Give this travel reporter some latitude... (From Bournemouth Echo)

Give this travel reporter some latitude...

7:00pm Wednesday 3rd March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

The problem with a lot of these conventional travel programmes is that they’re tediously formulaic.

You get one sun-kissed presenter, a picture postcard location, a few museums, a couple of restaurants and it’s more from another mainstream location next week.

Happily, when Simon Reeve took up the challenge with his brand of travel reportage, viewers were in for something completely different.

Those familiar with his Tropic Of Capricorn and Equator series will have noticed how Simon’s penchant for adventure and appetite for the unusual make informative and entertaining television.

And, on Sunday, he is back on our screens with his latest series, Tropic Of Cancer, which, like his other programmes, follows Simon as he travels along an invisible line of latitude.

“This isn’t just travel porn,” asserts Simon. “We are trying to open people’s eyes to the reality out there, positive and negative.”

His ethos undoubtedly makes for great television although it has put the broadcaster in danger on more than one occasion – like when he joined a Mexican SWAT team on a drug raid.

“The line took me to the city of Culiacan, one of the major centres in the ongoing drug war between the Mexican state and the drug barons,” explains Simon, a former Sunday Times journalist.

“There are elements of a civil war about it.”

Simon tells me that cartels in the area have enlisted the support of former Mexican SAS soldiers, who help them fight against the state.

“To relay that story was quite important. Fortunately, the house we raided didn’t contain ex-SAS guys with armour piercing bullets.”

Another hair-raising moment for Simon was when he was being pursued by the Indian secret police as he tried to illegally cross into Burma – he lost them by using his wife, Anya, as a decoy.

“She willingly volunteered,” laughs Simon, whose wife filmed much of the series.

Luckily for Simon, his latest trip wasn’t all about drug wars and subterfuge. He also managed to squeeze in some kite-surfing in Eastern Sahara, wrestling in Mexico (which he lost) and some fishing with a chap called Ali the Lion, a desert tribesman who enlists the help of otters to increase his catch.

He also went to Somalia to buy a dodgy passport.

“It’s a ridiculously dangerous part of the planet and to illustrate how the country has collapsed I went to a market to meet a guy called Mr Big Beard,” he says.

“The passport agency in Somalia has long gone – the government collapsed and it’s in a state of complete anarchy – and Mr Big Beard was the bloke who liberated the passport stamps from the ministry. He is making a tidy living flogging the passports.

“I haven’t attempted to go through US border control carrying it – it might involve an examination with large up-to-the-elbow gloves.”

• Tropic Of Cancer starts this Sunday at 8pm on BBC2.