Sahara with Michael Palin

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Sahara with Michael Palin - Destination Timbuktu

Michael Palin

John-Paul Davidson

Roger Mills

Sahara with Michael Palin: Episode 2: Destination Timbuktu

Documentaries

Destination Timbuktu

Episode 2

Episode 2: Destination Timbuktu

BBC One - Sahara with Michael Palin, Destination Timbuktu

After a stopover in Senegal, Michael meets kora player Toumani Diabate in Bamako.

Series charting a trek across the Sahara Desert. After a brief stopover in cosmopolitan Senegal, Michael endures two nights aboard the train to Bamako.

Series charting Michael Palin's trek across the Sahara Desert. Leaving the desert behind, Michael briefly savours the delights of cosmopolitan Senegal - jazz clubs, wrestling competitions, dance troupes and the queen of the Senegalese soaps, Marie-Madeleine.

Joining the so-called Bamako Express, he endures two days and nights on the train, but in the process gets to know a schoolmistress who is nothing if not forthright about the disadvantages of polygamy.

In Bamako he finds renowned kora player Toumani Diabate and delights in a master class before heading off to Dogon country.

The Dogon people have one of the most distinctive and celebrated cultures of West Africa and they nearly kill him with a combination of excessively complex origin myths, an exploding flintlock and boiling hot millet.

Celebrating the Muslim 'Tabaski' feast in the beautiful city of Djenne with a man called Pygmy and securing a passage on a cargo boat with a Norwegian missionary called Kristin, the rest of the journey down the Niger River to Timbuktu seems plain sailing, until the boat runs aground a day from its destination.

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Factual: Travel

Michael Palin explores nine countries and cultures during a trek across the Sahara Desert.

Series in which Michael Palin explores nine fascinating countries and their cultures during a trek across the Sahara Desert.

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Sahara with Michael Palin

Episode 2: Destination Timbuktu

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