A really good must watch series doe people like me who love to travel or watch travel documentary meeting new people new places and discovering live.A Really well filmed series by BBC.Simon comes across as a very naive presenter. Reading his wikipedia page, he is an extremely learned person so it gets very grating halfway through the series to listen to his constant moralizing and moaning about situations in the various countries After making a couple of series circling the globe along the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, it was no surprise to find Simon Reeve back to complete the Ronseal hat-trick on Sunday night with Tropic of Cancer (BBC2, Sunday). And why not? Reeve is an agreeable companion for the journey: unlike Stephen Fry, who managed to casually bump into both Sting and Morgan Freeman – mirabile dictu! – on his potter around the US, Reeve has the kind of experiences on his travels that the rest of us might also expect.
Well, almost. The drawback is that there are an awful lot of miles to cover in not much time and every location is inevitably reduced to a single themed episode. So for Mexico City we got lucha libre (those masked wrestlers), for Cuba we got organic allotments, and for the Bahamas we got the invasion of the lionfish. All were very watchable, yet somehow insubstantial. You couldn't help feeling there must be more to these places.
Reeve began his odyssey on the Baja peninsula. "This is going to be my biggest challenge yet," he said. But it didn't exactly look that way – the first place he came to was Cabo San Lucas, a 20-mile stretch of coast that has been turned into a playground for the American super-rich, where villas can set you back up to $12,000 a night. But this was just to soften you up for what came next.
Sunday-night travel programmes have to obey certain rules – exotic locations, big skies, breathtaking scenery and quaint foreigners – and Reeve dutifully ticks all these boxes. But he's also a decent journalist: in the late 1990s he was one of the first to warn that an al-Qaida attack on the American mainland was imminent, and he can't help but try to subvert the genre.
For a stunning 20 minutes or so in the middle of the programme, he did just that. First, he went to the nondescript town of Culiacán, the epicentre of Mexican drug-trafficking – a place where gang culture and violence isn't so much a way of life as a religion. Reeve took us to a shrine where you can buy relics to Jesús Malverde (the traffickers' folk saint of choice) and pray for a safe drug run, and then on to a vast cemetery, where 90% of the people buried there died under the age of 30. Some mausoleums are two storeys high and come with air-conditioning; all celebrate the universal currency of the AK-47.
Next stop was Durango, a small village in the Sierra Madre, which is being systematically destroyed by a massive gold mine that's dynamiting everything in sight, including any locals who happen to object. No wonder virtually every Mexican Reeve met said his or her one goal in life is to cross the border into the US.
Well, almost. The drawback is that there are an awful lot of miles to cover in not much time and every location is inevitably reduced to a single themed episode. So for Mexico City we got lucha libre (those masked wrestlers), for Cuba we got organic allotments, and for the Bahamas we got the invasion of the lionfish. All were very watchable, yet somehow insubstantial. You couldn't help feeling there must be more to these places.
Reeve began his odyssey on the Baja peninsula. "This is going to be my biggest challenge yet," he said. But it didn't exactly look that way – the first place he came to was Cabo San Lucas, a 20-mile stretch of coast that has been turned into a playground for the American super-rich, where villas can set you back up to $12,000 a night. But this was just to soften you up for what came next.
Sunday-night travel programmes have to obey certain rules – exotic locations, big skies, breathtaking scenery and quaint foreigners – and Reeve dutifully ticks all these boxes. But he's also a decent journalist: in the late 1990s he was one of the first to warn that an al-Qaida attack on the American mainland was imminent, and he can't help but try to subvert the genre.
For a stunning 20 minutes or so in the middle of the programme, he did just that. First, he went to the nondescript town of Culiacán, the epicentre of Mexican drug-trafficking – a place where gang culture and violence isn't so much a way of life as a religion. Reeve took us to a shrine where you can buy relics to Jesús Malverde (the traffickers' folk saint of choice) and pray for a safe drug run, and then on to a vast cemetery, where 90% of the people buried there died under the age of 30. Some mausoleums are two storeys high and come with air-conditioning; all celebrate the universal currency of the AK-47.
Next stop was Durango, a small village in the Sierra Madre, which is being systematically destroyed by a massive gold mine that's dynamiting everything in sight, including any locals who happen to object. No wonder virtually every Mexican Reeve met said his or her one goal in life is to cross the border into the US.
