Himalaya

I'm not much of a traveller. I did a couple of obligatory backpacking trips through Europe and the UK, and I spent a few days in New York, but most of the continents of the world remain untrodden by my feet and seem likely to stay that way. However, I do enjoy a vicarious journey on TV or through books, and Michael Palin is a reliably engaging companion who can suffer all the discomforts and uncertainties of travel on my behalf while I stay cosily on the couch. After tracking him around the world and from pole to pole, this time he tackles Himalaya.

To me, the Himalaya region always evokes the books of Rumer Godden, who has written so magically about her year of living in Kashmir in a simple mountain house with her two young daughters after her marriage fell apart in the early 1940s. Even though her family's time there ended in a nightmarish fashion when one of her servants tried to poison them, her deep delight in the beauties of the landscape, house and people glows through her prose. Sixty years later, Michael Palin journeyed through what was in some ways an utterly altered world, but in some ways still very much the same.

Palin and his team travelled through more than half a dozen countries as they made their way through the mountains, but despite differences in politics, forms of government, and degrees of military presence, the solid fact of the mountains themselves is always present: the sublime beauty, the hardship, and the tough, hospitable people. I don't think I'd be up to a hundred and twenty five days of butter tea and oxygen deprivation, not matter how gorgeous the landscape; lucky for me Palin was willing to do it for me.