Simon Reeve's South America

Simon journeys through the remote and little-visited northeast of the continent, from the spectacular tabletop mountain, Mount Roraima in Venezuela, through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. This section of the earth's crust is known as the Guiana Shield and contains the most unspoiled area of rainforest anywhere in the world.

In Venezuela, Simon meets some of the thousands of migrants fleeing the economic collapse of their country, an ongoing and under-reported humanitarian crisis. In neighbouring Guyana, the only English-speaking country on the continent, he visits an incredibly remote settlement in the depths of the jungle and learns that the country could be on the verge of its own oil boom.

In Suriname, Simon has an unforgettable and surreal encounter with Ronnie Brunswijk, the gun-toting former warlord who is now one of Suriname's most successful businessmen. Flying out with Ronnie to his remote jungle HQ, Simon is given a tour of his vast gold-mining concession. Despite being a convicted cocaine trafficker, Brunswijk was recently appointed vice president of Suriname.

Simon ends his journey in French Guiana, which is actually a department of France, where he visits the launch site of the European Space Agency and goes on jungle patrol with the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion.

Filmed just before the pandemic struck, Simon had no idea that his South American journey would soon be interrupted.

Simon visits Brazil, the biggest country on the continent. He starts in one of the remotest regions of the Amazon, with the Waiapi people, who cling on to their traditional way of life, which is under threat from logging and mining interests. The tribal leaders argue that preserving the forest is not only crucial to moderating the Earth's climate; they are working with Brazilian scientists to show how the Amazon can be managed to produce valuable crops and lifesaving medicines, without destroying the environment. At this point, in early 2020, Simon's journey was interrupted by the Covid pandemic, and he returns two years later to see how Brazil became one of the countries worst hit by the virus. In Manaus, the city at the heart of the Amazon, he visits a neglected indigenous neighbourhood and meets the nurse who was the only source of healthcare during the pandemic. On the outskirts of Manaus, where the Amazon jungle meets the city, he catches bats with a veterinary scientist who is hoping to identify potential future pandemics, before they enter the human population. Simon ends this leg of his journey on the west coast of Brazil, in the iconic city of Rio de Janeiro, a city under threat from climate change, vulnerable to flash floods and baking heat. The government has built a high-tech NASA-style control room to monitor all parts of the city for potential disasters. And in one favela, Simon meets the woman who has planted an urban forest to cool her neighbourhood, as well as to grow fresh food for many of the neglected children.

Simon visits Peru and Bolivia, travelling through the Andes mountains. Simon starts his journey at the world-famous ruins of Machu Pichu, one of the glories of the ancient Inca civilization. But since the arrival of Europeans, the indigenous people of the Andes - the descendants of the Inca - have suffered horribly, and to this day they live in some of the poorest communities in the region. Simon visits a remote Peruvian valley called VRAEM where the mostly indigenous population farms coca leaves, the primary ingredient of cocaine. Simon meets the impoverished farmers and goes on a raid with the heavily armed Peruvian police to destroy a cocaine making facility. Further and higher into the Andes he visits the hellish informal mining town of La Rinconada. At over 5,000 metres, it's one of the highest human settlements on Earth, and Simon meets the indigenous women who chip away at the rocks in appalling conditions to look for tiny fragments of gold. Travelling across the border into Bolivia, Simon's guide is one of the country's famous "Cholas" – indigenous women who wear traditional skirts and bowler hats. In the world's highest capital city, La Paz, he discovers how the Cholas have battled for increasing influence and representation in the county with the highest number of indigenous people in the whole continent.

Simon travels through three of the world's most extreme environments: the salt flats of Bolivia, the Brazilian Pantanal and Paraguay's Chaco Forest. In Bolivia, Simon meets a family who makes a living carving salt from the vast white expanse of the Uyuni salt flats, so huge it is said to be visible from the moon. He learns that beneath the salt could lie huge reserves of lithium, the metal so crucial for the batteries that will fuel the next generation of electric cars. Crossing into Brazil, Simon visits the world's largest wetlands, the Pantanal, and has a close encounter with South America's apex predator, the jaguar. Drought and fire threaten the Pantanal, but so too does excessive flooding, and Simon meets a farmer who has spent years building dams to hold back the rising waters and save his family farm. The last leg of this journey takes Simon into the little-visited Paraguay, where he meets a unique community which, despite their small numbers, has had a huge impact on the economy and environment of the country. Mennonites originally hail from Europe but they have spread throughout the world. In Paraguay, many live in ultra-conservative communities and eschew many of the trappings of the modern world. They drive around in horses and carts and speak their own language, known as low German. Simon visits a school where traditionally clothed children are drilled in bible texts and there are no smartphones to be seen. But the Mennonites have been hugely successful farmers, embracing modern methods where necessary to found vast cattle ranches and soy farms. They have chopped and burned huge areas of the Chaco, the unique dry spiny forest, which is twice the size of Spain and dominates the centre of the South American continent. Perhaps inevitably, this economic miracle, which has turned Paraguay into a major player in the global food market, has had its victims and Simon ends this leg of his journey with the Ayoreo people. Following a history of persecution and having lost much of their land, the Ayoreo now mount armed patrols to defend what remains. Others have given up the modern world altogether and returned to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of their parents and grandparents, living in the harsh dry forests of the Chaco.

The last leg of Simon's journey through South America takes him from Chile's Atacama Desert right down to Tierra Del Fuego, the most southerly inhabited place on Earth. The Atacama, one of the driest places on the planet, has as little as 1mm of rain per year, Simon discovers shocking evidence of human pollution. Outside the remote port city of Iquique, there's a huge mountainous landfill site, filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of used clothes. These are the result of fast fashion, where people in wealthy countries throw away millions of garments every day. Here he also meets some of the millions of Venezuelan refugees who have fled their country and spread to every corner of the continent, looking to start a new life. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Simon learns what it is like to live with a rate of inflation that dwarfs the problems we currently have. Simon continues his journey through Patagonia and meets the Mapuche people, whose insurrection is causing a major political crisis in Chile – farms and logging trucks have been burned to the ground and people have died. It's the latest chapter in a long struggle for land and rights. Simon ends his whole South American journey in the remote southern land of Tierra Del Fuego and learns how locals have resisted the arrival of vast salmon farms, which have damaged the environment further north. It's a fittingly optimistic way to end Simon's epic journey, not just through South America, but the whole of the Americas.