BBC - Equator with Simon Reeve (2006) Part 1 Africa

Simon Reeve travels to paradise beaches, dense rainforests and towering volcanoes on a 40,000 kilometre journey following the invisible line around the world. For most people, the equator is just an imaginary line around the globe but in this series Simon Reeve comes face-to-face with the reality. On a 40,000-kilometre journey, he reveals the equator as a unique region of our planet; home to both the world's greatest concentration of human poverty and natural biodiversity. Beneath the sweltering heat of the equatorial sun lie paradise beaches, strange foods and exotic wildlife, along with some of the world's most extreme terrains: dense rainforests, towering volcanoes and perilous rapids.

Part 1: Africa

Abandoned in a rainforest in Gabon and greeted by circumcisers in Kenya, Simon's journey gets underway. Simon’s journey begins on a beach in oil-rich Gabon. In the capital, Libreville, he discovers that the country has produced more than eight billion barrels of oil and used to have the world’s highest per capita consumption of Champagne – but the national wealth has always made a select few rich. Heading East along the Equator line, Simon arrives in a village where locals have been banned from hunting, and now perform traditional dances for tourists. The team drivers then demand £1,000 per day to continue working, and when the BBC crew refuses to pay, the drivers abandon the team in the rainforest. Simon develops a temperature of 40 Centigrade and starts vomiting blood: after being diagnosed with malaria, he is forced to rest before continuing his journey east. A narrow patch of Congo-Brazzaville lies on the Equator, but locals blame foreigners for an out break of the deadly Ebola virus, and the crew are told they could be attacked and killed if they land their small plane. So Simon lands in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a vast country – the size of Western Europe – where at least four million people have died since 1998 in the deadliest conflict since World War II.

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