Thanks to a friend to invited me along, I went to hear Michael Palin speak Thursday night about his extensive and spectacular travels around the world (and around and again). I admit that I only knew Palin for his extensive and spectacular body of work with Monty Python – one of the most classic examples of which is above. As it turns out, I’ve been missing out on his other collection of work: BBC documentaries of him traveling. You can watch some clips of these on YouTube, sadly embedding is disabled though.

In the same period of time he’s chaired the Campaign for Better Transport, for which the evening was a fundraiser. He relates the two activities in the evening’s program:

Around The World in 80 Days brought working and campaigning together. Forbidden to fly, our success or failure depended on the availability of surface transport. It came in many shapes and forms, from trains to cargo boats and dog sleds to dhows and despite some desperate frustrations, mishaps and wholly unexpected adventures it all worked and we got back to London with half a day to spare.

The success of Around the World in 80 Days opened all sorts of new horizons, and I ended up testing my transport tolerance from North to South Pole, and around the Pacific Rim, across the Sahara and through the Himalaya. Seven times I’ve said that I’d done my last journey and seven times I’ve lied. Now, having travelled through every continent and seen life in so many countries I realize, not only how Lucky I’ve been, but also how important it is to remember all that I’ve seen and done. Opportunities like this come very rarely.

Through the course of the evening he shared amazing photos of his travels with his impeccable comic timing highlighting the idiosyncrasies of the world, and the joy of discovering them. After a good couple of hours I was inspired and invigorated to get back out and hit the road. A couple of his recommendations I will defiantly follow up on:

1. Read Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus
2. Visit Patagonia
3. Buy Monty Python authored books. He read from a couple, and had me in stitches the entire time.

If you want to make yourself extremely jealous, check out his map of world travels. On the same site you’ll find more about the journeys, included stellar photos.

David de Rothschild sounds like a stupendous badass. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But spat out that spoon and headed out on some risky and noble adventures. He founded Adventure Ecology a few years back, an org that exists simply to stage massive adventures to some of the most ecologically endangered place in the world.

National Geographic Adventure has a good article on the lead up to his next expedition, sailing across the pacific in a rudderless catamaran made of recycled plastic bottles. Sweet.

Sweeter yet though, is that the whole thing is being done to highlight the damage we are doing to the world. He’ll sail through the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch – where ocean currents have trapped several million kilos of floating trash covering an area about twice the size of Texas. This help explains why his boat is made of plastic bottles – to highlight the fact that we can either recycle or junk, or use it to kill massive areas of our planet.

So good on ya David. I look forward to following your adventure.

Map: From National Geographic’s Emily Cooper, who puts my route mapping skills to shame.