Travel broadens one, someone once said. That was before package holidays. Now travel narrows, squeezing one first into aeroplane seats designed for (and evidently by) goblins, cramming one into identical hotel rooms so universal that one could be anywhere, then releasing one into a tiny range of braindead activities in one’s new and usually totally stuffed environment. For this, one pays right through the nose.
Those who receive the cash, however, are insistent that it is fun, saying it so often that against all better judgment one feels one must be mistaken.
Otherwise, why would so many jolly television presenters be having so much fun in Bali, and Fiji, and Phuket? The resorts they are so cheerful about pay quite a lot to be on these alleged travel shows whose underlying premise – “we had to be paid to come here” – goes unmentioned.
The other kind of travel, the old-fashioned sort where people go to enjoy a place, another culture that has not yet had high-rises dumped upon it, is virtually extinct now for two reasons. First, scarcely any such places survive, and second, the reason a few do is that they are very troublesome to get to. So difficult, in fact, that the only way we’re ever going to go there is through TV.
Talking a way through a border patrol, or braving a truly medieval dentist, or inspecting a bombed hotel is so much better done by Michael Palin while we’re nicely enveloped in a sofa.
The English have always travelled well.
For centuries they have dressed up in baggy khakis and sallied into lesser countries, there to visit sly British jokes on locals. Or endure incredible hardship. Scott and Shackleton went to the ends of the Earth to stir the hearts of Englishmen. Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg circumnavigated the world in 80 days without letting his manners slip for a moment, a journey Palin once emulated every bit as decorously.
Palin wears the traditional pants and looks rather like a visiting baronet, bowing slightly and enquiring as to the natives’ well-being. He usually seems slightly anxious, as if he is beginning to regret this journey. He always looks as if he might suddenly revert to his real (as we imagine) Pythonesque character. But that persona is glimpsed only occasionally, like a concealed weapon.
Palin offers insight through detail: in Himalaya with Michael Palin, “A Passage to India”, the bizarre aggression of guards at the India-Pakistan border, the chapati production line for free meals at Shimla’s golden temple, the disclosure by the Dalai Lama that he usually goes to the toilet in the morning but now goes in the evenings (“Since I’ve been in America everything is upside down.”), the guide at the former Imperial palace of the Viceroy in Shimla who points upstairs: “One fifth of humanity was once ruled from that room,” he says without resentment and even with a touch of pride.
How does TV1’s Intrepid Journeys stack up against the master? Surprisingly, not too badly. The terrain is as exotic, the approach more blunt, and the script has that unique Kiwi touch of burlesque.
Certainly, Palin offers his audience the chance to learn something about the country while Kerre Woodham, Danielle Cormack and Tim Shadbolt offered the chance to learn something about Woodham, Cormack and Shadbolt, but that is the way of NZ celebs. And even Palin is inclined to make cameo appearances in his own docos, popping up on stage in Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre in India.
Palin is the sophisticate. Shadbolt, in the latest Journey, to Borneo, is the noviciate. Palin tracks carefully through the partition of India and Pakistan, Shadbolt rips straight into the concreting. “It’s good to be back on the job,” he says, happily trowelling a ditch while the trowel’s owner looks on politely.
Palin mulls over the politics of disputed Kashmir.
Invercargill’s Mayor seems to have disavowed research altogether. “I thought Borneo would be covered in jungle,” he says.
But sometimes there is a remarkable similarity in approach.
Shadbolt conducts an English lesson in a village school, just as Palin had done the previous week; now it’s the children looking on politely in both cases.
Shadbolt staggers to the top of Mt Kinabalu, complaining all the way, moving with the speed and verve of a Southland Sunday and arriving at the summit absolutely shagged (“the bastard knocked me off!”). Palin takes a military helicopter to the foot of K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, but manages to look Shadbolt-like in his anxiety about what lies ahead.
Palin always looks as if he’s about to warn you off drinking the water. Shadbolt should have stuck to drinking the water, for he hooks into the rice wine, gets rat-faced, makes a speech (“It’s verrry nishe to be here …”), has an unsuccessful attempt at “House of the Rising Sun” on a guitar, then flakes. Palin has spent four weeks teetotalling in Pakistan (“I feel so healthy, I feel fit, younger, better …”), then gratefully chugs a brew the second he crosses the border into India.
Local accommodation is always a sitter, sometimes literally. Palin puts up in the decaying houseboats of the Victorian British. Shadbolt cracks after too many small, hard beds. What’s holding the Third World back, he opines, is little beds on bare boards, instead of lovely beds with innersprung mattresses.
Both attempt to bring their exotic surroundings closer to home. “Despite 60 years of independence, Shimla still feels like an Indian Tunbridge Wells,” says Palin. Shadbolt, marvelling that he is standing in a town of 200,000: “More than Invercargill and Dunedin together.” And: “I’m not even sure how many of them speak English.”
Palin is the master of television travel, Shadbolt the apprentice. But Intrepid Journeys has its own integrity; a raw honesty that in itself is entertaining. “Wealth doesn’t seem to make you a happier person,” observes Shadbolt. There you go.
Diana Wichtel is on leave.