PhilPaine.com

I want to kill Michael Palin — pure­ly out of envy. He gets to trav­el every­where, see the coolest things, and talk to fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple, and makes a for­tune doing it. Palin was recent­ly ranked num­ber nine in the list of the world’s top ten trav­el­ers of all time by Wan­der­lust Mag­a­zine. It’s been claimed that trav­el agen­cies antic­i­pate sharp spikes in book­ings for any des­ti­na­tion that he vis­its, after an episode of one of his doc­u­men­taries. Himalaya is his best doc­u­men­tary series to date. This one takes him to the North­west Fron­tier states of Pak­istan, to Amrit­sar in the Pun­jab, to Sim­la, to Kash­mir and Ladakh, through Nepal into Tibet, and from thence east­ward to Yun­nan in Chi­na, back through Naga­land and Assam, into Bhutan, and final­ly to the shores of the Bay of Ben­gal. In this spec­tac­u­lar jour­ney, he meets and talks to a vari­ety of peo­ple: an enter­pris­ing den­tist in Peshawar; the Dalai Lama; Namu, a pop singer from the matrilo­cal Mosuo peo­ple of Yun­nan; a South­ern Bap­tist head­hunter in Naga­land; danc­ing monks in Assam. Pal­in’s easy­go­ing affa­bil­i­ty gives every­one he talks to dig­ni­ty, which I think is the secret of his suc­cess. You always get more than just scenery and plat­i­tudes. The series tip­toes around pol­i­tics, but its focus on indi­vid­ual lives and per­son­al­i­ties makes it an impres­sive doc­u­ment. For exam­ple, his vis­it to the Sikh Gold­en Tem­ple does­n’t focus on the splen­dour of the build­ing, but on the vol­un­teers prepar­ing the cus­tom­ary meal, giv­en to any­one who comes to it.