Equator

Episode 1

Africa

For most people the equator is just an imaginary line running 25,000-miles around the globe. But the countries along the equator are among the most troubled on the planet. In this new series Simon takes a journey around the region with the greatest natural biodiversity and perhaps the greatest concentration of human suffering: the equator. In EQUATOR Simon meets illegal loggers, father and son circumcisers, drunk villagers, and a young woman stuck in the baking desert. Simon and the Equator film-crew are protected by soldiers in a coca field, and UN 'peace-enforcers' in a gold mine. They are blackmailed and abandoned by drivers in one country, and travel 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, Simon 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 father from another tribe of former head-hunters decides to make Simon part of the family. After presenting his 'father' with a fine pair of trousers, Simon is blessed with blood, presented with a short sword, and adopted. 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. He helps an orphaned orangutan into a tree, swims with sea-lions, fishes for piranha, climbs the equivalent of half-way up Everest, and discovers the city thought to be most at risk from volcanic eruptions. Simon's trip takes him through the nation suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere, and the African country that's endured the most violent conflict on the planet since the Second World War.