Himalaya with Michael Palin - 2004

Himalaya with Michael Palin 1 of 6 North by... by easytelevision

North by Northwest

Part 1 of the 6 episodes series. Features Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Gilgit, Chitral and K2. Starts from Khyber Pass, riding the Khyber Pass Railway, visiting Darra Adam Khel, touring their cottage firearms workshops meeting in the "Dental Alley", playing cricket in a comic style, meeting one of the last land barons. Riding to Chitral, meeting a madrasah owner, watching polo from its birthplace, a polo game, meets up some Kalash people, watching a polo game and ascending to Concordia, a place near K2.

Himalaya with Michael Palin is a 2004 BBC television series presented by comedian and travel presenter Michael Palin. It records his six-month trip around the Himalaya mountain range area. The trip covered only 4,800 km (3,000 miles) horizontally, but involved a lot of vertical travelling, including several treks into the mountains. The highest point attained by Michael Palin was Everest Base Camp at 5,300 metres (17,500 feet).

A book by the same name written by Palin was published to accompany the series. This book contained both Palin's text and many pictures by Basil Pao, the stills photographer on the team. Basil Pao also produced a separate book of the photographs he took during the journey, Inside Himalaya, a large coffee-table style book printed on glossy paper.

WELCOME TO HIMALAYA

Himalaya might well have been Silk Road, which was a proposal from Roger Mills, our series producer. But when I opened out the atlas, the largely desert character of much of the Silk Road made me think it might look too similar to the Sahara. Then my eye caught the word Himalaya and I was immediately excited by the prospect. I had never been to any of the area before. The character of the series would be as high and mighty as Sahara was flat and mysterious. And no-one could accuse us of 'going soft' as we got older. We were under great pressure from the BBC to have a series ready for transmission no more than two years after Sahara, and as Himalaya also entailed the preparation of two books to go with the series, the pressure was very tight from the beginning. After two or three months of preliminary recces, we began filming on the Pakistan/Afghan border in mid-May 2003. Filming continued on and off, for a total of six months until our last shoot in Bhutan in April 2004. All the book text (over 100,000 words), photographs and layouts were ready for the printers by early June. The commentaries for the series were written and recorded through the summer and the first episode aired on BBC-1 on October 3rd 2004. Himalaya means "Abode Of Snow" and I think we all underestimated the physical demands of working at altitude. We'd climbed mountains in previous series, but never spent such sustained periods at extreme height. In Tibet we spent over a month working at, or well above, 4000 metres (over 13000 feet). Himalaya was not just about high mountains but high anxiety as well as we visited some of the political flashpoints of southern and central Asia. The Pakistani border, the disputed region of Kashmir, Tibet and Nagaland were all tense at times, but, ironically, the nearest we came to a dangerous confrontation was in tourist-friendly Nepal, where Maoist insurgents abducted our Ghurkha officers during filming. The spectacular beauty of the highest mountain range on earth and the profusion of different religions and small tribal communities fighting for their survival amongst these mountains combined to make this one of the most physical demanding and spiritually satisfying of all the journeys. I hope that by choosing to travel the entire 2,000 mile length of the range, we showed that there is much more to these mountains than Everest and Annapurna. For the first time, the vast spread and enormous influence of the Himalaya, winding its way through six countries, has been examined as a whole. If you look at a map the Himalaya range resembles a raised eyebrow above India. I hope this adventure will have raised a few eyebrows and opened a few eyes to these epic and magnificent lands. If at times it was hell, the hell was always beautiful ! Michael Palin, London. October 2004.

The series is divided up into six one-hour episodes

#	Title	Countries Visited	Plot
1	North by Northwest	Pakistan	Features Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Gilgit, Chitral and K2. Starts from Khyber Pass, riding the Khyber Pass Railway, visiting Darra Adam Khel, touring their cottage firearms workshops meeting in the "Dental Alley", playing cricket in a comic style, meeting one of the last land barons. Riding to Chitral, meeting a madrasah owner, watching polo from its birthplace, a polo game, meets up some Kalash people, watching a polo game and ascending to Concordia, a place near K2.
2	A Passage to India	Pakistan and India	Features Lahore, Amritsar, Shimla, Dharamsala and Srinagar, with a special meeting with the Dalai Lama. Starts from Lahore, watching the closing of the border ceremony, visiting a Sikh town Amritsar, entering the Golden Temple, partaking in a communal meal, staying overnight in a hotel near the temple. Riding a train, visiting Shimla, watching an Indian Army drama, ascending in Srinagar, visiting seemingly declining floating inns, a reminder of the effects of a continuing warfare. Going Dharamsala, meeting with some Tibetan exiles, watching a musical, getting his life cycle, meeting the Dalai Lama and heading the stupas of Ladakh.
3	Annapurna to Everest	Nepal and China (Tibet Autonomous Region)	Features Kathmandu, Pokhara, Annapurna Mountain and the Everest base camp (northern, Chinese side). Includes Palin's meeting with King Gyanendra of Nepal and a scare involving the Maoist rebels. From following a Gurkha recruiting drive,instructors getting kidnapped by Maoists,getting acclimatization in some stopovers and arriving Annapurna Sanctuary. Descending to Kathmandu, he met King Gyanendra, his close circle, gambling, meeting with Sadhus and watching a death ceremony, along with strolling with a journalist while looking scenes from Kama Sutra. Leaving Nepal, bidding farewell on the guides on the border, travelling to Mount Everest, staying the night with Buddhist nuns and monks, travelling with Yaks and some Tibetans to Mount Everest and reaching the base camp.
4	The Roof of the World	China (Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province)	Features Lhasa and Yushu. From travelling vast Tibetan plateau, stopping in Shigatse,going to Tashilhunpo monastery, a brief story of the area under British invasion, Gyantse, visiting Lhasa,Potala Palace,visiting a modern Chinese nightclub in Lhasa, a brief history of Chinese invasion of Tibet, helping a reconstruction of the temple,swimming in a hot springs resort and travelling to Namtso Lake. Experiencing a Yak herder firsthand, churning butter tea. Going toYushu, experiencing a week-long festival, metting some Tibetans and buying caterpillar fungus, interview with an English speaking Tibetans and traversing the Yangtze river.
5	Leaping Tigers, Naked Nagas	China (Yunnan Province) and India (Nagaland State and Assam State)	Features Kunming, Lijiang, Lugu Lake, the Nagavillage of Longwa on the Indian-Burmese border and Kaziranga National Park. Includes a trek along Tiger Leaping Gorge. From a trek alongTiger Leaping Gorge, visiting Lugu Lake, meeting Yang Erche Namu and meeting someMosuo, meeting a Chinese traditional medicine man and going to Lijiang,heading to Naga village in Longwa, Nagaland, meeting some former headhunters and cross-border antics,heading to Assam, meeting with miners and riding trains, inKaziranga National Park, meets up and experienced a Hindu dance musical, meeting up a former Marxist idealist, taking part in elephant games.
6	Bhutan to the Bay of Bengal	Bhutan and Bangladesh	Features Thimphu, Sylhet, Dhaka and Chittagong. Ends on the Bay of Bengal. This episode was one of the few instances where the media gave attention to the Grameen Bank and Muhammed Yunus's efforts, in the micro-economic scale in Bangladesh before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. From Bhutan, hikes the country's National Parks,meeting some nobility and interviewing them,going to a royal bird sanctuary. In Bangladesh,he meet some stone quarry workers,meeting Muhammad Yunus (economist), taking a boat ride to the Dhaka's river delta and ends up having a cruise along the river to the Bay of Bengal. Palin also visits the famous Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard, the largest seagoing vessel dismantling station in the world.