Creators of ‘Roughing It’ documentary set sights on South Pacific

What drinks yak milk vodka, cites Werner Herzog as a cinematic influence and has an upcoming documentary travel series on PBS that doesn’t suck?

The answer is Christopher Rufo and Keith Ochwat, two travelers that chucked their jobs and college plans to strike off for Mongolia with only a video camera and the usual backpacker gear.

The emerged roughly a year later with a documentary film called Roughin It: Mongolia, chronically their travels through the steppes and towns of Mongolia. All total the pair make a 1,600-mile loop through Mongolia, with a pretty simple setup — one holds the camera, the other talks.

The show takes its name from Mark Twain’s classic travelogue, Roughing It, and offers a similar mix of travel, humor and people met along the way.

What separates Roughing It from so many of the other travel programs you see these days is Rufo and Ochwat’s enthusiasm. Like travel writing, travel film and television seems to swing to either side of a spectrum neatly defined on one hand by the witty cynicism of Anthony Bourdain and the willful naiveté of Samantha Brown, without ever accounting for the more common middle ground.

While I’m a fan of Bourdain (Brown makes me want to stick a fork in my eye, but that’s just me), his show isn’t really about travel — it’s about Anthony Bourdain. And the rest of travel show world leaves much to be desired, which is a gap Rufo and Ochwat manage to fill quite well.

Rufo and Ochwat have some humor, and yes, a few moments of cynicism, in their debut, but for the most part the show’s charm is the hosts’ genuine engagement with the world they encounter, something that the two credit to their lack of film crew and ability to remain “normal” travelers from the point of view of locals. In short, locals treat them like ordinary people which makes for a more compelling show.

Unfortunately Roughing It: Mongolia seems to have come and gone from PBS (if the word bittorrent means anything to you, you should be able to find a download), but the good news is that PBS will be airing a new documentary (series actually) from Rufo and Ochwat next year (no official date yet, I’ve seen spring 2009 and “late” 2009, so let’s leave it at next year).

This time around the pair are headed to the South Pacific and PBS will be airing a total of eight episodes. Set your DVRs.