Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime (2020) s01e05 Episode Script

I think the Himalaya is the sexiest
mountain range.
The ultimate Boy's Own adventure.
When I was ten years old,
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
made the first ascent of Everest.
I never imagined that, one day,
I'd follow them into the Himalaya.
But five decades later, I did.
Look at that!
Ha-ha-ha!
Wow!
It's the Himalayas
I mean, the Himalayas.
He's going for one of the most
extraordinary places on the planet.
He has huge warmth and it's a warmth
that spreads across all kinds of
people.
Bottoms up!
Down the hatch!
Now I'm looking back on that epic
journey
and opening up my diaries to revisit
my trip to the roof of the world.
Your face - very familiar to me.
Because of BBC.
Oh!
Oh, wonderful.
I had that boyhood
..feeling of, um, of adventure.
This is a summit of Annapurna.
And, really, I mean,
it's just breathtaking.
I wasn't a boy any more.
I'm 60 years old
..and more
when we set off for the Himalaya.
It was like fulfilment of a dream
that I thought
would never, ever come true.
I've spent decades travelling
the world, and if I'm ever tempted
to think I've seen it all,
this amazing planet has always
proved me wrong.
But nothing on my journeys
really prepared me for the Himalaya.
What mattered really was somewhere
striking, somewhere that had sort
of an identity, a feeling.
A sort of impact.
You just saw and heard the word
"Himalaya".
It was sort of an epic word.
The Himalayan range contains
many of the highest mountains
on Earth, and it's home
to over 50 million people.
Quite a new mountain range.
And they're actually apparently
going higher by about an inch
a year or something
like that, because the tectonic
plate's pushing from the south.
The top of Everest is actually
a little segment of limestone,
which means it was once
on the seabed,
which is a great thought.
Our route would take us
3,000 miles across the Himalaya,
up into the high mountains,
then down again
to the sea.
From Pakistan,
we would travel through northern
India, towards Nepal, Tibet
and Mount Everest itself.
From there we'd
explore the great Tibetan plain
and the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan,
before descending to Bangladesh
and the Bay of Bengal.
The fact that we were starting
on the northwest frontier
and almost the first day of filming
would be on the Khyber Pass,
I mean that did, you know, that?
Wow, that, that's a jolt
of excitement.
I'm at the top of the Khyber Pass
on the border between Pakistan
and out there, Afghanistan.
Through here have come some
of the great armies of the world -
Alexander the Great brought an army
through here,
Darius the Persian,
Tamburlaine the Great.
And in 1842, the lone survivor
of the British army's attempt
to pacify Afghanistan, came
staggering up this road to announce
the annihilation
of 17,000 of his comrades.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
The Foreign Office had advised us
against travelling to Pakistan.
We were filming in 2004, only three
years after 9/11, and attacks
by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda
had become frequent in the places
we would visit.
But taking the right precautions,
we decided it was worth the risk.
Pakistan had a real edge to it,
which excited me, because I love
going to places like that.
People say,
"You perhaps shouldn't go."
Or "It's dangerous," and all that.
Well, people live there.
People havebring up children
there.
So you've got to sort of get
that level as well.
Do you think there's any danger
in people coming here?
No. Not No.
Not even before. Pakistani people
are very much hospitable people.
And they take care,
special to theirguest.
I mean, much more than theirself.
The people were indeed mostly
welcoming,
but here on the northwest frontier,
the law of the gun often prevailed,
giving a boost to one
particular local industry.
RAPID GUNFIRE
You can hear Dara from miles away.
It sounds as if there's a pitched
battle going on.
MULTIPLE SINGLE GUNSHOTS
But it's just business as usual
in the town that lives on guns.
They have guns
because that's what you do
in the northwest frontier.
Because it's a lawless place
and the army and the police
really don't go there much.
And yes, there were dangers,
but as soon as you get there,
you realise it's not as obvious
as that.
Zahoor explains that on
the northwest frontier, people carry
guns the way the English carry
umbrellas, which might account
for the bizarre gentility
of the place -
picturesque and perilous,
laid back and lethal.
CONTINUOUS GUNSHOTS
Oh. OK.
The arms industry in Darra may be
in the hands of small shopkeepers,
but they can produce an exact copy
of any of the
world's major shooters.
This is the mini version
of the Kalashnikov,
the Russian-made gun.
Kalashnikov, right.
Yeah. The AK-47 everyone knows
about.
Yeah, and who are these guns
bought by largely?
See, we are in tribal territory.
And there are
hundreds and thousands
of people living in
the tribal free territory.
Yeah. Here, they do not need to have
a licence to have a gun.
The young one, the old one,
from time to time, they exchange
guns
like people exchange cars.
It wasn't a sort of aggressive
feeling.
It sounds ridiculous, but it wasn't,
"We've got these guns and
we're going to kill people."
It's just, "We make guns.
"We've made guns since the British
army made the Lee-Enfield rifles,"
back after the the days
of the Indian Mutiny.
And they're just very good
at making guns.
So you go to a shop and people
will sort of show you a gun,
like they'll sell you something like
you're trying on a suit, you know?
"That suits you, sir."
Do you have, like,
sort of James Bond?
You know James Bond?
James Bond, ha. You do? Oh, yes!
He's got I mean, he's always
very well armed, isn't he?
Now, this is the pen.
You can sign I don't believe it.
And you didn't even use your
cheques.
I was joking.
He really has got one of these.
Now, can you see? Yeah.
This is the top.
You take off this top, then you put
the bullet here.
Yeah. .22 calibre bullet. Yeah.
And there you are signing,
"Sincerely yours, James Bond."
Yes, exactly. You get a "boom!"
Aha! Look at that!
The great thing
about travel is to question
your preconceptions.
Just because you have guns
doesn't mean
you want to destroy the world.
Cricket is Pakistan's national
obsession, played at any spare
moment on any spare patch of ground.
I enjoy going, very much.
Right from the beginning,
they were extremely friendly.
And they were terribly good natured,
the people there, and very funny.
Michael was a huge inspiration
on me.
I just knew that one day, you know,
I wanted to travel and go and see
some of the places that I'd seen
on my screen.
Visiting places that are alien
in culture is a wonderful way
for people to generate empathy,
not rely just on the narrative
that we're often fed in the news,
which is always doom and gloom.
How was that?
Yes.
Wow!
As always, on my journeys, I kept
a diary to record my immediate
reactions to the places I visited.
But in Pakistan, my pen
sometimes struggled to cope
with the sheer sensory overload.
This is Peshawar.
"On our way back to the
hotel, we go through the old city.
"If you can turn a blind eye
to the decrepitude of the buildings,
"some only held up by the two
on either side of them, the insanity
"of the wiring system running,
unravelling string across the front
"of the buildings, making them look
like badly wrapped parcels,
"then you can only boggle
at the profusion
"of people, products, activities.
"Everything is here from fans
to fridges, to cooking pots the size
"of small ponds, and it's all
up front and on display."
It's really difficult to get
the kind of feel of a place
like that, which is an extraordinary
frontier town.
It's just so many wonderfully
strange
and bizarre things happening there.
Everything in this town seemed
totally over the top and, for me,
rather beautifully baffling.
Luckily, my guide Zahoor was
there to keep me right.
Here's your bus.
How do you know?
Because it says 6-8-0-8.
Chitral bus?
No, this is the Chitral bus.
Yeah, OK. So I get on this one?
Oh, yes, please. Get up on the bus.
Good luck. Thank you very much
indeed. Hope to see you.
Inshallah and good luck.
Thank you for helping me to
understand Peshawar a little better.
Yes, OK. All right. Whoa!
Whoa!
That's mine here. OK? Thank
you.
This bus does go to Chitral,
doesn't it?
It doesn't, as it happens,
and for one very good reason.
The road to Chitral has to climb
a 10,000 foot pass
and down 43 hairpin bends on the
other side.
Forget about buses,
it's frightening enough
in a four-wheel drive.
We all know mountains,
whether it's the Lake District
or the Alps, but when you go
to the Himalayas,
you really are stumbling
into something quite different.
It's awe-inspiring.
It's actually terrifying.
The roads, really holed and damaged,
and also very dangerous.
And look at that -
right by the edge there.
This was hairy, I wasn't at all
comfortable.
There's one road,
it's subject to rock fall,
so when you're on a narrow ledge,
which is not even a highway,
rocks wouldn't just block it -
they'd probably knock
you off into the gorge below.
You just have to take your, you
know, fate into your hands,
and just say,
well, "Good luck to the driver."
Look at this.
A vehicle heading your way has to
push into the side.
Talk about holding your breath.
Our route now took us on a
loop through the Chitral Valley.
Birthplace of polo.
CROWDS CHEER
Then we headed south again
..and made for the country's
neighbour and great rival, India,
through the border checkpoint
at Wagah, where the simmering
tensions between these two
nuclear powers are channelled
into theatrical confrontation.
It's seen as a place
of sort of joyful rivalry,
it's pure theatre,
and the armies on both sides
try to outdo each other in marching
in a threatening manner,
which is really terrific to see.
I mean, it's partly so like
Silly Walks, but it's actually also
extremely physically powerful.
And they're playing to the crowds
and the crowds really seem
to like it, and they're
all cheering their own side,
cheering their own guards.
No messing about there.
This is not camp.
This is naked anger and aggression
bottled up and delivered.
CROWD CHEERS
HORNS PLAY
I was utterly fascinated
by that border crossing,
that ceremony of the flag-lowering,
with the crowds cheering.
It just gives you a window and
an insight into a world that some
of us would never see.
I find borders incredibly
fascinating,
how you can just draw a line
..in the sand, or draw a line
through a, through some rugged
landscape and say, "This is one
country, that's another country,
"and once you cross that line,
we're completely different.
"We speak a different language.
"We eat slightly different food.
"We act differently."
But we're all humans.
It's nuts!
Ah, great.
I hop into a local minibus,
which takes me the ten miles or so
to the first Indian city.
Neither Muslim nor Hindu,
Amritsar is a Sikh town.
I know a bit about Sikhs - the
turbans, and the hair that should
never be cut, and I know their
reputation as fierce warriors
and shrewd businessmen.
But to learn more, I make
for Amritsar's most holy site,
the Golden Temple.
Though they seem quite a relaxed
and worldly people, the Sikhs do
demand a strict dress code
for the temple.
I know Sikhs,
and knew Sikhs in this country,
but I didn't know
a great deal about their religion.
When you go to Amritsar,
you are aware of what Sikhism
really means.
There are an estimated 20 million
Sikhs in India,
2% of the population.
They believe in one God
for all, rich or poor.
With no human hierarchies
or priesthood, idols or icons
coming in between.
It sounds commendably modest, but
when I first see the gold sheathed,
Sri Haramandir,
the holy of holies,
modest is not the first word
that comes to mind.
Any traveller who comes to the
Golden Temple can come in and stay
the night and be fed and given
accommodation, completely free.
That is, that is, you know,
what one should do for one's
fellow human being.
In the kitchens, volunteers take
turns to prepare a simple free meal
for anyone who wants it.
Chapatti, dhal, pickle and water,
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
This is the chapatti
production line.
These are the dhal vats.
Every day in sweatshop conditions,
thousands of kilos of lentil curry,
are stirred in Titanic cauldrons.
So, this is I mean, essentially
they give, this, a basic meal
to whoever turns up?
Yes. Within reason.
But I mean, it's a huge place.
This must be a very big operation?
Yes.
How many meals do they provide a
day?
Well, basically, this cuisine,
this kitchen
is open 24 hours to everybody.
Right. And every day,
40,000 to 50,000 people,
they come here and have food.
It was a really lovely window
into seeing something
that is probably mysterious
for many people.
We need more of this, because
it's that whole lack of knowledge
that I think creates the conflicts
and animosity in our society.
Because we don't know about other
religions.
We just make these assumptions.
What sort of people are they?
I mean, are they poor people
who can't get food anywhere else
or people like us who are making
television documentaries?
Well, this is a basic thing
of every Sikh temple.
I mean, essential for every Sikh
temple.
Everybody has to come first
in the kitchen.
So, here, everybody
learns the lesson of equality.
Yes. This is the essence
of the kitchen.
Yes, that's great.
Going to the Golden Temple
was an extraordinary experience.
You know, what it meant to the Sikhs
themselves to share all the work
needed to sort of help their fellow
human being.
That's something which I never
understood
about the Sikh religion before.
And that's probably because
in this country, we don't talk
a lot about religion.
We tend to leave you to it.
But there when you're travelling
in in India, in the Himalaya region,
you can't just leave the world
to it.
Religion impinges all the time.
There's lots of levellers. And
I think that's the great thing
about the faiths that I encountered
in the Himalayas, is that
it's something that, doesn't matter
what your station in life,
how much money you've got,
people are always encouraged
to be at that same level
when it comes to faith.
And Michael's journeys, you know,
really encapsulate that.
Leaving Amritsar, it was time
to continue our ascent
into the hills
..on a railway
steeped in imperial history.
The line to Shimla,
formerly Simla,
summer capital of the British Raj.
India have been very much
part of childhood stories.
It was part of, sort of,
British folklore.
Of so many people, including my own
father,
who went to work in India some
time in their lives.
My father helped build one
of the dams in what is now Pakistan.
The British had engaged
with India for a very long time.
I really wish that I'd asked
my father much
more about the world.
And what it was like living in
India in the '20s.
He never really talked
about any of that.
There are one or two letters
from him, there are photographs
where he seems terribly happy.
And the lads were having a great
time out there, but they all knew
that it would come to an end.
And during the late 19th and early
20th century,
the days of British Empire
in India,
there was definitely
a sort of paternalist feeling
that we were there
to show the Indians how best
to run their country,
which was appalling, really.
And my attitude to travelling is to
be completely the opposite.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
There's no dining car,
but there is home cooking,
courtesy of a
generous fellow passenger.
Oh, thank you very much.
Wow, that'slovely.
What is this?
This is poori. Poori. Poori.
Poori and?
Made out of wheat flour.
Wheat flour? Yes.
These are potatoes.
Oh, lovely! With Indian spices.
With Indian spices.
Lovely.
This is your picnic for the family?
Yes. This is my holiday time with
my family. Oh, lovely.
And why did you, why did
you choose to go to Shimla?
Because it is nearby.
Where are you from?
I'm from Delhi.
All right. Yeah.
You have to start very early today,
did you? Yeah.
Four o'clock, I wake up in the
morning. I cooked food.
Six o'clock, we left. Yeah,
I cooked this. At four o'clock?
Oh, that's Wow, that's
It's a labour of love. We left our
residence. 7:40, boarded the train.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
Is Delhi hard work? Is it
a very high-pressure city?
Yeah. Very much pressure.
What do you do?
I'm working with the Government
of India, Ministry of Defence.
Oh, right. Secret work?
Yes, well
Michael is as likely
to have an interview with somebody
who he happened to bump
into in the streets,
at least that's the impression.
And they're totally
natural and they aren't stressed
and they don't feel they've got
to make a particular point
or a presentation. The result is
it's a real human reaction.
He put on a sort of blueprint
of how to behave
in foreign countries, which is his
great courtesy,
but familiarity and friendliness.
He's at ease with himself
and he's got no, he holds,
no bad thoughts.
Shimla was very much a British
imperial creation
..because it was too hot
in the Plains during the summer.
The whole administration
of India would decamp
up into the hills, to Shimla.
Simla, the Hill Station
is now Shimla,
the bustling provincial capital.
But the imperial legacy remains
and the Viceroy's Palace -
Victorian self-confidence set in
stone - still dominates the town.
One fifth of humanity was ruled
from that room up there.
One fifth of humanity,
as much as that?
That was the British Empire
at that time? Yes.
It is absolutely colossal
and on the top of the hill there.
If there's ever a building
which says, you know,
"So, well, up yours,"
it's the Viceregal Lodge.
So, where's this? This is the
big?
This is The Ridge. Parade ground.
This is the big Ridge,
the town's largest open space.
Yeah. And we're walking along a
natural watershed now, Michael.
The flow from that side on our right
goes down to the Bay of Bengal
and from the left,
to the Arabian Sea. Extraordinary!
Is that partly why they chose
this spot, Simla?
A wonderful
Dividing India, you know?
Yes. Or sitting astride India!
Sitting astride it, yes, yes.
Whatever way you look, it's
an imposition, isn't it?
From Shimla, we moved on to a place
where the troubled legacy of Empire
was even more tangible - Kashmir.
The visit to Kashmir
was quite revealing, really,
because there you've got this
tension between Pakistan and India.
And yet it was the most serene,
beautiful, calm, wonderful
sort of physical environment
out there on the lake.
In Kashmir,
heaven and hell come pretty close.
Swanning about like Cleopatra
in a barge on Dal Lake,
I feel completely at peace.
But in the city of Srinagar,
on the shores of the lake,
a nasty war slowly grinds on.
At Partition in 1947, it was
expected that majority-Muslim
Kashmir would become
part of Pakistan.
But the British and the local
Hindu ruler kept it in India,
igniting a conflict that's
still simmering today.
The whole problem with Kashmir was
that it was largely a Muslim area,
and they want to rule it themselves.
I shall be staying with
Mr Gulam Butt,
proprietor of Clermont houseboats -
once the most sought-after
on the lake.
Mr Butt. Hello! You must be Mr Butt.
So happy to see you here.
Yeah, well, it's nice to be here.
You've obviously had a few people
before me. Yes, they all,
they all stayed there.
Even George Harrison
George Harrison, my dear friend!
He was here. Was he?
With Ravi Shankar and his wife
Yeah? What year was he here?
That was 1966. 1966.
He was here, yes, sir.
Have you still got people
coming now? Yes.
Unfortunately, not - mostly
because since 1990, you know
I know, been a lot of troubles,
yeah.
..the turmoil and troubles
we have since 1990,
because of the problems
and all that.
Here, a place of great beauty
is undergoing a profound crisis.
Profound crisis, really.
"Wake to grey skies and rain.
"Filming delayed.
"Retire to the best bed
on the journey so far,
"and read the Dalai Lama's book,
The Art of Happiness.
"We've been granted an audience
with him in a few days' time,
"and I began the book
a little out of duty.
"Now I find I'm getting
a lot out of it.
"There's something infectious
about his optimism -
"an optimism which comes from
confronting, rather than avoiding
"the unacceptable,
and acknowledging, understanding,
"and demystifying it."
Perched high in the Himalayan
foothills near Dharamshala
is the village of McCleod Ganj.
Alongside local poverty
is a parallel economy
geared to the demands
of well-heeled Westerners.
And the reason for all this
is religion.
Neither Hindu nor Muslim,
but Buddhist.
Ten years after the Chinese
took over his country,
the Dalai Lama,
fearing death or imprisonment,
fled across the Himalaya from Tibet.
India's Prime Minister Nehru
risked Chinese wrath
to offer him sanctuary.
And this is where the leader
of Tibetan Buddhism now lives,
surrounded by his
faithful followers.
What I felt about Dharamshala
is there's lots of people
living in the aura of the great
man himself, the Dalai Lama -
his presence there means
so much to so many people
that you think when you get to
meet him that, you know,
one will immediately collapse
on the ground in the glow of
his wisdom and enlightenment.
The Dalai Lama greets
his Western admirers first.
Then it's the turn of the
Nepalese and Tibetans.
Only they get packets of herbal
pills - blessed by his holiness -
which will cure coughs and colds.
If the international pilgrims
seem almost blase,
the Tibetans who stand in line are
quite visibly awed by his presence.
Then, all of a sudden,
it's our turn.
Your Holiness.
"At 2.25, we're advised that
he will be coming.
"I arm myself with a khatag -
a thin, white scarf -
"which is a mark of greeting
and respect among Tibetans."
You're a busy man, aren't you?
HE CHUCKLES
"Try not to dwell on the fact that
I'm about to embark on a 40-minute
"talk with the spiritual leader
of one of the great religions
"..and can't remember
a single one of the questions
"I rehearsed in my room last night."
Your face is very familiar to me,
because of the BBC.
Oh, really?
THEY CHUCKLE
Well, your face is very
familiar to me.
You watch the BBC, then?
Practically every day. Do you? Oh.
Because I have more trust.
Really? Yes.
And mainly, there's some
beautiful documentaries.
Including your own, you are
visiting different places.
And sometimes, I wonder,
I wish to join with you.
I could see many places. Ah!
THEY CHUCKLE
Well And many different people.
He seemed to be a very,
very nice bloke indeed.
Without any of the, kind of,
mystique that I thought might
..erm, might be there.
You're the best travelled of
any Dalai Lama in history.
And, I mean, you are -
you have a very hectic schedule.
Why do you think
it's important to travel?
From my childhood,
I always had curiosity,
or desire to know more about
different people,
different culture.
And, as a Buddhist monk,
I also have been interested
to learn more about
different religious traditions.
We're going to Tibet, as I say,
in a month, which is very exciting.
What sort of situation
do you think we'll encounter there?
What is Tibet like at the moment?
I hear there's a revival
of interest in Buddhism.
Will we see this,
and will it be the real thing?
Since you are going there,
so you yourself must find out
what's the true situation.
Of course, although I'm here
outside Tibet,
not inside Tibet.
But, as a Tibetan,
I want to extend my welcome to you
to visit my old country.
MONKS CHAN
This is the tragedy at the heart
of the Dalai Lama's story.
China won't allow him or
many of his followers
to go back home to Tibet.
Young Tibetans like
Tukton Siwei have never seen
their ancestral homeland.
Your parents had to leave Tibet,
I assume, did they?
Yes.
They came to India in the 1960s,
when his son-in-law was here.
During that time,
they were in a group.
Yeah. Yeah.
Do you think you'll ever
get to Tibet?
No. I would like to go, really.
Yeah, but then, it's really
difficult at this moment.
We have special procedures
to follow.
I was reminded how lucky I was.
In a few days,
I would be seeing Tibet for myself,
while these people
remained in exile,
determined to keep their
culture alive.
And so, we left Dharamshala,
and the real climbing began.
Now it's time to tackle
the mountains.
We'll be trekking up to
the 13,500-foot base camp
of Annapurna, whose summit
dominates the horizon,
along with the classically beautiful
peak of Machapuchare - "fishtail".
The idea is to see a bit of
the country and get acclimatised
to high altitude before we take on
Everest and the Tibetan plateau.
Followed by our Sherpa guides,
Wongchu and Nawang,
I set a less-than-blistering pace.
I'm already feeling breathless,
but notices warn that things
can only get worse.
"Mountain sickness."
If you get the mountain sickness,
then you must drink a lot of water.
And then you must use the soup
and garlic soup,
in the tins,
and go slow, walk slower.
Well, that's easy, yes. When you get
a headache or something,
altitude,
you must move down in a low place.
"Early symptoms, headache,
loss of appetite,
"dizziness,
fatigue on minimal exertion."
Oh, I've got a bit of that!
"What to do?
"Get in touch with
your nearest Sherpa.
"Descend, descend, descend."
Well, that's pretty clear.
Yeah.
It's not a cakewalk, is it?
To go into the mountains at all in
Nepal, you have to use Sherpas,
and Sherpas are the local Nepalese.
They've been brought up
in the mountains.
It's extraordinary
to watch them at work.
It's not the Olympic 100 metres!
They scamper up.
They're carrying, in the basket,
40 or 50lbs, or more.
60lbs, they're carrying,
as they just scamper up.
And it's very demoralising
cos it makes you feel,
even if you're feeling well,
very laggardly and hopeless.
On this journey Michael is walking
for 15 to 17km a day,
which is all at high altitude,
which I think
is pretty astonishing.
And you can see Michael's sort
of fragility and vulnerability,
I think, really, for the very first
time in any of his series,
of, "This is actually
really, really hard."
Maybe it's a little sadistic
part of me,
but I feel, as a travel journalist,
at some point you have to suffer
for your art,
and Michael suffered.
There was one point where
he asked the travel guide,
"Are we stopping here?
"Are we ready to just have
a quick break?"
And the guy went "No!"
and carried on walking.
And you just see Michael go,
"Swine,"
and then carry on walking with him.
Lunch here?
No, on the hill.
Swine.
I love those parts, you know,
and I think that's when you get
the best out of a presenter,
because it's real, you can't lie,
you can't fake that.
These mountains were the most
challenging I'd ever tackled
and as we climbed ever higher,
the effects of altitude sickness
started to kick in.
As you climb higher, the oxygen
in the air decreases,
so you have to breathe even harder
to get any air in your lungs.
You're also climbing,
so you're expending more effort.
So, it just slows you down.
You have to stop and you have to
breathe very carefully.
You have to fill your lungs again.
So, it's quite uncomfortable
walking.
Cor blimey. Wangcho's going at
a pretty fast pace.
Mind you,
he has been up Everest twice
It's the afternoon
and I think walking this morning
was somehow easier.
You stop for lunch
..and suddenly it's really hard
to get started again.
And every step
suddenly seems like 12.
You know, the stairs, the steps,
they're very well maintained
but they're never regular,
so you're going at
a different speed.
Anyway, stop moaning, Palin.
On you go.
Enjoy the Himalaya.
Finally, taking pity on me,
my guide, Wangcho,
agreed to a breather
in a spot that had its own
stories to tell.
Oh, wow.
We're getting higher up now.
Wangcho, I'm beginning to feel it.
3,000 metres, are we?
Are we above 3,000 metres?
Yes. This is a very nice place.
This is a nice place.
It's cool. It's shady.
What is it?
This is a Hinku cave.
A Hindu cave?
Hinku.
Hinku, sorry.
What is Hinku?
Hinku means, before this,
some Hindu God
and some Himalaya gods
are living here. Right.
That's what they call it.
And also for a long time,
Yeti lived here.
Yeti lived here?
Yep.
God Really?
Yes, really.
Do you believe in the Yeti?
I saw this on the mountain.
Wangcho, my guide,
was a wise man and knew
the mountains very well,
so when he starts talking
about the Yeti, I remember thinking,
"Well, do I believe this or not?"
I've heard many stories
about the Yeti
and have dismissed them.
What did it look like?
It looked like a monkey
and a bit like us.
A big monkey. How big, how tall?
Same, like us.
Really? Are you sure
it wasn't one of us?
Sure it wasn't some climber,
a bit lost?
No, it's the Yeti.
And yet hearing him talk about it
and talk about it with such
unselfconscious acceptance
made me feel, "Well, yeah, maybe
there is, maybe, you know
"..somewhere up there I'll meet
him."
Yeti or no Yeti, this mountain
was pushing me to the limit.
Halfway through the trek,
and for the first time
some doubts are creeping
into my mind.
Oh, dear.
I don't know how I'll go on today.
Last night was pretty awful.
I've got a throat like sandpaper.
Altitude's rather unforgiving
from what I hear.
Things don't get any better
as you go up.
But still, there's nowhere else
to go. Nothing for it.
I keep on. Hope I prove them wrong,
and climbing does make you
feel better.
I was feeling pretty bad
by this time,
and yet we had to keep going
and there around us
was this spectacular,
beautiful, mountain scenery.
So, this is somebody keeping going
and trying to be as jolly
as possible,
but wanting also at the same time
to be honest
and say, "I feel bloody awful."
I think there's a certain point
where it's good to acknowledge
that you're feeling lousy.
It's also important just to show
that the altitude sickness
is something that happens a lot
of the time in mountains like these.
They may look beautiful,
but you can't just start
at the bottom and walk up.
You've got to acclimatise
as you go along.
There was a point
when I got up to,
I think it was the hut,
really almost at the top
of the Annapurna Trail,
must be about 14,000 feet.
I was so exhausted when I got there
that I said
It's about four in the afternoon
or something,
and we'd had tea and lunch,
and I said,
"I'm just going to go to bed."
Can I have a lie down, please?
"I wake up, wrenched from sleep
by some chest-racking cough,
"and I'm seized by near panic.
"Everything is pitch-black,
"silent and cold as ice.
"I've no sensation of where I am.
"All sorts of things
go through my mind.
"The one thing I can't dismiss
"is that I might have to think
the unthinkable.
"That, for the first time
in any of my journeys,
"I may have to face
the possibility of failure.
"I'm 60, after all.
"There has to be a point at which
the body puts its foot down.
"For a depressing hour or so,
I can't escape this profound feeling
"of being defeated, physically
and mentally, by the Himalaya."
I woke up
and I wasn't sure where I was.
And I was just lying there
and there was no sound,
and I thought,
"Oh, my gosh, is this it?"
I sort of
"Is this
"what it's like, you know,
to pass on?"
Suddenly, I heard next
door to me, from the next door hut,
this terrific sort
of bronchial cough,
and I suddenly realised, "I'm
alive!"
You know, you wouldn't hear
this in heaven!
Once I'd woken up in the middle of
that night of darkness,
two or three hours later
and there was the most stunning view
and it was absolutely beautiful.
And I felt completely and utterly
restored, just like that.
HE SIGHS
The end is in sight,
Annapurna base camp.
I think I'm going to get there.
I just have a feeling
I'm going to make it.
Well, I suppose this symbolises our
achievement over the last five days.
This is the summit of Annapurna,
and really, I mean,
it's this breathtaking,
extraordinary, powerful
scenery round here.
I think it's rather lovely
when you begin to see the traveller
facing up to things which are
immensely challenging for them.
At home, we're sitting,
we're not challenged at all,
we're on a comfortable sofa and
watching,
but you can tell that he went
through hell
on a lot of his journeys.
I suppose I did feel, at times,
"I shouldn't be doing this,"
but then you're always passed by
somebody who's 83.
Doing something like this is
probably the best thing
I can possibly do, rather
than sit at home and think,
"Oh, God, what was I doing 40 years
ago?" and all that,
and "Should I go see the doctor
about this ache and pain?"
Go on with your work, get moving,
get out there,
and you forget completely about how
old you are and you're just very,
very glad that you can still see
so much of the world.
This was as high as we would go,
for now.
Descending and turning east
once again,
we made for Nepal's evocative
capital city, Kathmandu.
After the emptiness
of the mountains,
Kathmandu comes as quite a shock.
Almost a million are squeezed
into Nepal's capital,
built on the widest valley
in the Himalaya.
VEHICLE HORNS BEEP
Like Dharamsala and Amritsar,
this is a place
of deep religious significance
where Nepali Hindus say farewell
to their loved ones.
Down at the ghats,
business is brisk as funeral pyres
and their attendants
are worked flat out to cope
with demand.
BELL RINGS
I think every Hindu or every
religious person
wants to come to Pashupatinath,
and where it is the place to be
cremated.
Sons carry the body
and walk bare feet
and they bring the body
to Pashupatinath.
They actually walk through the town,
barefoot, and bring the body here?
Yep. And there's no burial
in the Hindu religion?
No, no burial.
It's always cremation.
Cremation, yeah.
BELLS RING
They shave their heads.
A sign of mourning,
you shave your heads, the men.
"The priest talks
to the family and they then lift
"the body onto the pyre.
"It's the body of a woman.
Younger than I expected.
"Basil leaves and water are placed
in the dead woman's mouth
"as prasad, food consecrated
and blessed by the gods.
"The oldest male heir applies
a lighted taper to the body.
"Shaking with emotion,
"he then walks to the end
of the pyre
"and buries his head on her feet.
"I feel I should look away,
but I can't.
"I know nothing about these people,
"yet in this brief ceremony,
"I feel a wave of empathy,
not just for them,
"but for loss,
for the end of a life.
"I come from somewhere
where death is kept private,
"almost as if it's an embarrassment.
"Here in Pashupatinath
it's very much hands-on.
"The reality of death,
the fact of death,
"is confronted, not avoided."
BELL TOLLS
And it really changed my thoughts
about how we dispose of bodies.
Most people in this country
tend to be cremated,
but we leave that destruction of the
body, if you like, to somebody else,
whereas the essence of what was
happening in Kathmandu that day
was that the family,
although men only,
but the family were dealing
with it themselves.
We were heading into one of the most
barren and inhospitable
places on Earth.
The great Tibetan Plateau.
They call this
"the roof of the world,"
and for the next few weeks,
I won't drop below 13,000 feet.
The prayer flags that mark the high
passes show that despite
strenuous efforts by the Chinese
in the 1960s and '70s,
religion still exists here.
What no longer exists
is a country called Tibet.
We are now in what is
officially known
as the Tibet Autonomous Region,
a part of the People's
Republic of China.
Whatever you call it, it's a
land of superlatives.
Wow.
Look at that!
Ha-ha.
Wow!
Well, great moment.
My first view of Everest.
I mean, apart from photos in
restaurants and things like that.
And just the most glorious, mighty
view.
And it's the very, very heart
of the Himalayas out there.
Giant mountains, four or five of
them, all over 8,000 metres,
and Everest there just slightly
touched by the cloud.
Absolutely epic.
It really does make it all
worthwhile.
And it's also the highest
I've ever been in my life.
I'm at about 5,300 metres now,
which is over 17,000 feet.
So, a big first,
and the sun's shining!
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Now all we've got to do
is get there!
It was truly astonishing
and unbelievable,
the great panorama
of the Himalayas were down there.
I don't know if it was just some
trick of where you were,
you almost felt you were
above all the other mountains.
There was Everest in the middle
of them all, but it was like
looking at a model of the Himalayas,
laid out in front of you.
And Everest, there, sort of a bit
like, you know,
those statues of Queen Victoria
you see in various Indian parks.
The Queen there
in the middle of it all,
just slightly higher
than everything else around.
Drawing closer to the foot
of Everest itself,
we relied more than ever on the
hospitality of the few hardy souls
who lived their lives up here
at the top of the world.
A community that,
like so many in the Himalaya,
was founded on faith.
Rongbuk consists of a monastery,
half a street, a guesthouse.
and an almost unbelievable view
of the highest point on the planet.
It's bitterly, bitterly cold.
The wind blows through the pass.
And yet, here are these young men,
sort of given up their lives
to become monks in the highest
monastery in the world.
Why would they live up there?
Answer being, I think, that it's
seen as a great honour to be a monk.
It's an honour to be part of
a community like that.
And I think it's also to do
with the fact that the more personal
physical sacrifice you make,
the greater your wisdom,
the greater your chance
in the next life.
It's hard to imagine what degree
of devotion enables them to survive
the bitter cold and isolation
up here in Rongbuk.
It's a cold, cold place they have
to be.
I've brought you this.
The gift I present to the abbot
seems to offer a clue.
THEY EXCHANGE GREETINGS
It's a tanka,
a painted scroll from Kathmandu.
It depicts the Buddha,
the Enlightened One.
They look at it with real affection.
The harder their life is,
the closer it will bring them
to an understanding of him.
The amount of different
religions that he comes across there
from Islam in Pakistan,
you know, to Sikhism in India,
and then to Buddhism in Tibet.
It's all happening
within this mountain scape
of the Himalayas.
And part of it kind of made me
think,
"Well, maybe it's because they live
in
"such harsh and difficult
conditions,
"you need some sort of faith
to keep you going."
What Buddha would have made of the
Rongbuk guesthouse, I don't know.
Run by the monks,
it's spartan to say the least.
The consolation is having Everest
as my neighbour
and the weather out there looks
good enough to raise hopes
for a climb up to base camp
tomorrow, Sunday
..and the good news is our
transport's arrived.
The only problem with being so
close to Everest
is that you're very high up,
there's very little oxygen,
and you have to keep breathing
very hard.
When you're just
slightly dozing off,
you suddenly wake up,
gasping for breath,
trying to just get that oxygen in.
So, it's actually
bloody uncomfortable at night.
"Sleep when it comes
doesn't stay long.
"Somewhere in the middle
of the night
"with Everest seen through
my cracked window,
"bathed in near full moonlight,
"You think,
'Oh, wow, I'd pay for this.'
"I suffer a couple of hours
of shortage of breath.
"The wind howls, making the prospect
of the toilet block
"even more miserable."
I know Everest is out the window.
I know it looks lovely,
but I'd exchange it, you know,
for something two foot
off the ground
if it had showers
and a flushing toilet.
The toilet block was
for all the people there.
There was just two holes in the
ground, basically. Very little
cover.
And I can deal with most things,
but I couldn't deal with that
particular toilet block.
I went out into the fields
with my little roll of toilet paper,
which blew away across
the Tibetan Plateau.
I thought, "God, you know, I've
toilet paper around Everest.
"I shouldn't be doing that.
This is entirely wrong!"
Just one of those things.
And yet the view from that room,
through, as I say, a cracked window
with yellowing sellotape sort
of trying to seal the gap,
was of the north face of Everest,
and it was stunningly beautiful.
I wasn't actually planning
an assault on the north face,
but we were heading for a spot
that, for me, felt just as exciting.
Everest base camp.
Prayers for our safety
have been written and hung up
with all the others to be carried
with the wind up to the gods.
I find walking still quite
an effort at this height,
but as we head towards Everest
I have a feeling that adrenaline
will overcome altitude.
As so often on this journey,
progress was at the pace of a yak.
The wonderful thing is you're
with the yaks and you're on foot.
You slowly get to know a place.
You're not just getting
out of a vehicle and meeting
someone and shaking hands.
You are walking into a landscape
whereby you slowly become
immersed in it.
And, of course,
that's what Michael had to do.
There's a slowness to it,
but it's a sort of deeper
connection,
I think, to the place
and its people,
and I think that's really lovely,
is that we really feel like we are
walking the paths with him.
And in the mountains, mealtimes
weren't to be rushed either
Sunday lunch is taken at
a little over 17,000 feet.
This is what we call black tea.
Yeah.
And that's butter. Oh, black tea.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Cheers to you all.
From head to feet!
THEY LAUGH
Thanks, guys, very much
for getting us up this far.
Mm.
Ah, it's nice. Great. Nice?
Yeah, it's kind of
Yeah, it's good, actually.
It's salty. Salty tea.
Favourite tea.
I believe very, very strongly
that sharing food
is one of the most
important elements
in making contact with people.
It's the way of sharing.
Once you sit down to eat together,
youin every culture
and every civilisation,
erm, that's really where you share
your thoughts and your moments,
because everybody's
..everybody's sharing in the good
that the food and the drink
are doing to them, just celebrating
the joy of just being alive
and not having to rush off anywhere.
Not that there were some places
to rush off to!
Do these guys have any sort of,
eh
..anything other than tea that
Yes, definitely.
..warms them up on the way?
They have some Chang here.
Chang? Yeah, barley beer.
Barley beer? Ah. Chang.
Chang. Is it good?
The tea was good, so
Would you like to try that?
Yeah, I'll try that. OK.
It is rather an attractive bottle.
So this is made of, eh - this is
barley, really, fermented barley?
Thank you. Ah. Right, lovely.
Is this strong?
What do you do?
First, this is for Buddha.
Ah, right. Second for God.
A third one for heaven. Yeah.
Oh, right. Then you can
..three times. OK, OK.
Yeah. Usually.
This is for the chomolangma.
I should take my gloves off, really.
The first one for chomolangma.
First one for
..chomolangma? Chomolangma,
which, of course, is what?
Is that what you call Everest? OK.
Chomolangma!
OK?
Second one, Buddha.
Next one for Buddha? Yeah.
For Buddha! Yeah. For Great Buddha.
Third one for human. Third one
for human? Human being, yeah.
The third one for human beings.
Woohee!
Right. Then
And then, drink. Yeah.
OK, cheers! Down the hatch. Cheers!
Bottoms up,
as they say in the Sahara.
Living in really difficult,
harsh environments,
you're constantly sort of up against
it, up against these challenges.
Erm, you know that everybody else
is too.
And so there's much more - the hand
of friendship is always extended.
Oh! Mm!
Watching Michael's shows,
he has formed these bridges
between different cultures,
but he does it with such
a remarkable style.
I don't think that ten-year-old me
ever imagined that one day
he'd be sharing lunch with Sherpas
on the side of Mount Everest.
But then again, perhaps he did.
Maybe that's why it happened.
You know, there are always things
in your childhood that you remember
as being something extraordinary
and the world changing as a result
of what had happened. And one
of the great things I remember
was, erm, the ascent of Everest,
and the fact it was announced
brilliantly on the day
of the Queen's coronation
eh, was, eh
..made it even more sort of,
erm, epic.
I had this book and treasured it
for a long time.
And I went to New Zealand 1998,
and actually met Edmund Hillary,
and I'd taken the book with me
hoping I might meet the great man.
And I not only met him,
but he actually introduced me
in some talk. Edmund Hillary,
the man had gone up Everest,
saying, "Well, you know,
I'm really pleased tonight.
"I have Michael Palin, one of
the great intrepid adventurers."
And I thought, "Come on!"
But anyway, there it is,
signed by Edmund Hillary.
But there's another Everest story
with an even greater hold
on my imagination.
I suppose one
of the great events of my childhood
was the conquest of Everest in 1953.
But as a boy, I can remember
being even more fascinated
by the idea that Everest
might have been climbed
30 years before.
In 1924, a guy called George Mallory
made base camp here for an attempt
on the north face of Everest.
A few weeks later,
he and his climbing partner,
Andrew Irvine, were observed
disappearing into a cloud
only a few hundred yards
from the summit of Everest.
Neither of them
were ever seen again.
It's one of the great mysteries.
Did they or did they not
climb Everest in 1924?
That seems kind of right somehow,
so that no one person would say,
"We've conquered this."
Just looking at the drama
that must have gone on,
and the intensity of emotion
that must have been connected
with the last few thousand feet
of that rock,
cos there were people waiting,
especially with Mallory and Irvine,
watching them, watching
the little specks in the snow
get smaller and smaller, but get
closer and closer to the top.
And they must have
been willing them on,
there must have been such, eh,
a kind of
..such an intensity of expectation
at that time.
There I was, looking at the line,
the ridge that these men
would have travelled
up to the summit before they
disappeared into a cloud
and then were never seen again.
Mallory and Irvine had disappeared
up that slope.
And I looked up and it all seemed,
you know, so simple, it just seemed
it would just keep on climbing.
It brought me very close
to what had been a story
and a kind of adventure.
I was nearly 60 when I
..walked up a bit of Everest!
But I did it, you know?
And it seemed, eh,
like it sort of completed something.
After leaving base camp, we reached
the highest point on our journey,
18,000 feet.
From here, it was downhill
all the way to Bangladesh
and the sea.
But plenty of adventures
lay ahead of us.
And our route now took us
across the Tibetan plain
towards Lhasa,
the world's highest capital city,
where another boyhood dream
was about to come true.
Astride a rocky outcrop in the heart
of the city is one of the most
charismatic buildings in the world.
13 storeys high, it looms
over Lhasa like a giant Buddha.
Chairman Mao wanted to blow it up,
and I can see why.
If a nation could be symbolised
by a single structure,
Tibet was the Potala Palace.
I remember seeing this extraordinary
building in photos
in my encyclopaedia when I was
young, quite unlike anything else
I'd seen,
the essence of foreignness
and strangeness.
And, of course, I'd never expected
to see it, because at that time
Tibet
was closed and there was
no chance of seeing it.
Now, of course, I can come here.
Tibet's open again, but sadly,
the Dalai Lama, whose palace it was,
has gone.
And it's now just a museum.
The Potala Palace was completed
in the 17th century and no expense
was spared to make it
a home fit for a God king.
Before the advent of skyscrapers,
the Potala Palace
was the tallest building
in the world.
If you make it to the roof,
you'll find the most enchanting
of all the palace's 1,000 rooms,
the eastern sunshine apartment.
This was the Dalai Lama's bedroom.
At the top from the roof,
your relationship to the city below
is that of an eagle to the ground.
If ever there was a physical feeling
of being on top, of looking out
over your subjects, of being
lord of all you survey,
it's embodied here in the Potala.
Figures like ants
down in the streets below
makes Buckingham Palace
look like a bungalow!
I.. Yeah, it's rather one of
these things, a cocktail party chat.
I was talking to the Dalai Lama
..I WAS talking to the Dalai Lama
and he said
that when he was young, he loved
looking at atlases and maps,
and he would look out of the windows
of the Potala Palace
across the plain and he said,
"One day I'll go out
"and I'll see all these places."
And I said, "Oh, that's just
the same as me in Sheffield!
"You know, I thought,
will I ever leave Sheffield?
"There were you in the Potala Palace
and me,
thinking very much
the same sort of things.
Pictures of Tibet and the Potala
Palace
had seized my young imagination.
What I didn't imagine was
just how cold it would be.
Tibet is the coldest country
I've ever been.
I was cold all the time
I was there.
I don't think there was a heater
in the whole of Tibet.
The irony is, the warmest
I ever got in Tibet
was when I took my clothes off.
About 100 miles north of Lhasa,
amid swirling steam, I discover
a totally unexpected nirvana.
Oh! Poh!
Oh, wonderful!
The problem with Tibet is,
it's a very big place
and very difficult to heat.
And this is the first time
I've been really warm in two weeks
in Tibet.
And I've had to come to this
Olympic-size swimming pool
north of Lhasa at about 14,000 feet
to really be warm! And it's lovely!
Who needs clothes
when you've got the hot springs?
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Oh, oh, oh!
I got to this place,
the roof of the world, really.
Bitterly cold outside,
but a hot spring.
And take my clothes off
and get warm!
Yes! Whereas all the rest of the
time we'd just been putting on
more and more clothes, everything
you'd ever bought in the world,
you were wearing,
and that's only at night!
Lightly defrosted, I pressed
on across the enormous emptiness
of Tibet. I wanted to find out,
what was life like up here
for the few people
who called it home?
400 miles northeast of Lhasa,
summer has arrived on the plateau
and the yak are
fattening themselves up.
Sonam and his brother are moving
their herd to make the best
of the fresh pasture.
Nothing seems to be happening.
I'm totally unqualified
for any milking of any kind,
let alone yak milking. Come on,
then, come on. There you go.
There you go. Oh, yes.
We didn't just turn up.
Someone had said,
"Can we come and film you and would
you do it on a certain day?"
And the first thing that surprised
me, which is a very touching thing,
really, cos you imagine a yak herder
in his sort of thick yak skin robes
and all that, and a sort of bandana,
but no, he was in
a rather smart suit,
looked just like a sort of commuter
in Shanghai or, you know,
Portland, Oregon or anywhere else.
So that was a bit of a blow!
He didn't look very exotic.
But he was very nice
and very friendly.
Soon have enough for a cappuccino!
The tent that is their summer home
is predictably yak-dependent.
It's made from their hair
and heated by their droppings.
Ah! Thank you.
It's a bit warmer in here
than out there on the high plateau.
Hello. Hello, little ones.
The children were behaving very much
the way children would behave
at home, if I had
my own grandchildren, or something.
I'm Michael.
Not that you're interested.
We've not known each other
for long, have we, Sonam?
But somehow, although
you can't speak my language,
and I can't speak your language,
we somehow know what we're on about.
Eating, sharing food together,
children. It's a very similar thing.
Children are always the same,
you know, aren't they?
They're always, one of them is
going like that and is very happy,
and the other one's going
It's the same in England, it's
the same in Tibet, where you are.
And we ended up just talking,
rather like I'm telling you
this story now, myself and Sonam,
about how children are.
Funny thing that, isn't it?
Who needs phrase books?
Hello. Hello.
I've rarely been as comfortable
and as exhilarated
by the connection between
two different sets of people,
kind of different languages
and different backgrounds,
as I was in that, eh, in that tent
with Sonam and Mrs Sonam
and the two little children.
It was so like home.
Oi! I saw that, I saw that!
Not everyone gets the privilege
of going to these places and meeting
these people and then suddenly,
through Michael, you're meeting them
and you're engaging with them,
and especially with Michael,
who's just such an amazing companion
to watch, you know,
and hishis ability
toto make it light
and to bring people alive,
was something that we were all
the grateful recipients of watching.
But we still had
some hard travelling ahead.
All too soon, it was time
to leave this friendly family
..and Tibet itself,
and continue my journey.
I headed east, and then south,
into yet another
spectacular landscape.
Tiger Leaping Gorge.
I was on my way to Nagaland.
THEY SING
In Nagaland, which is
extreme sort of northeast
on the borders of India and Burma,
and a tribal group
called the Konyak Nagas,
erm, who've lived in that area
for, you know, thousands of years,
and are now being
slightly pushed back
and marginalised.
But traditionally,
the males were head-hunters.
The Naga comprise
a dozen different tribes,
of which these,
the Konyak Nagas,
were the last to give up
the proud tradition of head-hunting.
On these necklaces, each brass face
means a head taken.
And I see quite a lot of, eh, heads.
The, eh, the skulls - is that
a trophy from the head-hunting days?
Yeah.
This gentleman here, is
he a very distinguished man?
He looks, with a headdress like
that, rather important.
Might have been a warrior once.
Yeah.
You can see by the tattoo
on the face. Yeah.
What's the largest number of heads
that anyone's ever taken?
One I know that's from home Yeah.
..which got 66 heads. Wow!
He's no more.
I met this man who had five of them,
so I was talking to, you know,
a reasonably successful head-hunter
and it was difficult to know
what to talk about.
Tattoo, yes.
Tattoo to the chest. Yes.
What does that mean?
Does that mean
Oh, it goes all the way down? Yeah.
Lifted his, sort of, shirt and
showed me
an incredibly complex tattoo.
There's a lot of history in there.
My stomach's very boring,
look at that, very boring.
So I pulled up my shirt
and showed him my, sort of, pink
un-illustrated Western chest.
Oh, yes. There we are. Whoa!
I think you win.
You win on the decorative stakes.
I mean, it could have gone
completely the wrong way, I suppose,
and I could have been seized by
several men and taken off.
I think I got the right moment
and the right man
to have that moment with,
so suddenly from being
a fierce head-hunter,
he was also a man
who liked a bit of fun.
They're still part of India,
some of them are just across
the border, Burmese,
but one wonders really
how long their identity
is going to really last,
how many more generations
as the modern world extends.
The American Baptists church sent
missionaries out with great success
and they built some big cathedrals
here for the Konyak people.
How strong is Christianity here now?
99% of the population
is now Christian.
99% Yes. ..are Christian?
Why have so many become Christian?
It's because of education.
Education, right. They've come in
contact with the outside world.
Ah, right.
So does the Christian religion
provide the education? Yes.
At the Baptist Cathedral in Mon,
2,500 Naga voices are raised.
CONGREGATION SINGS HYMN
These are Christians absolutely
packed into a church
in a fairly remote corner
of north-east India.
A focus of the clash
of cultures, religions,
cos it's on the Burma-Indian border.
Like all the sort of the small
mountain tribes, the government,
are trying to assimilate them
more into a centralised country,
in this case, India.
It happens in many, many parts
of the world as the central
government wants to expand itself
and doesn't really want
to have minority groups
outside their control.
I think these people are threatened.
Their way of life is threatened,
which I think is not
a good thing at all.
I think we want to learn from people
like this and many, many lessons.
From Pakistan and Kashmir
to Tibet and Nagaland
..many of the Himalayan societies
I'd visited were in some kind
of turmoil, their cultures
clashing with each other
or with the wider world.
But close-by Nagaland is a country
that has largely resisted
the march of modernity.
A kingdom of mountains and forests
where tradition
is respected and protected.
Bhutan.
There's room to move here.
Bhutan is the size of Switzerland
with a population of little
more than a million.
It has one of the strictest
environmental policies in the world.
More than a quarter of the country
is National Park,
where not even fallen wood
can be gathered without permission.
Bhutan is as spectacular as a lot
of the other Himalayan countries.
Because it had resisted
foreign invasions,
because it had resisted absorbing
foreign workers
and foreign workforces, largely,
it had preserved a way of life,
which wasn't just, sort of, for show
and wasn't just for festivals.
It was the way they lived.
And it seemed to be, sort of,
working.
It gave Bhutan
a particular identity.
The influence of Buddhism
is everywhere,
like this dramatic
clifftop hermitage.
There are a lot of holy spots which
seem to crop up all over Bhutan.
What was special about here?
VOICEOVER: Legend claims it was
founded by a saint, Guru Rinpoche,
who rode here on a tigress
1,200 years ago
and turned himself into something
so nasty that the evil spirits fled
and left the valley to Buddhism.
Another view. Wow, fantastic.
I really, really
loved my time in Bhutan.
You really feel like you're stepping
back in time and you feel like not
that many people have got
to see some of these vistas.
There's something about the sort
of the majesty and the magnitude
and the sort of impressiveness
of the mountains
that sort of lends itself
to magical thinking.
There's no surprise that the people
and the beliefs there have nature
and the landscape very much
at the heart of it.
Religious symbolism is at the heart
of Bhutanese life.
If you want a safe journey,
you don't pass a prayer wheel
without spinning it.
One for you.
Round, round.
I find it fascinating
that it's not about economy.
It's not about resources.
It's not about making
loads of money.
It's about happiness.
It's about being eco-friendly.
It's about living at one
with their environment.
You will come across a valley,
you will come across an environment,
which you think, "This is heaven.
This is paradise."
There's something about it.
There's the grandeur,
but also the fruitfulness
of some of the fields.
This is where man was meant to live.
Beautiful place for a site,
isn't it?
It's quite enclosed.
This is one of the best camps. Yeah.
How many days before we start to go
down now, really?
And how many days
before we get to Paro?
Oh, about three days from now
we'll be in Paro.
Three days? Yeah. Right.
For the festival.
Yeah, so that's kind of pretty
much downhill from here or?
Yeah, downhill all the way.
"By tonight, the majestic peaks
of the Himalaya will be behind us
"for the last time.
"So while the tents are being
struck,
"I pick my way up the hill
for a last look.
"I feel my own personal pangs of
regret at leaving all this behind.
"There are few places outside
the Himalaya where the relation
"of man to nature can be experienced
on such a gigantic scale.
"And something like that
may not change your life,
"but it does stretch it a bit."
This is a bit of a sad moment,
really, cos up there
behind the clouds is probably the
last of the great Himalayan peaks
that I shall see on this journey.
Jomolhari, about 24,000 feet,
just over 7,000 metres.
I'll miss the big mountains.
And, I mean, nowadays, I think those
are the only mountains in the world.
Anything less than 20,000
feet is just tiny!
So, farewell, the big monumental
Himalayan peaks.
Farewell, Jomolhari.
And so, at last, we descended
from the roof of the world
..to a place that couldn't be
more of a contrast.
Bangladesh has had a hard life.
It won independence
from Pakistan in 1971,
amidst a war, massacre and famine,
which few in the West even noticed.
George Harrison was an exception.
MUSIC: Bangla Desh
by George Harrison
# Bangladesh
# Bangladesh
# Where so many people
# Are dying fast
# And it sure looks like a mess #
I thought it was very important
that the Himalaya should not end
where the mountains ended,
but where the unique environment,
which is entirely created
by the mountains
and by the physical geography
of the Himalaya, ends,
and that is really where
the rivers meet the sea.
# Bangladesh, Bangladesh #
There's the Irrawaddy,
the Mekong, the Salween,
the Brahmaputra, Ganges,
they all flow from the Himalaya.
So, here you had the complete
antithesis of the Himalayan ranges -
flat green fields.
Millions of people living
in dense cities.
I felt this was where the journey
ought to end, because this is really
what living under the influence
of the Himalaya gets you.
It's 90 miles from Mongla
to the Bay of Bengal.
The only boat that'll take me
down there is an ex-lifeboat
with a viewing platform grafted
on top of it.
On either side are the sinister,
uninhabited banks
of the largest coastal mangrove
forest in the world.
These are the Sundarbans, habitat
of the Royal Bengal tiger, which,
despite frequent appearances
on the travel posters,
runs the Yeti a close second
for elusiveness.
In a tiny space
next to the lavatory,
our cooks prepare the last
meal of the journey -
locally-caught crab, lobster
and the best prawns in the world.
They made us one of the best meals
I had on all my journeys.
We were going down
this huge wide delta.
There were various
single fishing boats
and they kept stopping there
and asking what fish he had,
and then another one.
I can remember thinking at the time,
"Come on, we should be
getting there."
And then you realise this was all
part of getting
the best fish soup ever together,
and you're just going,
"Oh, this is just sensational."
At last, the moment has come.
After six months in the mountains,
I can sniff the unfamiliar
smell of the open sea.
As I head off onto the Bay of Bengal
on millions of tonnes of mud
that was once Himalaya, I feel
I've made the last in a chain
of connections between the sea
and the mountains we've climbed,
and the gorges we've walked,
and the rivers we've sailed,
and all the people we've met
along the way
suddenly seem very close.
With that, my epic Himalayan
journey was at an end.
It had been an adventure
that surpassed
even my boyhood dreams.
You've got absolutely everything.
You've got extraordinary landscapes,
physical power
and strength of nature.
You're also looking at the sort
of human element
who lives in the Himalaya.
Bottoms up! Down the hatch!
Hello.
That's what's so lovely
about this programme.
It's about going for these
extraordinary places
and really appreciating
the experience of it all.
This definitely, physically,
was the most difficult
and the most potentially arduous.
I just have a feeling
I'm going to make it.
My crew, of course,
did all these things with me.
It wasn't just me against
the mountains.
It was a team of us.
I feel like Michael
was at his best here.
It felt like a labour of love
and it felt like one
of those childhood dreams.
I just kept that sense of wonder.
I still saw it
with a child's eye in a way.
Himalaya was a very powerful force
in my imagination.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever
expected that I would actually end
up climbing halfway up Everest.