I knew the difference between this journey and all the others we've done
was a lot of high-altitude work,
and I also read in all the guide books the panic signals about AMS -
Acute Mountain Sickness.
There's not an awful lot you can do about it in terms of training,
except to do some work at altitude before you take on a big climb
and be reasonably fit... and probably don't smoke and don't drink.
Our director, John Paul Davidson, directed the section on Annapurna and Everest
and had built in the Annapurna trek as a rehearsal for Everest
and a chance for us to acclimatise to altitude.
The Annapurna trek took us up to about 13,000 feet...
so it wasn't as high as we were going in Everest - 18,000 feet.
So it was quite interesting to see how we all adapted.
Unfortunately, I got this terrible cold, cough and chest infection
as we were going up.
The higher you go the less oxygen there is in the air,
so the more time it takes your body to absorb the oxygen you need.
So it became more and more painful because my lungs were clogged up anyway
and there was less air, so every step became as though you had ball and chains on your feet.
And I...
At one stage... I remember one night we stayed in one of these mountain lodges
and they're very bare, very basic.
They're just cold little stone chambers, there's no hot water, there's no...
There's not much food up there, no heating.
So you just get into your sleeping bag and hope for the best.
I was coughing quite badly then, so I had all these various pills
and mugs of garlic soup that I was given by the Sherpas.
I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night...
and felt so completely miserable and I could barely breathe
that for the first time on any of the journeys,
I felt, "I might not make the end of this.
"I'll have to tell people I'm not able to go on the last bit to Annapurna. That's that."
Then I went to sleep, woke up again and by that time I'd decided I perhaps could do it.
In the morning, the sun rose and you could see it shining on Annapurna.
And the curious thing about working up there
is that the nights are extremely cold and the days are very hot.
As soon as the sun climbs over the peaks, it's very hot indeed.
So I woke up and I was feeling pretty shivery and unpleasant
and then when the sun rose, not only could you see Annapurna
but you just suddenly felt revived and I managed to get up to Annapurna.
So it was a test, really, of my altitude stamina,
but a more serious test than I'd expected.
Later, when we went up to Everest, which is about 18,000 feet...
I was fine and I dealt with it,
but all the way over a certain height, about 10,000 feet, you do feel short of breath.
You aren't going to sleep well. You wake up with your heart thudding. That's inevitable.
Fortunately, I was OK on the Everest trek, but some of our team weren't.
Our sound recordist got quite ill and had to be taken to hospital in Lhasa
and flown back to England.
It's quite a serious business, altitude sickness.
You have to be careful and do it slowly.
If you're making documentaries like this, doing the entire Himalayan range,
there's not much time to dwell anywhere,
so you can't do the amount of training you would normally do.
We were going up Annapurna, and Wongchu, who was the Sherpa who was our guide...
He was an amazing man. He's been up Everest twice.
He got up there so far ahead of his team.
He got there about 5.30 in the morning and they weren't there.
I said, "What did you do?" He said, "I lie down, have sleep. They come later."
Someone goes to the top of Everest and has a kip. That's cool.
Politically, it was a very...
actively unsettled area.
Almost the whole journey from the Khyber Pass right round to Bangladesh,
there were some political problems of various kinds.
Pakistan and going on the North-West Frontier
so soon after the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan and 9/11,
that was considered to be a dangerous place
and the British Foreign Office were advising people not to go to Pakistan at that time.
But we managed to get round that
and the Pakistanis looked after us and we were given guards.
Going into India, we wanted to go up into Kashmir
and Kashmir was an area of great conflict - has been for a long time.
There's been great security problems there.
Even about two weeks before we got there, there were bomb explosions in Srinagar.
Again, we managed - with protection - to get permission to go there,
but we were warned it would be difficult.
In Nepal there was the problem of the Maoist rural resistance
against centralised government in Kathmandu - Maoists against the monarchy.
Again, we were told to tread carefully there.
Going into Tibet and China...
there's not really such a threat of violence there,
but there are a great number of problems because of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
It was now 50 years ago, but the Chinese are not particularly keen...
in fact, they're not at all keen for you to support the Dalai Lama.
Any kind of support or encouragement
for the Tibetans is frowned upon by the Chinese.
So we had to assure the Chinese this is not a political programme.
Which it isn't, particularly - we're looking at people, landscape, everyday life.
We managed to persuade them that we weren't investigative reporters,
so we got into China all right.
And then in Assam in north-east India -
this was somewhere which had not been open to tourists for very long,
and that had been open for about 20 years
because there had been separatist movements there.
Nagaland wanted its own independent state.
And that went right through even to Bangladesh,
which was the last port of call,
where they use what they call the "hartal", which is a strike, really.
The various political parties call these strikes
to get the government to change its policy,
or just even to show that the opposition were there and they weren't happy with things.
When we were there, there were about four hartals in the time we were shooting.
Days when you can't move. The whole country grinds to a halt.
So all the way almost to the Bay of Bengal we had to be aware of political problems.
But the way we get round these usually
is to convince people that the programmes we are making
are going to do their countries good because we're not making judgments about politics
or going into the issues of violence - although you can't escape it sometimes.
But, generally speaking, we are looking at the best side of a country,
encouraging people to travel to those countries
and trying to get stories about how ordinary people live.
One of the most wonderfully bizarre ceremonies we saw
was the border guards at Wagah between India and Pakistan.
They get together and it's a sort of display of...
national chauvinism.
And they have crowds who gather to watch this.
It's basically lowering the flag and closing the gates between each country,
but they make it into this huge event.
These big... They march like I've never seen anyone march, apart from Cleese -
really high kicks - and it's a terrific display of aggression.
And I think probably when it arose there was quite a lot of feeling behind it
and it is very much a show of aggression.
It's like male peacocks ruffling their feathers.
And India and Pakistan just don't get on at all well along that border.
Both sides blame each other for breaches of security.
So there is this terrific show of anger.
Then at the very end when it's all finished,
they all stand and have their photos taken with the kiddies.
The two countries don't mix much, but suddenly you see the PR side of it,
so both sides do very well out of it.
But the crowd is there. It's a bit like a football match.
"Pakistan!" they shout on one side. "India!" on the other.
But it does...
When you look to one side, away from the gates and the ceremony
and the wonderful hats and the strutting animated figures and the silly walks,
you can see stretching off into the distance tank traps, barbed wire...
the real evidence of a serious border problem.
And I think that in the year since we filmed,
quite a lot has changed between India and Pakistan.
They've been talking to each other, talking about Kashmir.
They've opened that border,
so Indians and Pakistanis can cross on buses and trains, which they couldn't do before.
So there are signs of hope that this ceremony will become purely a tourist event
and won't really reflect the animosity which seems to be just...
The animosity seems to be...
sort of reduced
from serious violent status
to just a certain amount of token aggression, and I hope it goes on like that.
It would have been opened in the 1850s - actually slightly later, 1860s...
One of the big things for the British Raj were amateur dramatics.
For a long while the parts were only played by men
and when it came to men playing female roles there was a bit of trouble, apparently.
One officer had this moustache and had to play Portia in "The Merchant of Venice"
and refused to shave his moustache off.
So that must have been an interesting portrayal!
Then in the 1870s they built this lovely theatre.
And it's absolutely beautiful - lovely stucco work around it and velvet seats.
And to be able to go on stage there was a very nice feeling.
I'd have loved to have done the production.
What they asked me to do was to go out in front of the curtain
and announce the play.
The play was called "Chinamen" by Michael Frayn.
So I said, "It's wonderful. You've got a play by Michael Frayn.
"He's got big hits in both Broadway and the West End at the moment, so you're lucky."
The woman who was directing it said, "I'm so glad it's Michael Frayn.
"We were sent the script and it had no front page." So they didn't know who'd written it.
So I said, "It's Michael Frayn." "Michael what?" "Michael Frayn."
Anyway, they asked me to come out as a special guest before the play started
and there was a man who was going to introduce me.
Backstage, he was pacing about, looking rather anxious.
He came up to me and said, "What is your name again?" I said, "Michael Palin."
You'd hear him say, "Palin. Palin. Palin." Occasionally..."Palin."
Anyway, the moment comes when I'm introduced
and he said about the play, "And finally, tonight, our special guest, Mr Michael Plain."
So I went out and did my bit and it was actually a rather nice moment.
It's a small theatre. I'd love to do a show there.
It's a bit off the beaten track, I suppose, but you never know.
The Dalai Lama had agreed to a 40-minute audience with us.
He's a very busy man, so we were rather pleased that he would talk to us.
I'd heard about him, read about him,
friends of mine like John Cleese had met him,
so I thought we'd probably get on quite well.
And about two days before our interview,
we were filming in a temple near to where he lives.
It was early in the morning and they said, "The Dalai Lama is taking prayers in his temple.
"If you get up there quickly, you can do a bit of filming."
So we were taken up and frisked...
There's security there. They're all peace-loving Buddhists
but one or two have guns to protect their man.
Anyway, we were put by the side of the stage
and there was the Dalai Lama in a huge group of people, 200-300 monks.
The ceremony of the prayers was going on - the gongs, the drums.
And around him I should think probably 500 foreigners, all part of this ceremony.
It was quite impressive. Then suddenly he finished.
I got cut off from the camera crew, so I just went down the stairs and waited
and, after a moment or two, the Dalai Lama appeared at the top of the stairs.
I thought, "Where's our camera?"
He was being led down by two people either side of him.
Couldn't see the crew anywhere.
He comes down close and suddenly stops and he gave me a little wave.
So I thought, "He can't know who I am."
So I looked behind, but there was no one else there he was waving at.
So I went across and he shook my hand and I said, "We're talking to you on Friday."
He said, "Yes, yes. I look forward to that."
So that was a coup for me, standing out in the crowd.
And that's the kind of man he was when we did our filming with him.
He had... On the morning of the filming he'd had a public audience,
so 700 people had been filing past him
and he had to shake hands with them and he had a message for everyone,
then he had to speak to some Tibetan exiles
who'd fled from Tibet to come and see him in India,
and then it was us, so you'd think he'd be tired.
He came in without any minders ahead of him -
there were advisors, but no one pushing anyone out of the way.
There was a complete...
lack of intimidation in his presence.
There was a great aura to the man,
but he somehow diffused any of that sort of feeling of...
there's a God-like figure amongst us
and made everyone in the crew feel immediately relaxed.
He went up and said hello to everybody and had a smile and a joke.
That seemed to be the way he operated.
There were lots of things he wanted to talk about,
but he talked about them as an acquaintance, as one person to another,
rather than as a leader of a major world religion to their 400th visitor of the day.
I was really very impressed.
In the end, our 40-minute audience turned into an hour.
He was led out because he was speaking to somebody else in 20 minutes.
But... a great man and an easy man to talk to.
People often say, "What sort of person would you take on a journey with you
"in addition to your crew?"
And I say, "It's very hard. You have to have a real combination of elements there."
The Dalai Lama would be fine. He'd be terrific.
He seems quite fit. He's 68. He can still travel.
Speaks the language. Great sense of humour.
Everyone would bow as we went along, so easy to get cut-rate accommodation!
But he just felt like someone you could talk to about anything.
Later in the journey, in Assam...
I got much closer to elephants than on any other of the journeys I've done.
I've seen them in Africa, but they're wild elephants
and can be dangerous and you're advised to stay well away.
But in Assam we found these domesticated elephants, which they used for logging,
so they'd taught them certain commands.
Not only did I have a chance at riding an elephant,
which is quite something -
just the power of this thing slowly moving through the undergrowth -
but they have very broad backs,
so when you get off, your legs have been stretched so far apart, you can barely walk.
That was quite exciting.
One of the great moments was in the national park in Kaziranga, in Assam,
on the edge of the Brahmaputra River.
I was given the chance to wash an elephant.
They had these elephants down by a water-hole and they were washing them.
I mean, they're huge. They must be 12, 14 feet high. So almost double my height.
This huge thing with great tusks. I thought, "Where do I start?"
First of all they gave it a command
and this huge thing just quietly lays down on its back in the water.
Then they said, "Just splash water over it." So I did that.
They said, "Rub the hide. They love that." And it did. There was a gurgling as I rubbed it.
"Mmm." It's rather like massaging some old colonel in the bath.
I was keeping away from the tusks, which were actually in very fine condition,
and they said, "No, no. You rub his tusks, especially where the tusk meets the jaw.
"There's a little overlap. They love being tickled there."
So I go like that.
It is a big thing and I can see it might take it the wrong way if I'm being over-familiar,
but then I rubbed the top of the tusk and there was this wonderful...
(ECSTATIC GROANING)
And this great eye just went up like that, looked at me.
It was really nice making an elephant happy,
which is something I feel glad I've been able to do.
I might put that on my gravestone -
"He made an elephant happy... in little ways."
It's a very superstitious part of the world, the mountains.
A lot of the mountains are not climbed
because they're sacred mountains and you're not allowed to climb them.
So we saw some fantastic peaks, like Machhapuchhare and Chomolhari in Bhutan,
just made for climbing, but they've not been climbed.
I don't know why Everest is allowed to be climbed.
Basically, they think the peaks of the mountains are the abodes of the fairies
where people go when they die and so you don't touch them.
Indeed, in Annapurna near the mountains we were not allowed to eat meat -
they're not allowed to kill any animals or bring any animals that have been killed
within the area of this mountain.
You're not allowed to have sex either -
as if it were likely halfway up a mountain, but they don't like that, the gods.
The other thing around there is the yeti,
which is halfway between reality and superstition.
So I asked Wongchu, our Sherpa guide, about the yeti
and he said he'd seen many yetis.
He absolutely believed the yetis existed...
or they used to exist.
He then said most of them had been killed a long time ago, so there's only one left.
So I said, "What do they like?" He said, "They like tea."
They love to drink tea. He was winding me up a bit.
So I wasn't quite sure what was going on. We didn't actually see any yetis.
I think it's a bit like the Loch Ness monster.
It's a wonderful story
and keeps people going there just to see something that is never going to be found.
The more I asked Wongchu... "What's it like?" He said, "It looks like..."
I said, "How big is it?" He said, "About your height. Our height."
I said, "What does it look like?" "Quite like you."
So what Wongchu had seen was some bloke in the snow trying to find the yeti.
I think there's a kind of self-creating yeti story going on there.
People keep seeing each other looking for the yeti.
What you'd seen was David Attenborough earlier that year.
So I remain open to suggestions on that.
If anyone does see a yeti - anyone who looks at this DVD and has seen a yeti
or knows how to get in touch with a yeti, please let me know on a postcard.
I think it's lapsang souchong tea it prefers.
It was quite a sad moment, actually, turning our back on the central Himalayas,
the high mountains, for the last time.
Although I don't particularly want to climb up the mountains, they have a presence.
You can understand why people regard them as sacred places
where you go when you die or whatever... and you have a God-like presence.
You sort of sense that.
The last morning I went away from the camp on my own for a bit
just to look at this massive mountain...
Snow down its flanks and the glaciers.
Then off we go on our walk down to the capital of Bhutan
and within half an hour the mountain's disappeared and you're into jungle,
and then the flat lands down below.
You can scarcely believe that the mountains disappear so quickly.
That's what I remember the most almost about our little Bhutan trip -
the last chance to see the big mountains.
And Bangladesh... The remarkable thing about Bangladesh after Bhutan
was that this is a country...
It's bigger than Bhutan, not hugely bigger, but it has 70 times the number of people.
I think the population is something like 130 million.
It's the most densely packed country in the world.
So to come from these remote mountain eyries,
where there were the odd yak and a few people working the fields,
and come to a country crawling with people...
was quite exciting and made for a good end to the journey,
especially in a city like Dhaka.
But you realise that the reason Bangladesh is there is purely because of the mountains.
These great rivers that have their source in the Himalayas
come down through Bangladesh.
One is the Brahmaputra River, which is a river that rises in Tibet
and turns round the corner.
The other is the Ganges, which rises in the mountains.
So these big Himalayan rivers bring all this soil, this effluvia,
that dumps itself on the delta, and Bangladesh is effectively a delta.
That's why the country is so rich.
In years when they don't have these crippling floods,
they can get two or three good harvests a year.
It was a wonderful sort of... not exactly relaxing ending,
but it was a reflective ending to the journey.
You were away from the high mountains, we're in a boat going down the delta,
off into the Bay of Bengal.
I remember thinking that I'm riding on the Himalayas, in an odd way, as I go out.
This river had poured off the mountains.
So it was a nice... I was united with the Himalayas at the very end there.
There's an interesting story to our end sequence.
We'd hoped to meet a boat - a forestry boat - that would take me out towards the sunset.
We got there and this official boat wasn't around.
So what could we do?
We found a fishing boat chugging into the harbour -
not the harbour, this jetty, in the middle of nowhere.
So we commandeered this fishing boat.
Within half an hour we had to put together a sequence with me sitting on the boat,
the camera on our own little boat, ropes being attached to either boat,
close-up on me, lose the ropes, off I go into the sunset.
It was quite a credit to these fishermen
that they get roped into doing a special effects shot for a documentary
with half an hour's practice, and we got it right.
So I felt that's a little triumph to end the journey.