After watching Charley Boorman, partnered with Ewan McGregor, travel around the world in the television series Long Way Round

, and from the tip of Scotland to the tip of Africa in Long Way Down

, I wasn't sure what to expect from By Any Means

, where a McGregorless Boorman makes his way from Ireland to Australia using a wide variety of means of transport.

And after watching the first episode, where Boorman, his director Russ Malkin and camera operator Paul Mungeam, make their way from Wicklow to the English Channel, I was prepared to give the series a pass: Boorman without McGregor was a little bit like Hardy without Laurel, and I found myself missing the partnership. Something that wasn't made any better by a cameo by McGregor early in the episode just as the team heads out.

But I decided to give another episode a go, and they've managed to bring me around. While billed as a three-man trip, By Any Means is really a solo adventure with a smaller support team: Malkin and Mungeam make occasional appearances, but they're a supporting cast at best with the focus strongly on Boorman.

And perhaps it just took an episode for Boorman to get the confidence needed to host alone; while the first episode was scattered and Boorman appeared distracted, once things got seriously underway he seemed to perk up, and the trip, and the program, became far more compelling.

I'll have more to say once they've made it all the way to Australia, but if you're interested in journey-oriented travel television, you might want to check out By Any Means

for yourself.

Years after the independent video rental market has all but dried up elsewhere, we're very lucky here in Charlottetown

to have That's Entertainment

-- it's a tour de force that makes renting from the multinationals feel like eating cardboard.

Last Sunday I stopped in to rent a menagerie of DVDs to tide us through the winter storms and holiday week; they're due back tomorrow and we made it through almost everything (credit to my in-laws for putting up with the box-set marathons). Here's what we've seen:

• Long Way Down

  is the television series about the motorcycle journey by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman from John o' Groats at the tip of Scotland to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa, a follow-on from their Long Way Round

  journey around the world. They've done a decent job of turning what could have otherwise been endless footage of motorcycles on dirt into compelling viewing, and they deserve credit for shining a light on Africa as a something other than an endless crisis. The soundtrack

  is particularly impressive.

• Ballykissanel Series 3

  is twelve episodes of quirky Irish dramedy. It's the season I've dreaded watching since I became a fan many years ago; suffice to say that episode 11 is a shocker. Perhaps an acquired taste, but if you manage to acquire it, you'll find all six series at the Provincial Library

  as well as at That's Entertainment.

• The Shop Around the Corner

  is a 1940 starring Jimmie Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The film served as an inspiration for the 1998 You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and the broad themes of the two films are very similar. The Shop Around the Corner is set in Budapest, but although the names of the characters are Hungarian, the films entirely in English and might as well have been set in London or Chicago. Not a must-see movie, but well-acted and interesting nonetheless.

Air Canada is selling Halifax to Beijing

for $565 each way for travel until April 30, 2009. March break in Prince Edward Island is March 16 to 20, 2009.

What the web version of this CBC story about ministerial travel on Prince Edward Island

cannot effectively communicate is the sense of righteous indignation with which is was delivered on the local radio news this morning.

Of the myriad traits of Prince Edward Islanders, good and bad, the most poisonous and self-defeating one is xenophobia: the sense that we've got a good thing going on here and the associated resistance to the strange, the foreign and the unusual. As if accepting a world beyond our borders risks pollution of the Island Way of Life.

This is by no means a universal trait, and there are many, many Islanders with minds open to the world. But still the tendency lurks in the heart of the Island identity. And that's not only unfortunate for the rest of the world, which could learn a thing or two from Islanders, but more so for the Island: restricting the oxygen of the novel is not the way to thrive in the interconnected world.

Which is why the CBC's "gotcha" approach to "uncovering" ministerial travel, as though finding evidence of an egregious crime, is so galling. It is the role of the fourth estate to be vigilant, and certainly the CBC fulfills this role every day. To fan the flames of the natural tendency of Islanders to be suspicious of anyone travelling off the Island, however, is irresponsible, and goes beyond vigilance and into tabloidism.

I'm certain the some ministerial travel is vital to the life of the province. I'm equally certain that, on occasion, ministerial travel is essentially ceremonial and at least somewhat self-indulgent. Which travel is which deserves scrutiny.

But regardless of how practical ministerial travel is, it is important to the life of the province that ministers travel, broadly and frequently: to remain solely inside the echo chamber that is Island politics leaves a minister exposed to a limited slice of ideas, approaches, opportunities and ways of doing things; the simple fact of being immersed in a different environment is reason enough to travel, for the openness of mind that inevitably results.

When Premier Robert Ghiz went to China

earlier this autumn there may well have been practical reasons for doing so.

But, more importantly, when Islanders saw Robert Ghiz on television standing on a stage in China with his fellow Premiers it communicated, as the Premier himself said, "We need to look outwardly." That's an impulse we should celebrate.

Update for non-Islanders: "ministers" are member of the provincial cabinet

, chosen by the Premier to lead government departments.

In her introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

, author Susan Orlean writes about "travel writing in the new world that 9/11 seemed to have brought forth":

Should anyone write about -- or read about -- what it's like to snowshoe through Alaska or raft in Costa Rica when the world seemed to be falling apart? Would anyone in his or her right mind have any interest in leaving home when the universe seemed so threatening? What I said then, and still believe, is that human beings are stubbornly and persistently curious and that I can't imagine we will ever lose our desire to know about what lies beyond our immediate horizon. At a time when the world feels chaotic and frightening, writers who go out to see it and describe it seem more important, not less. Even fluffy, expository stories about pretty places matter if people are less inclined to travel, since then the writer acts as the reader's proxy, bringing back the world that most people might be reluctant to go out and see for themselves. At the most elemental level, the world's troubles are the result of people turning inward and turning away from whatever and whoever is different and unfamiliar. If a writer can make even one reader feel more open to someone or someplace new, I think he or she has accomplished something well worth doing.

I think the same thing could be said about the version of trying times we seem to be entering now.

If you happen to find yourself in Dushanbe

, the capital city of Tajikistan, needing to drive up to Tashkent

, the capital of Uzbekistan, you can take the scenic

M34 highway.

Eventually you will come to the Anzob Pass

, about which the foreign office says

:

The Anzob Pass is still closed but it is possible to drive from Dushanbe to the North via a tunnel still under construction. Embassy staff are prohibited from using this tunnel when driving on official business. This road is particularly dangerous in winter due to icy conditions and frequent avalanches and drivers can be trapped for a long time if caught in an avalanche because of the uninhabited mountain terrain.

So if the Anzob Pass is closed, you can take the tunnel. Although the Anzob Tunnel is "still under construction," apparently it's possible, by times, to drive through it, as demonstrated by this this round-the-world cyclist

who shot video of his trip through the tunnel

.

If the Anzob Pass happens to be open, it will take some time; according to the United Nations Development Program

you can:

Drive from Tashkent via Khujand and over the passes to Dushanbe - spectacular, best done by driving first to Khujand and spending the night there in the UNDP guest-house, then leaving the following morning. The drive from Khujand takes 7 hours, but one should not hurry, so allow a full day. However, the southern of the two passes, the Anzob pass. Normally the pass opens for regular traffic in the last week of May or thereabouts.

I have come to know all this because I suddenly became entranced with the idea of attending BarCamp in Dushanbe on November 26, a dream that, alas, I'm fairly confident I won't realize.

Google Maps now includes walking directions as well as driving directions. And so I can find that walking from Charlottetown, PEI to Atlin, BC

would take 54 days and 9 hours. I'm also warned:

Use caution ? This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.

Perhaps more practical, it's good to know that I should be able to walk to Halifax in 2 days

once the oil runs out.

We arrived back from Iceland in Halifax late last night, having met up with Olle and Luisa, en route from Copenhagen, in Keflavik. We stashed ourselves at the Quality Inn by the airport, and then took a swing through Halifax proper this morning. Coffee at Cafe Ristretto, lunch at Wooden Monkey, then drive and ferry home for supper at The Noodle House

. Not a bad introduction to the east coast culinary scene.

Tomorrow we rejoin our regularly scheduled programming.

We didn't really have a plan for today. So we woke up and headed down to breakfast here at Hraunsnef Country Hotel

with only a sketchy idea of what the day would hold.

I choose this hotel almost completely at random: I knew we wanted to see something of Western Iceland, and that we wanted to be in the countryside, but that was about it. Iceland Farmholidays

was where I turned first, but they have a "you can't book a specific place" policy that didn't strike me as all that convenient. Hraunsnef, although a member of their network, also allows independent bookings, however, so lured in by their website

, I booked two nights. It wasn't until we arrived that we got some concept of the area.

Under the counsel of our friendly host, we decided to spend the day looping up Highway 518. It was quite a journey: by my rough calculation we passed through about a dozen geologic epochs and just as many biological regions: we saw everything from verdant riverside fields full of sheep to bouldered Moon-like landscapes:

Highway 518 winds its way up one side of a valley and back down the other. At the apex of the loop you can almost see the Langjökull glacier -- if we'd had a more powerful car we could have driven closer, but one look at the "F" road that led that way (the designation given to "you need a 4x4" roads) and we realized that we had to be content with a faraway look:

Down the other side we passed a little country church with an "organ" made of rocks:

And a little bit down the road an impressive waterfall that came out of the side of a river:

The tiny village of Reykholt was where we stopped for lunch. Alas we stopped at 2:06 p.m. and the only restaurant in town, at the big tourist hotel, closed for lunch at 2:00 p.m., so we had to be content with bread and cheese from the gas station (good bread, though). Reykholt is an important historic site in Iceland, a centre of literature and religion; while the modern and historic churches are indeed impressive, the museum under the church is moribund and not at all a must-see. We did learn, however, that it's time to cut Oliver loose next week:

At the end of Highway 518 is Deildartunguhver, the largest geothermal spring in the world: it spews out 50 gallons of boiling water a second, water that's piped long-distance to the towns of Borgarnes (34 km) and Akranes (64 km):

By this time the day was late, and Oliver needed to pee, necessitating a quick over-land jaunt to the gas station. Then back to Hraunsnef for a soak, another excellent supper, and, soon, sleep.