This ground-breaking series focuses on African innovation, addressing today's and tomorrow's problems with courage and imagination in equal measure. It is a fascinating look at how cutting-edge scientific technology from all over the world is being put to use to alleviate the problems faced by Africans today. The thirteen part series tells stories from all over Africa, and introduces the people who are doing great things -- from fighting the escalating...

In the second program, Simon Reeve goes to Barbados, one of the wealthiest islands in the Caribbean. Learn how high-end tourism has impacted life in Barbados. In Venezuela - a poor nation, despite having some of the largest gas and oil reserves in the world - Simon looks at the mismanagement of natural resources and meets the inventive people running businesses from a 'shanti town in the sky', an abandoned skyscraper that is home to more than 3,000...

Steinbeck hits the highways with his French poodle, Charley. In a custom-built camper he named Rosinante after Don Quixote's steed, the two traveled the country--10,000 miles and 34 states. Their varied experiences comprise several slices of small-town back-roads Americana. Steinbeck laments the rise of plastic-covered everything, the vacuousness of "sad souls" he encounters, and the homogenization of local and regional culture. But bright spots...

This program examines how tourism has been vital to the Egyptian economy for decades. It considers how the revolution of 2011 and the political and social upheavals that followed have adversely affected tourism.

Simon Reeve begins this final episode the remote Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, a country facing monumental change with the construction of a new transoceanic waterway set to rival the Panama Canal. Reeve then travels to the Honduran island of Roatán, a haven for marine life and tourists - as well as for people fleeing unimaginable violence on mainland Honduras. He ends his Caribbean journey on the iconic island of Jamaica, discovering a country confronting...

Follow Ian Wright's journey down the length of Chile, from the driest desert in the world to the southern-most point before the Antarctic Ocean, in this episode of Globe Trekker. He encounters llama farmers, visits the island made famous in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, sees the largest telescope in the world, and meets the indigenous Mapuche Indians and a group of 8th generation German ex-pats, two groups who work to retain their own language and...

Francesco da Mosto takes a look at Italy as the land of adventure and ambition. Beginning in Venice with actor Ciaran Hinds, he considers how the town struck Shakespeare as the perfect setting for The Merchant of Venice . In Rome, Francesco discovers how Shakespeare used the city as a smokescreen to address the burning political issues of his day while avoiding trouble with Elizabethan censors. Francesco meets Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance, and...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The classic chronicle of a “terribly misguided and terribly funny” (The Washington Post) hike of the Appalachian Trail, from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body
 
“The best way of escaping into nature.”—The New York Times 
 
Back in America after...

In this second episode, Professor Richard Fortey travels to the rainforests of Madagascar-an ancient island that has spawned some of the most extraordinary groups of plants and animals anywhere in the world. From beautiful Indri lemurs, toxic frogs, and the cat-like giant mongoose called the fossa, to evolutionary oddities like the giraffe-necked weevil and the otherworldly aye-aye, Prof. Fortey uncovers the secrets of the evolutionary niche-examining...

Lafcadio Hearn was probably as responsible as anyone for opening the Western mind to the ways of the Japanese, having lived and worked there, marrying a Japanese woman and becoming a naturalized citizen. He made his fame through translating Japanese ghost stories, but he also wrote a vast amount of essays and articles, with this being a collection of short, thoughtful pieces.