his new book, Michael Palin Into Iraq. “I still have it, inscribed ‘To Michael, with love from his Daddy, 5th May 1950′.”
He writes of the illustration on the "alluring cover", which depicted the Forty Thieves, the "wide blue sea … the domes and minarets of a mosque".
"It was my first experience of the allure of other places."
The Middle East remained "a world I knew least," he writes, until this year when – as travel plans are wont to do in these Covid times – things took an unexpected turn.
Palin and his Into North Korea director Neil Fergusson were planning a trip to Syria but when that country's authorities discovered he had given money to volunteer aid organisation the White Helmets, they were denied permission to film. Instead, they turned their attention to a neighbouring country, Iraq.
"A number of evocative names sprang out at me," he writes in his book, which accompanies a TV series of the same name. "Babylon, Baghdad, Karbala, Ur of the Chaldees and two rivers whose names recurred repeatedly throughout ancient history, the Tigris and the Euphrates."
Talking to Herald Travel, he says, “the fantasy world of Mesopotamia, places like Baghdad, seemed to be the stuff of stories - all the great stories were from Iraq.”
He was also intrigued with the modern-day country's history of conflict and destruction.
"I realised that this was a country that has had a really damaged, destructive history. War for about 30 or 40 years, and I just was interested to see how a country like that keeps going once the war stops. I mean, there are still tensions there. But how do people get through that? How do they revive? How do they start thinking about the future? What are they like?
"So it was the ancient and modern – two strands which made me want to go to this particular part of the world."
To go somewhere that's regarded as one of the most dangerous places on Earth is not an easy decision – and he says his wife of 56 years, Helen Gibbins, was not thrilled about the prospect.
"My wife was normally very keen on me doing long journeys away from her," he jokes, "but she was very worried because you see all the scenes of what's going on in Iraq. But the worst burning flames of violence have now died down somewhat. It's no longer as unsafe."
His successful trip to North Korea gave him confidence that this trip too would be okay.
"You have to trust the people who you take advice from, and don't just go there and turn up at the airport together one day. It's a lot of planning, a lot of thought, and a lot of talking to people who have been to Iraq.
"Almost everybody I know who I respected who has been there, a lot of foreign correspondents said, 'You know it is crazy place. But you must go, because countries like this need people to go there now that the fighting's over'. No one likes to be just known as a country of bad news. You can have some good news as well. You've got to bring people back and connect with a country like that again."
The whole process from planning to travel to releasing the TV series and book has been a relatively fast one – it was only in March this year that Palin and crew began their three-week journey following the course of the Tigris River. Just six months later Into Iraq was released in British book shops and on TV screens (the book is out now in NZ with the series yet to be scheduled).
The book is a day-by-day account of the journey, transcribed from notes Palin kept in a journal and on a voice recorder. It's an easy read that you can polish off in one sitting, but you'll likely come away with a whole new perspective on a country that most of us have seen only through news reports of war and destruction.
"There are very different parts of Iraq – it's not a homogeneous country ... You've got three sides, North – Kurdistan, where you feel really at home if you're a westerner, the hotels are quite smart, and all that. The middle part is hit and miss but we met some wonderful people there. Then the South, which I found pretty impenetrable. I found it difficult to connect with people there, although the marshes where the marsh Arabs live in the south is spectacular, they're happy to talk there."
Palin documents the good days and bad, the frustrations of travelling in a country not set up for tourism, the people he meets and sights he sees.
One of the most difficult experiences was visiting the site of Camp Speicher in Tikrit, where in 2014 Islamic State killed up to 1700 unarmed cadets, picking out the Shias and non-Muslims for execution then throwing their bodies into the river.
"It was very creepy and strange and dark," Palin says. "We were asked by the local Shia militia who control this site to do a piece about this awful massacre, which I'm ashamed to say I knew very little about.
"To walk along the riverside and see the area where these people were actually shot and tossed into the water, it was a horrible thing. I found the militia who had asked us to be there, they kind of ignored us. There were no attempts of explaining it, to say why it was important to them. I found that was all very difficult, and that was one of the darkest points in the journey. We got out of Tikrit pretty quickly because it wasn't a happy place."
There were other challenging moments – seeing children living in bombed-out ruins; learning of gay men being thrown from high windows in the centre of Mosul; meeting articulate, cultured, highly educated young men who were made to adopt fundamentalist dress and customs (not listening to music, no mobile phones, no books) – but he says it didn't make him regret the decision to visit Iraq.
"Far from it. I mean, I knew we were going to see some pretty horrible things, and learn some awful stories, which we did … But that's really why I suppose I was interested – because I knew these things have been going on, and I just again wanted to meet people who'd been through it. How do you survive a thing like that? It's unbelievable to us that you should go through that. This is actually why you travel, I think. You've got to look at the hard things as well."
Palin, 79, whose career began in 1965, describes himself as very lucky to have spent the past few decades travelling the world for his documentaries and books, giving him the opportunity to bring back the stories of the people he meets and places he's been. But he also says travel – particularly the more challenging type of trips – gives us the opportunity to learn something about ourselves.
"[In Iraq] I learned, at the age of 79, how do you deal with a long journey like that? Do you have to take it easy? How many risks can you take? Can you climb up a 200-foot minaret with no restraining rail on it and stand on the top in the middle of nowhere?
"I learned that actually, not only did I have the mental appetite for travelling, I had the physical appetite, and I was able to do it.
"I found that the excitement and the adrenaline buzz were still there, so I was pleased about that. I was also just pleased that it reinforced my idea that, however dreadful and awful places have been, and however ghastly a time people have been through, there is a shared humanity there which to me is very, very important and kind of quite inspiring. Almost everywhere I've been, that's what I've tried to get to understand."
The pandemic's barriers to international travel are now largely behind us but there is of course another huge challenge facing passionate travellers – climate change and the impact of long-haul travel on the environment.
"It's difficult," Palin agrees. "But I think we should travel because I think we need to talk to each other. All the people on Earth - we need to talk to each other, otherwise someone else will talk for us. Someone else will make the headlines and say, 'we've got to be this, we've got to be that. You mustn't go to this country, mustn't go to that country.' I do very much believe that you have to go, see for yourself, think for yourself, make your own mind up.
"That is very often only done face to face, I'm afraid. The idea of just seeing videos of people around the world is one thing, but actually finding out how they live and what they're feeling? You've got to be there."
Michael Palin Into Iraq, published by Penguin Random House, is on sale now, RRP $40
This story originally appeared in New Zealand Herald Travel here.
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