In the first of two reports, Simon Reeve visits Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Drugs and danger await when Simon Reeve visits Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the second of two reports.
Ben Anderson's first ports of call are Liberia and Sierra Leone, where he finds both optimism in the face of adversity and a pervasive desire for peace.
Ben Anderson concludes his adventures along Africa's west coast, where modern-day states live with a legacy of slavery, colonial carve-ups and horrific civil wars. In the impoverished Ivory Coast he finds a basilica taller than the Vatican, while in Benin voodoo is flourishing and a huge oil spill in Nigeria's delta has blighted the land.
In this episode Ben Anderson visits Vietnam and Cambodia, to see what effect the "American War" had.
From starving coffee farmers in Nicaragua to a priest who survived El Salvador's death squads, Ben Anderson meets those left behind after US military action. Chemical weapons await when he visits the resort island Panama. Whose are they? Meanwhile, Honduras hosts a war between gangs and state.
First on Simon Reeve's tour are Somaliland, Transdneistria in the Black Sea region and Taiwan. Along the way, he gets drunk with a president, meets a nationalistic boy band and buys a Somali diplomatic passport. He sees mass graves, hi-tech weaponry and is arrested trying to film a military base.
South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia are on the itinerary as Simon Reeve continues his hazardous tour of breakaway states in the Caucasus region. He uncovers 30,000 live shells in a warehouse where security measures amount to a piece of string, and has an unnerving encounter with KGB operatives.
Altitude sickness is just one of the delights awaiting Ben Anderson on the Amazon, Ganges and Congo rivers. Starting in the Andes, he trains with elite police and joins a group of peasants who mount a takeover from rich farmers. In India, Ben visits the holy city of Varanasi, where the volume of burials has turned the Ganges into a health hazard. At the Congo river, Ben meets passengers waiting for a ferry that has never left and soldiers extorting taxes under the nose of the UN.
Iraqi soldiers and riots await as Ben Anderson travels to the Jordan and Euphrates rivers.
North Korea & Iraq
Syria, Libya, Iran & Cuba
