In the original dustsheet. Orange cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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In this account of the third of Michael Palin’s travel adventures for BBC Television, he journeys for almost a year, covering 50,000 miles and all of the 18 countries that border the Pacific Ocean, encompassing a wide diversity of landscape, culture and people. The Pacific Rim is one of the world’s most volatile areas, with economies that are expanding faster than anywhere else on earth – and here the earth itself is in a constant state of flux. Not for nothing is the Pacific coastline known as the “Ring of Fire” – volcanoes mark Palin’s journey like stepping stones, and he climbs one which has recently erupted and is still smoking. He negotiates mountains and plunging gorges, crosses glaciers, dodges icebergs, follows great rivers such as the Yangtse and the Amazon, and confronts the notorious Cape Horn and the wild and windswept beaches of western Alaska. The people Palin meets include one of the few remaining survivors of a Siberian Gulag camp, head-hunters in Borneo, and Japanese monks. He eats maggots in Mexico, rustles camels in the Australian desert, lands a plane in Seattle, and sings with the Pacific Fleet choir in Vladivostok.

Review: Having enjoyed Michael Palin’s novel, The Truth, Full Circle was my next choice of book. I saw some of the television series of Mr Palin’s Pacific Rim travels. What comes across in the book, far more than from the television programmes, is the hardship and the duration of the trip, the toughness and the bravery of the whole crew, the distance from home and families for them all, and the constant packing of bags and endless travel that often lasted for many, many hours between stages of the journey. In reading, there is more time to assess these facts than there is in a program lasting about an hour wherein perhaps two or three countries passed through are covered. Mr Palin does not moan about these things!!! Rather, he sees the funny side of almost every personal inconvenience and makes me laugh every few paragraphs or so with his amazing sense of the ridiculous. The team has savoured/endured so many experiences. How lucky we are that the author can write it all for posterity with such a light, entertaining skill. My lasting cherished pick of the prose is his description of his own getting out of a bunk bed which was so close to the one above that he got out lying flat, and after a few minutes “inserted” himself back into it. Every time I see a letter-box that comes to mind. Thank you Mr Palin for a whole lot of interest and laughter.

Michael Palin has written and starred in numerous TV programmes and films, from Monty Python and Ripping Yarns to The Missionary and The Death of Stalin. He has also made several much-acclaimed travel documentaries, his journeys taking him to the North and South Poles, the Sahara Desert, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe and Brazil. His books include accounts of his journeys, novels (Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth) and several volumes of diaries. From 2009 to 2012 he was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He received a BAFTA fellowship in 2013, and a knighthood in the 2019 New Year Honours list. He lives in London.