I did not see the first two series of earth circumnavigations by Simone Reeve, the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, unfortunately, and I only watched the first three episodes of the third series, Tropic of Cancer, after noting that the 4th episode was to be shown on Monday evening.
What I have just said is inaccurate because I have a vague notion of having watched individual episodes from the earlier series and watched the House of Saud in 2004, but somehow the importance of the man and his work has escaped my attention until now. This I will remedy by keeping an eye for further runs of his previous work
I am impressed for several reasons. Although as is evident Mr Reeve has a BBC camera crew, production manager/editor and trip organiser with him, presumably with an advance team paving the way, identifying issues and making contacts with televisual people et al, you are always aware that he is personally undertaking the travels in hostile environments of nature and of man, and that, as the locals are evidently aware, if there is something that merits reporting he and his team will do so without fear or favour. He does not appear to be the principal centre of attention as someone like Alan Wicker, Piers what’s his name Michael Palin and such like and he seems to get immediately to the heart of the matter he is bringing to our attention, in a casual off beat manner which works so well. You do not feel lectured at or being manipulated in holding a particular view or called upon to make a particular judgement. The programme editors have introduced the recent annoying habit of telling you in advance what is to come at the end and the beginning of advertisement breaks having grasped that for the majority what is being said does not register and remain in our attention unless the key points are hammered into out ongoing consciousness.
The other aspect which struck me after looking what Wikipedia has to say about Simon is that he is approaching 40. I would not have said he was over 30. He has been around the world three times and visited 90 countries. I have no information about how he came to embark on his dangerous investigative life or the details of his background other than he was brought up in West London and rarely went abroad until he started work. He also appears to have been uncertain about his future with jobs in a supermarket, a jewellery store and a charity shop before commencing as a postboy with a newspaper. This appears to have led to investigative journalism about nuclear smuggling, organised crime and terrorism, all subjects involving governments, unofficially, of course, as well as the most deadly of criminals on the earth planet.
His first book published in the later 1990’s was called The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef Bin Laden and the future of terrorism and he disclosed the existence of al Queda, known to the authorities but not to the public until them. The book became a best seller which only underline the enormity of the failure of USA intelligence in not being able to forestall 9/11 the kind of attack which Reeve forecast would happen. Why is it that all the great nations of the world turn out to also be rotten at their core? His second work studied the Munich massacre and after this he commenced to visit the obscure and troubled parts of the world for the BBC.
In the first of the Tropic of Cancer episodes he visits Baja in the most northern of Mexican states in the Gulf of California where United States criminals of various kinds hang out with the media and personality famous and the legitimate rich, paying exorbitant prices of around £5000 a night for a stay in spacious luxury accommodation with spectacular seascapes, with their own security ferrying them from and back to their yachts. It looked sterile as does Dubai although it was not the objective of Reeve to go in search of the drugs and sex which are the essential ingredients of such places as long as it not revealed in public or to the media, although in fairness as Reeve also subsequently reported their are old fashioned Muslim states as well as the terrorising fundamentalists, with the Arab upper classes have been coming to European capitals and other less publicised fleshpots for their sin.
Reeve appears always to be objective and attempts to see the other side which was apparent with his visit to the gold mining company’s demolition of a mountain immediately by a village. His first contact was with a local protestor opposed to the impact of the mining upon his community and environment. The problem is that the company offers good work for the locals as an alternative to the millions who leave to try their luck in the USA as cut price workers in absence of the Green Card. The company denied responsibility for the attacks on him and his home which they put down to employees and their relatives. It so much reminds of Spanish peasants coming to work in Gibraltar for the military and civil administrators of the British Empire.
What Reeve then revealed was how corrupt Mexico remains today in a situation where the America policy is clear, one does not openly criticise friendly countries with whom one is doing good business. He visited the city of Culiacan in Sinaola which is dominated by the drug barons supplying the USA and where their chains of operatives are forever murdering each other and anyone who gets in their way, especially the police who fail to take bribes or yield to intimidation. The Federal government put on a good show allowing him to travel around with the heavily armed state police used to impress the locals that the government is seriously trying to tackle the problem. We were shown enough to indicate the truth of badly equipped forces, facing superior weapons supplied by the United States.
The reality was brought home when the mini convoy arrived at a small town in the middle of nowhere and the vehicle in which Reeve was travelling was deliberately rammed by a taxi driver, whose mates then surrounded the visitors in a hostile and threatening way demanding compensation. The police were called and immediately showed they were part of the problem and Simon and his party were only able to leave by paying up. Their driver said he was ashamed that the rest of the world would see the reality of his sham USA propped up state.
They made a stop in Mexico City where he attended the local World Wrestling style pantomime performed by women in a huge arena where the locals could vent their frustrations and aggression without harming anyone directly. For me the his visit confirmed my long standing view that your average Mexican is caught between the rock and the hard place, staying home and finding yourself out of work, terrorised by drug dealers and other criminals or cross the boarder as a slave labourer and hope for something better, for ones children, at least.
The highlight of this first adventure was the stop over in Havana where he concentrated on the environmental movement to grow fruit and veg in the unlikeliest of places. Reeves casually reminds that Cuba used to be the gambling, drugs and vice capital of the USA which then looked to the soviet union for support against the might of the USA capitalists determined to crush the Castro regime by any means despite the country having one the best effective education and health systems on the planet. The ex Cubans, supported by the mafia and the international capitalists form an important political force in the USA which tends to drive USA foreign policy.
After a stopping in the Bahamas, another play ground for the rich and famous, money laundering and tax evasion reputedly, where he finds he slums created by fleeing Haitians and the local fishing decimated by predator devouring escapee’s from USA aquariums, called Lion Fish.
In the second programme his journey across Africa began with exposing the invasion of western Sahara by the Moroccans and the lengths they are going to prevent the local people from challenging the assimilation of their country Nazi and Stalin style. He then spend days on a train through the harsh desert landscape across the Sahara to see life at first hand in the Algerian refugee camps where more than 100000 Saharawis from the Western Sahara live, and then he broke freshly cooked bread with a Turaeg nomad and saw the Saharawis army train one side of the UN monitored truce line. He then met up with camel traders of Algeria where the beasts are used for meat than travel and entered the previously hidden world of Libya, once a training ground for terrorists, and now trying to join in the new world of international capitalism. His escort minder was a distant relative of the dictator and he was able to contrast the beauty and tranquillity of the oasis lake Al Gabroun with the dried up remains of Mandara, an urgent reminder of man’s mismanagement of environment one way or another. He then visited a part of a huge network of waterway tunnels being built to outside the coastal cities to enable population movement and development arising from the oil revenues. The programme communicated the vast emptiness, the areas of natural splendour, the comparative primitive poverty of many and the problems leaders face of engaging with the corrupt capitalist system which nevertheless has provided significant improvements for the majority. That is the irony and dilemma.
The first part of his third programme looked at the impact of the Assam dam project on the lives of the Nubian people who lost their homes and their heritage under the waters of the Nile but which provided the cities and towns of North Egypt with electricity from the 1960’s following the creation of the 300 miles Lake Nasser which makes the few miles of Lake Kielder appear a pond. Reaching the Red sea he sees at first hand the extraordinary beauty of the coral reefs and speculates on the wisdom of the Egyptian move allow the development of the area into European holiday resorts. He meets up with the owner of one luxury site with accommodation for 200 who has been offered fortune a fortune to sell up because the government believe that the resort could provide accommodation for 2000 and wants to create a change of such resorts along the red sea sands and coral reefs. This is the dilemma which Simon meets time and time again. On one hand there is the call to preserve the natural wonders of world which usually means they are only accessible to the few who are rich enough to buy their way with the security and provisions to sustain their life style or adventuresome enough to pack back their way and live as the people do at constant risk of disease and starvation, with the additional risks of capture and slavery, one way or another. Egypt is struggling to remain a predominantly secular state with tourists constantly under threat from terrorist outrages unless they are heavily guarded by the state.
The perspective immediately changed on crossing the Red Sea into the modern Muslim state of Saudi Arabia. The team was only allowed in with an invitation from a handpicked educated Saudi young woman who destroyed all his accusations about the subordination of woman and the strict code of behaviour with great feminist skill and charm. The problem the Saudi young men face because they cannot openly drink, gamble, take drugs or fornicate, let alone go out with girls before the arranged marriage, is that they only way they have to let off steam is to drive around aimlessly in soupped up cars with night club standard audio blasting equipment in their boots, or become active fundamentalists determined to inflict their way of life my or your grand children.
He then visited Dubai and exposed the situation of the migrant workers mainly from the Indian sub continent, promised fortunes in earnings, but have to mortgage their homes and take out loan shark loans to make the trip for the benefit of their families, only to find themselves marooned in slave conditions and without funds as the building boom has slowed with the collapse of international capitalism. I still do not understand why anyone would want to go and live in this make believe Middle eastern Las Vegas although I fully understand the driving necessity which has always attracted those who go in the hope of achieving better for their children.
I tend to agree with the people of Oman to try and keep things are they are almost ignoring the wealth of the oil except to try and protect their natural environment. I liked the idea of the woman owning the goats with the men selling them for a commission. They appear to have got their values the right way round although we were not given much opportunity to find out what the people thought and how they would react if they were given choice. I look forward to learning about the rest of the journey around the world to India, Bangladesh, and Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hawaii. In the meantime I turned my attention to the last even Frost detective programme spread over two nights.
What I have just said is inaccurate because I have a vague notion of having watched individual episodes from the earlier series and watched the House of Saud in 2004, but somehow the importance of the man and his work has escaped my attention until now. This I will remedy by keeping an eye for further runs of his previous work
I am impressed for several reasons. Although as is evident Mr Reeve has a BBC camera crew, production manager/editor and trip organiser with him, presumably with an advance team paving the way, identifying issues and making contacts with televisual people et al, you are always aware that he is personally undertaking the travels in hostile environments of nature and of man, and that, as the locals are evidently aware, if there is something that merits reporting he and his team will do so without fear or favour. He does not appear to be the principal centre of attention as someone like Alan Wicker, Piers what’s his name Michael Palin and such like and he seems to get immediately to the heart of the matter he is bringing to our attention, in a casual off beat manner which works so well. You do not feel lectured at or being manipulated in holding a particular view or called upon to make a particular judgement. The programme editors have introduced the recent annoying habit of telling you in advance what is to come at the end and the beginning of advertisement breaks having grasped that for the majority what is being said does not register and remain in our attention unless the key points are hammered into out ongoing consciousness.
The other aspect which struck me after looking what Wikipedia has to say about Simon is that he is approaching 40. I would not have said he was over 30. He has been around the world three times and visited 90 countries. I have no information about how he came to embark on his dangerous investigative life or the details of his background other than he was brought up in West London and rarely went abroad until he started work. He also appears to have been uncertain about his future with jobs in a supermarket, a jewellery store and a charity shop before commencing as a postboy with a newspaper. This appears to have led to investigative journalism about nuclear smuggling, organised crime and terrorism, all subjects involving governments, unofficially, of course, as well as the most deadly of criminals on the earth planet.
His first book published in the later 1990’s was called The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef Bin Laden and the future of terrorism and he disclosed the existence of al Queda, known to the authorities but not to the public until them. The book became a best seller which only underline the enormity of the failure of USA intelligence in not being able to forestall 9/11 the kind of attack which Reeve forecast would happen. Why is it that all the great nations of the world turn out to also be rotten at their core? His second work studied the Munich massacre and after this he commenced to visit the obscure and troubled parts of the world for the BBC.
In the first of the Tropic of Cancer episodes he visits Baja in the most northern of Mexican states in the Gulf of California where United States criminals of various kinds hang out with the media and personality famous and the legitimate rich, paying exorbitant prices of around £5000 a night for a stay in spacious luxury accommodation with spectacular seascapes, with their own security ferrying them from and back to their yachts. It looked sterile as does Dubai although it was not the objective of Reeve to go in search of the drugs and sex which are the essential ingredients of such places as long as it not revealed in public or to the media, although in fairness as Reeve also subsequently reported their are old fashioned Muslim states as well as the terrorising fundamentalists, with the Arab upper classes have been coming to European capitals and other less publicised fleshpots for their sin.
Reeve appears always to be objective and attempts to see the other side which was apparent with his visit to the gold mining company’s demolition of a mountain immediately by a village. His first contact was with a local protestor opposed to the impact of the mining upon his community and environment. The problem is that the company offers good work for the locals as an alternative to the millions who leave to try their luck in the USA as cut price workers in absence of the Green Card. The company denied responsibility for the attacks on him and his home which they put down to employees and their relatives. It so much reminds of Spanish peasants coming to work in Gibraltar for the military and civil administrators of the British Empire.
What Reeve then revealed was how corrupt Mexico remains today in a situation where the America policy is clear, one does not openly criticise friendly countries with whom one is doing good business. He visited the city of Culiacan in Sinaola which is dominated by the drug barons supplying the USA and where their chains of operatives are forever murdering each other and anyone who gets in their way, especially the police who fail to take bribes or yield to intimidation. The Federal government put on a good show allowing him to travel around with the heavily armed state police used to impress the locals that the government is seriously trying to tackle the problem. We were shown enough to indicate the truth of badly equipped forces, facing superior weapons supplied by the United States.
The reality was brought home when the mini convoy arrived at a small town in the middle of nowhere and the vehicle in which Reeve was travelling was deliberately rammed by a taxi driver, whose mates then surrounded the visitors in a hostile and threatening way demanding compensation. The police were called and immediately showed they were part of the problem and Simon and his party were only able to leave by paying up. Their driver said he was ashamed that the rest of the world would see the reality of his sham USA propped up state.
They made a stop in Mexico City where he attended the local World Wrestling style pantomime performed by women in a huge arena where the locals could vent their frustrations and aggression without harming anyone directly. For me the his visit confirmed my long standing view that your average Mexican is caught between the rock and the hard place, staying home and finding yourself out of work, terrorised by drug dealers and other criminals or cross the boarder as a slave labourer and hope for something better, for ones children, at least.
The highlight of this first adventure was the stop over in Havana where he concentrated on the environmental movement to grow fruit and veg in the unlikeliest of places. Reeves casually reminds that Cuba used to be the gambling, drugs and vice capital of the USA which then looked to the soviet union for support against the might of the USA capitalists determined to crush the Castro regime by any means despite the country having one the best effective education and health systems on the planet. The ex Cubans, supported by the mafia and the international capitalists form an important political force in the USA which tends to drive USA foreign policy.
After a stopping in the Bahamas, another play ground for the rich and famous, money laundering and tax evasion reputedly, where he finds he slums created by fleeing Haitians and the local fishing decimated by predator devouring escapee’s from USA aquariums, called Lion Fish.
In the second programme his journey across Africa began with exposing the invasion of western Sahara by the Moroccans and the lengths they are going to prevent the local people from challenging the assimilation of their country Nazi and Stalin style. He then spend days on a train through the harsh desert landscape across the Sahara to see life at first hand in the Algerian refugee camps where more than 100000 Saharawis from the Western Sahara live, and then he broke freshly cooked bread with a Turaeg nomad and saw the Saharawis army train one side of the UN monitored truce line. He then met up with camel traders of Algeria where the beasts are used for meat than travel and entered the previously hidden world of Libya, once a training ground for terrorists, and now trying to join in the new world of international capitalism. His escort minder was a distant relative of the dictator and he was able to contrast the beauty and tranquillity of the oasis lake Al Gabroun with the dried up remains of Mandara, an urgent reminder of man’s mismanagement of environment one way or another. He then visited a part of a huge network of waterway tunnels being built to outside the coastal cities to enable population movement and development arising from the oil revenues. The programme communicated the vast emptiness, the areas of natural splendour, the comparative primitive poverty of many and the problems leaders face of engaging with the corrupt capitalist system which nevertheless has provided significant improvements for the majority. That is the irony and dilemma.
The first part of his third programme looked at the impact of the Assam dam project on the lives of the Nubian people who lost their homes and their heritage under the waters of the Nile but which provided the cities and towns of North Egypt with electricity from the 1960’s following the creation of the 300 miles Lake Nasser which makes the few miles of Lake Kielder appear a pond. Reaching the Red sea he sees at first hand the extraordinary beauty of the coral reefs and speculates on the wisdom of the Egyptian move allow the development of the area into European holiday resorts. He meets up with the owner of one luxury site with accommodation for 200 who has been offered fortune a fortune to sell up because the government believe that the resort could provide accommodation for 2000 and wants to create a change of such resorts along the red sea sands and coral reefs. This is the dilemma which Simon meets time and time again. On one hand there is the call to preserve the natural wonders of world which usually means they are only accessible to the few who are rich enough to buy their way with the security and provisions to sustain their life style or adventuresome enough to pack back their way and live as the people do at constant risk of disease and starvation, with the additional risks of capture and slavery, one way or another. Egypt is struggling to remain a predominantly secular state with tourists constantly under threat from terrorist outrages unless they are heavily guarded by the state.
The perspective immediately changed on crossing the Red Sea into the modern Muslim state of Saudi Arabia. The team was only allowed in with an invitation from a handpicked educated Saudi young woman who destroyed all his accusations about the subordination of woman and the strict code of behaviour with great feminist skill and charm. The problem the Saudi young men face because they cannot openly drink, gamble, take drugs or fornicate, let alone go out with girls before the arranged marriage, is that they only way they have to let off steam is to drive around aimlessly in soupped up cars with night club standard audio blasting equipment in their boots, or become active fundamentalists determined to inflict their way of life my or your grand children.
He then visited Dubai and exposed the situation of the migrant workers mainly from the Indian sub continent, promised fortunes in earnings, but have to mortgage their homes and take out loan shark loans to make the trip for the benefit of their families, only to find themselves marooned in slave conditions and without funds as the building boom has slowed with the collapse of international capitalism. I still do not understand why anyone would want to go and live in this make believe Middle eastern Las Vegas although I fully understand the driving necessity which has always attracted those who go in the hope of achieving better for their children.
I tend to agree with the people of Oman to try and keep things are they are almost ignoring the wealth of the oil except to try and protect their natural environment. I liked the idea of the woman owning the goats with the men selling them for a commission. They appear to have got their values the right way round although we were not given much opportunity to find out what the people thought and how they would react if they were given choice. I look forward to learning about the rest of the journey around the world to India, Bangladesh, and Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hawaii. In the meantime I turned my attention to the last even Frost detective programme spread over two nights.
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