Not even a close encounter with a rampaging wild boar in darkest Brazil can deter Michael Palin from his passion for globetrotting, he tells Hannah Stephenson

IT has been five years since Michael Palin put away his travelling boots to become a home bird for a while. But it could never be forever, he explains. “I have a low boredom threshold. Travelling is like having a shot of strong coffee. It galvanises the senses, physical and mental.”

Palin, who turns 70 next year, was also concerned that if he left it much longer, he might become a bit too old for mammoth excursions.

“But then I look at David Attenborough,” he counters.

“There he is, 86 and still sitting on top of an iceberg somewhere doing a piece to camera.

As long as you’re enthusiastic and curious, you might as well keep at it.”

So he left his home in North London and set off for Brazil, a country not previously stamped on his passport, but now the subject of his new BBC1 series and accompanying book. All he knew about Brazil was that it represented sun, sea and samba – and the most successful national football team in history.

“It’s the fifth biggest country in the world and I can’t quite think why I’ve missed it,” says the Monty Python star, whose travel series have included Around The World In 80 Days, Pole To Pole, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe.

Life on the road wasn’t always comfortable.

During the four months he was travelling he wrapped himself up in mosquito nets in the Amazonian rainforest and equipped himself with a bodyguard when filming in some of Brazil’s more dangerous urban shanty towns, known as favelas.

These towns used to be a no-go area for visitors because they were controlled by the drug gangs. But, ahead of the World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympics in 2016, a policy called “pacification”

is trying to rid the areas of vice and integrate them into city life.

“There’s still an edgy feel,” says Palin. “You’ve got to have someone with you in the street and as soon as you enter the shanty town you have to open all the windows of your vehicle so that they can see you. They just want to know that you’re a white film crew with permission to film there and not a rival drug gang coming in.”

Nothing could have prepared him for a terrifying encounter with a wild boar while staying with an indigenous tribe in a remote rainforest, sleeping in hammocks in a large circular hut.

“In the middle of the night I needed to answer the call of nature, but there were no toilets. I creaked the door open and went out and was having a pee in the bushes when, ‘Rooooaaarrr’ there’s this massive noise from this thing crashing through the grass towards me,” he recalls.

“It was quite aggressive and I was terrified so I ran back very fast, but then I couldn’t find the door. I thought I was going to be trodden on.

“Then I saw one of the ladies in the tribe was holding the door open for me and I realised that, for them, opening and shutting the door at night is very important because it’s security for the whole tribe.”

He no longer packs home comforts when filming in far-flung destinations. “I take my little black notebooks, which are vital to record my observations.

If you are going somewhere in the outback you just take toilet rolls.”

Who knows where he’ll end up next. “However happy I might be at home, as long as there are maps and guide books and airline schedules, I am still fatally susceptible to the lure of the open road,” he says.

  • Brazil begins on Wednesday, BBC1, 9pm. The accompanying book is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25 (eBook £12.99)