Product Description
Limited copies available now of this wonderful large format (27.5cm x 19.5cm x 2.5cm) paperback, packed full of photos!
Michael’s epic voyages have seen him circumnavigate the globe, travel from the North to the South Pole and circle the countries of the Pacific Ocean, but this was perhaps the greatest challenge yet: to cross the vast and merciless Sahara desert.
As the journey unfolds, the Sahara reveals not the emptiness of endless sand dunes, but a huge and diverse range of cultures and landscapes and a long history of commerce and conquest stretching from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the oil-rich Islamic republics of today.
On his way, he encounters dangers such as camel stew, being run over by the Paris-Dakar rally and Dakar nightlife, as well as returning to the original spot where The Life of Brian was filmed.
Starting and finishing the adventure in the once stable, now uncertain colony of Gibraltar, Palin crosses the straight to Morocco, and pauses in Fez and Marrakech before traversing the mighty Atlas Mountains. In the stony, hostile wastes of Western Algeria he spends time in one of the refugee camps of the Saharawis, a population in exile.
Recovering from and overdose of camel stew, he heads to Mauritania, where he rides the longest train in the world, finds a holy city half engulfed by sand, and nearly gets run over by the Paris Dakar Rally. Arriving in Dakar a few days behind them, he samples the city’s exhausting night life, then takes a train to the heart of Mali, home of great music, the largest mud building in the world and the great river Niger, on which Michael rides to the legendary city of Timbuktu. He walks with nomadic herders and rides with a Touareg camel caravan through Niger, scales the Hoggar Mountains and flies into the oilfields of Algeria, before investigating Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya and the stunning classical remains of Tunisia, where the Life of Brian was filmed and Palin crucified.
