Part 3 • 2017 • episode "3/3" • Joanna Lumley's India
Joanna ends her 5,000 mile journey in the place where she was born, Srinagar in Kashmir. She starts off in the Ranthambhore National Park, where she hopes to spot a tiger in the wild. Meeting tiger conservationist Belinda Wright, Joanna witnesses the work of local NGO Tiger Watch, who are attempting to break a cycle of poaching and poverty through education. Home to over 18 million people, Delhi is a city of stark contrasts. The extreme differences are obvious when Joanna visits a homeless community - where 10,000 men live under a flyover - and visits the modern part of the city where she has a go at working in a hi-tech call centre. The final leg of her journey takes her north from Delhi to Dharamsala, where she is granted a private audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Joanna concludes her trip with a stay on a houseboat in Srinagar, as her parents did on honeymoon in 1941.
Joanna Lumley's India • 2017 • 3 episodes •
Joanna witnesses religious ceremonies in temples, learns how scientists are enabling people in tea plantations to live alongside wild elephants and with the help of computers is turned into a multi-limbed Indian goddess. In Kolkata, Joanna takes to the streets at night with a local guide and meets members of India's transgender community. Finally she journeys high into the Himalayas to visit Gangtok in Sikkim, where her mother lived as a child.
2017 • Travel
Joanna meets the Maharaja of Dungarpur, who shows her around his lakeside palace. In stark contrast, Joanna visits a Dalit community - considered to be India's lowest caste - in Gujarat, and hears of the everyday discrimination these people experience under India's still deeply entrenched 3,000-year-old caste system. She later joins in a Hindu house warming ceremony, where a cow and calf are brought into the new house for luck. Braving the roads of Mumbai, Joanna takes a ride in the city's only all-female taxi company and visits the Times of India, where her uncle was editor of the paper in the 1930s and 40s. She then overcomes her vertigo to explore the World One Tower, soon to be Mumbai's tallest luxury residential building.
We begin our journey in Oltenia, once known as Wallachia minor, and one of the least promoted regions in Romania.
1/9 • Flavours of Romania • 2018 • Travel
Madagascar to the Seychelles
Simon Reeve visits the tropical Indian Ocean Islands of Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles on the second leg of his journey. Amid the paradise of coral reefs and jungles full of spectacular wildlife, Simon witnesses some of the threats to the Ocean.
2/6 • Indian Ocean • Travel
This week, Julia visits the lush Ionian island of Corfu, often called the least Greek of all the Greek islands. Her trip begins in the capital Corfu Town where she discovers a surprising, cosmopolitan city more like a little slice of Italy than Greece.
2/6 • The Greek Islands with Julia Bradbury • 2020 • Travel
The third leg takes him from the illegally annexed peninsula of Crimea to the historic Baltic city of St Petersburg. Crimea is part of neighbouring Ukraine but was annexed by Russia in 2014. President Putin's government is investing heavily in the illegally occupied territory - building a huge bridge linking Crimea to Russia. Simon meets the eccentric and fearless owner of a safari park who likes to get up close and personal with his pride of lions. The owner is struggling to get water to his park after a canal that supplied much of Crimea's water was shut off by the Ukraine. And it is not just the lions that are affected - the diminishing water supplies are now beginning to threaten a humanitarian crisis.
3/3 • Russia with Simon Reeve • 2017 • Travel
Tokyo Reverse
Yeah, this is not exactly a documentary, but it is pretty damn cool, isn't it? The full video has 9 hours and you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/92216591
A hundred miles south of Cairo a stretch of the Nile was once considered Egypt's main highway, used by Cleopatra to travel the country. More than 2,000 years after her, Bettany visits a vast desert catacomb where tens of thousands of mummified animals were once left as an offering. Further upstream, there is a chance to swim in the Nile, and look inside the tombs where Tutankhamen's discoverer, Howard Carter, first got hooked on Egypt. Bettany explores the longest tomb yet found, before heading to the Dendera temple, where Cleopatra herself may have once wowed her lover Julius Caesar.
2/4 • The Nile: Egypt's Great River with Bettany Hughes • 2019 • Travel