In Pole to Pole, Michael Palin and a crew from the BBC travel from the North Pole to the South, mostly by land and sea, and roughly following the 30 degree East meridian. Like Around the World in 80 Days, the text is available in full on online; there’s also a nine-episode BBC TV series, and the unabridged audiobook that I listened to.
There were a couple of notable things about this one, to my mind. First, sheer luck: they leave the U.S.S.R. days, literally, before the August 1991 coup; they went through China in 80 Days before Tiananmen Square, as Douglas Adams put it, “underwent that brutal transformation that occurs in the public mind to the sites of all catastrophes: they become reference points in time instead of actual places,” but a few months before, not a few days. (Adams visited the Square (the place) while traveling for Last Chance to See, and quite enjoyed it. Palin noted in 80 Days, that while in Hong Kong, he’d had a phone message from Adams, who “is quite upstaging me with something like a two-year journey to various remote parts of the world for a BBC radio series.”)
Second, it was almost reassuring to find that there are, in fact, travel difficulties that the might of the BBC cannot overcome. So many unfriendly countries had been crossed, and so many last-minute problems negotiated away, that it was beginning to feel somewhat unreal. Apparently, however, even the BBC cannot talk its way onto a supply ship for Antarctica that’s fully booked with scientists and survey staff, and so the team must get to the South Pole via South America, not Africa.
And finally, John Cleese is silly.