Michael Palin’s latest travel adventure took place March 2022 and consisted of a short (two week) trip to Iraq, he was after all seventy eight when he made the journey and the epic trips from the 1980’s and 90’s are probably behind him now but this was still a fascinating read. This was his first documentary travelogue since visiting North Korea in 2018 which was equally short and it is now eleven years since his last trip lasting multiple months which saw him explore Brasil. The book is beautifully illustrated and written in Palin’s easy to read diary format which he has honed over decades of doing such series for television although now they are for ITN and Channel 5 here in the UK rather than the earlier, and higher budget, trips for the BBC.

The book covers eighteen days travelling, although days one to four are in Turkey as he travels down to the Iraq border finally crossing over on the evening of the fourth day and day eighteen has him getting up at 5am to dash to the airport to leave so that doesn’t really count. On the way through Iraq following the River Tigris he gets to places I read about as a child, the ancient city of Ur and its famous ziggurat, Babylon and the astonishing minaret in Samarra which can be seen top right on the cover of the book. Like Palin I have wanted to visit these places for decades, and nearly went soon after returning from Iran in 1997 but various other destinations called to me more urgently and later it became too dangerous to go. From the descriptions in this book it looks like it may be becoming possible to be a relatively safe tourist in Iraq again, however he explains that major destinations such as Ur’s ziggurat and the site of Babylon were largely reconstructed over their original ruins during the time of Saddam Hussain. That doesn’t make them less impressive and the lower parts, certainly of the ziggurat, are genuinely thousands of years old so still worth a visit. It would be the endless waits at random checkpoints that they endured for seemingly little point other than to justify the existence of the checkpoint and the guards manning it, I doubt I have the patience for nowadays.

The book is quite short, just 171 pages and a lot of those have half and half text and photographs of the trip, I therefore read it in about two and a half hours. I would have liked more details especially on the life of the people coming out of decades of conflict. Palin was always good interacting with locals in previous documentaries and whilst I haven’t yet seen the TV series that this book accompanies, that is only three sixty minute episodes and those include adverts so I doubt you get much more insight. Having said that I really enjoyed the book and when I started it was difficult to put down, the urge to just read another chapter was always there and as each chapter was a days journey it felt even more like a diary and you felt you were progressing down Iraq along with the small team making the films.

Unlike his previous expeditions where he planned a lot of the journey himself and was very much an independent traveller, albeit with a TV crew in tow, this time Palin travelled with a company called Untamed Borders which means that a large part of his itinerary can be booked direct with them if you too fancy a trip to Iraq.