''Sahara'' is the book that

Michael Palin Sir Michael Edward Palin (; born 5 May 1943) is an English actor, comedian, writer, and television presenter. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. He received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was knig ...

wrote to accompany the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

television documentary series '' Sahara with Michael Palin''. This book, like the other books that Palin wrote following each of his seven trips for the BBC, consists both of his text and of many photographs to illustrate the trip. All of the pictures in this book were taken by

Basil Pao Basil Pao Ho-Yun (鲍皓昕) is a Hong Kong–based photographer. He has been the stills photographer on the BBC filming teams that made Michael Palin's television travel programmes. Early career Pao was born in Hong Kong, but started his career ...

, the stills photographer who was part of the team who did the trip (Basil Pao also produced a book, '' Inside Sahara'', containing many more of his pictures). This trip involved traveling all around and through the Sahara Desert, starting and ending at Gibraltar. The book contains 13 chapters: ''Gibraltar'', ''Morocco'', ''Algeria'', ''Western Sahara'', ''Mauritania'', ''Senegal'', ''Mali'', ''Niger'', ''Algeria'', ''Libya'', ''Tunisia'', ''Algeria'', and ''Gibraltar''. The reason Algeria is featured three times is that the trip first cut through part of western Algeria, then later up through south, central and eastern Algeria, and finally on the return trip followed the Mediterranean coast of northern Algeria. Some of these countries are huge; for example, Algeria is four times the size of France or three times the size of Texas. The Sahara Desert is roughly the same size as the United States, and the trip covered 10,000 miles (16,000 km.) and took three months. The book is presented in a diary format; Palin starts each section of the book with a heading like "Day Forty-Two: Djenne". However, not all days are mentioned, a result of this trip being broken up into shorter trips, a fact that is not mentioned in the TV programme.

Audio edition

This book is available as an audiobook, read by Michael Palin. There are two versions available. The abridged version lasts 6 hours and the unabridged version 9 hours, 52 minutes.

External links

Full text of ''Sahara''
at Palin's Travels {{Michael Palin's Trips British travel books 2002 non-fiction books Books by Michael Palin Books about the Sahara Weidenfeld & Nicolson books English non-fiction books