| Please visit www.simonreeve.co.uk for more information. For most people the equator is just an imaginary line running 25000-miles around the globe. But the countries along the equator are among the most troubled on the planet. In this series Simon Reeve takes a journey around the region with the greatest natural biodiversity and perhaps the greatest concentration of human suffering: the equator. Simon meets illegal loggers, father and son circumcisers, drunk villagers, and a young woman stuck in the baking desert. He is protected by soldiers in a coca field, and UN 'peace-enforcers' in a gold mine. Blackmailed and abandoned by drivers in one country, Simon travels through another that has just 300 miles of paved roads -- despite being the size of Western Europe. Simon is drenched while white-water rafting, surrounded by a million flamingoes and swallowed by a tidal wave. After being warned about the deadly virus Ebola, he vomits blood and develops a temperature of nearly 40C. Diagnosed with malaria, he's saved by medicine derived from the Vietnamese sweet wormwood. One remote tribe takes Simon to their sacred monument, while a man from another tribe of former head-hunters decides to make Simon part of the family: Simon is blessed with blood, presented with a short sword, and adopted. Elsewhere, Simon discovers a matrilineal society where daughters are called 'iron butterflies', mass graves in the jungle, and islands where protesting fisherman have killed giant tortoises ... |
