by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Michael Palin, best known for splitting sides with comedy legends Monty Python, has taken a different career path over the past 15 years - one well over 100,000 miles-long by now. In 1988, Palin set off on the Around the World in 80 Days quest, spawning a TV series, a book and a travel bug that wouldn't quit. He's made five journeys since, braving along the way Antarctic deepfreeze, Saharan sandstorms, an impressive list of exotic illnesses and culinary feats, a couple of near-death experiences and some down time in between. His latest expedition, Sahara - as always the subject of a book and documentary series - saw 99 days in the harsh physical and political climate of a sand stretch as big as the USA. You'd wonder what that would do to a person's head.

"At times it was like some sort of cleansing draught," Palin tells me over the phone from his home in London. "Basically you get up very early and you walk to 11 and you find some shade, and you stay there until about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and you start walking again. There's no real outside noise, no houses and, well, nothing much to talk about. There's not a great deal to see apart from the stunning wild landscape. It was just such a complete opposite to the life that I live here."

But alas, idle dreamers, the great wild Sahara of Lawrence of Arabia, teeming with caravans of camels carrying gold, ivory and silk, is no more. "I don't see many good omens," Palin laments. "The biggest activity there at the moment is building a pipeline from Nigeria right up the coast to take gas to Spain, but not much else, I'm afraid - except on the extreme edges, Algeria in particular. Once they sort out the civil war they could be quite a prosperous country. It'll be very exciting to see what's happening there."

Palin's latest book (the whole thing can be read on his Web site, www.palinstravels.com), is full of vivid description, social insight and, as one would expect, humour. "I can remember laughing just uproariously with this wonderful nightclub owner in Dakkar, Senegal, who gave a terrific answer to some question I asked him in a slightly drunken interview," Palin remembers. "He said all the clubs he'd owned before were different than the one he'd had now, and I said, ‘In what way?" and he said, ‘All the other clubs were rectangular.' It was just absolutely terrific; I absolutely collapsed on the floor in laughter with the people with me."

Palin is coming to town this weekend. No, not to climb Mount Royal in his bare feet, but to speak at the Blue Metropolis on his two subjects of expertise: travel writing and comedy writing. He's known for his humility. "It's not something I particularly said I'm qualified to talk about," he says of the "Writing Ridicule" event. "I approach ridicule in rather a bleak way; I don't like to ridicule people. But I do sometimes like to ridicule systems or sort of ways of thinking, and it'll just be rather intriguing to delve back into my past and think about all the comedy I've written, and maybe come up with some sort of perspective on it."

Blue Metropolis panels "Writing the World," Friday, April 4, 7:30pm, $15; "Writing Ridicule," April 5, 11am, $10, at the Montreal Renaissance Hotel (3625 Parc)