South America

Simon Reeve’s South America episode 5: The last leg of Simon’s journey through South America takes him from Chile’s Atacama Desert right down to Tierra Del Fuego, the most southerly inhabited place on Earth. The Atacama, one of the driest places on the planet, has as little as 1mm of rain per year, Simon discovers shocking evidence of human pollution. Outside the remote port city of Iquique, there’s a huge mountainous landfill site, filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of used clothes.       These are the result of fast fashion, where people in wealthy countries throw away […]

Simon Reeve’s South America episode 4: Simon travels through three of the world’s most extreme environments: the salt flats of Bolivia, the Brazilian Pantanal and Paraguay’s Chaco Forest. In Bolivia, Simon meets a family who makes a living carving salt from the vast white expanse of the Uyuni salt flats, so huge it is said to be visible from the moon. He learns that beneath the salt could lie huge reserves of lithium, the metal so crucial for the batteries that will fuel the next generation of electric cars.       Crossing into Brazil, Simon visits the world’s largest