Episodes
1. The Lost City of Gold (Peru)
50 min
Inca (ing-kàh) ....... The two flinty syllables strike at the imagination like the sudden hard beat of an Andean drum. Cities of gold; sun worship; virgin sacrifice. The stuff of legend. Legends that for the most part remain hidden in the impenetrable no-man’s land of Peru’s high country. For the better part of 400 years people have searched the deep canyons & towering ice peaks of these mist-covered cloud forests trying to locate the lost cities of the Inca. They were all after one thing; gold. Any gold would do but there was one thing desired above all others, the Great Golden Disc of the Sun. The most sacred of all Inca relics. The Inca Holy Grail. It is in search of this Holy Grail that David Adams goes on his journey to Puncuyoc, sacred Sister City of Machu Picchu; the city sought but never found by Hiram Bingham.
2. The Last Trail of Butch and Sundance (Bolivia)
50 min
David Adams re-lives the last days on the last trail of two American heroes, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, through the deserts of Bolivia. In 1908 the two legendary outlaws disappeared in the south of Bolivia not far from the border of Argentina. Were they killed by the Bolivian Cavalry? Or did they fake their deaths and escape to the USA and Europe as rich men? This is the mystery tackled by David Adams and the “Journeys” team. He recreates the lives and adventures of Butch and Sundance from La Paz in the north, to San Vincente to the south. And in the process he discovers what life was really like for them, and the true story of what happened in their final hours.
3. The Lost World of the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia)
50 min
The Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia are how Asia used to be. A surviving pocket of intact wildlife & wilderness that’s been untouched by history. And not just any history. It’s survived Year Zero. Pol Pot. The Killing Fields. History at its most vicious. David Adams enters this lost world in search of the khting vor, a mysterious snake-eating animal known as the “Cambodian unicorn” which was until recently believed to be extinct. On his journey he runs the gauntlet of renegade bands of the Khmer Rouge and Mekong River pirates, goes trapping tigers and discovers the jungle-choked remains of what was once the biggest city on Earth.
4. In Search of Jason and the Argonauts (Georgia & Azerbaijan)
50 min
Nowhere else on Earth is the difference between the tranquillity & beauty of the physical world and the brutality & disorder of the people who live in it brought into such sharp contrast as it is in the former Soviet satellites that span the gap between Europe & Asia. Nagorno Karabagh. Ossetia. Abkhazia. Ingushetia. Chechnya. Dagestan. Who’d even heard of them before the 90s? Nowhere has the millennial thirst for independence combined with exploding nationalism to such deadly effect as it has in the new nations and ethnic enclaves of Caucasia. And right in the middle of them all lies Georgia. This is where Prometheus was bound to his rock. Where Medea cast her spells. Where one of Noah’s sons set up house after the biblical flood. Where Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece. David Adams follows in the footsteps of Jason and his Argonauts on a journey from the Black Sea to the Caspian in search of the truth behind the myth of the “Golden Fleece”.
