Caribbean with Simon Reeve
Intrepid journalist Simon Reeve is off on a whole new adventure, embarking on a journey around the Caribbean Sea, home to some of the most exotic and enticing locations on earth.
Caribbean with Simon Reeve
From Friday 18 September at 9pm (SIN/HK)
bbc-earth
Series previews
About the show
A world of rich variety
The series blends travel with wildlife, issues, adventure, and incredible insights into a glorious region of the world.
Alongside breathtaking footage from land, sea and even a flying dinghy, it brings to life the unique stories and beautiful landscapes of the Caribbean.
Home to thousands of islands and a tropical mainland coast, the area is crammed full of history, conflict, culture, adventure, wildlife, glamour and colourful characters, giving Simon endless opportunities to explore.
As he travels from the slums of Haiti to luxury holiday destinations; from the beaches of Barbados to the Venezuelan oil fields; from the jungles of St Vincent to the drug war in Honduras, he immerses himself in the different countries and their contrasting cultures.
In his trademark engaging style, he seeks out the people making their lives in these islands and coasts, discovers how things are changing, and highlights the huge variety and richness of this stunning part of the world.
Gallery
Facts
Jamaica is a very mountainous country, with almost half of the island lying above 1,000 feet (305 metres). Its highest point is the Blue Mountain Peak, in the east of the island.
With uninterrupted parliamentary governance since 1639, Barbados has the third oldest parliament in the Commonwealth, after Britain and Bermuda.
Christopher Columbus explored the Dominican Republic on his famous voyage of 1492. He named the land La Isla Española, and his son, Diego, was its first viceroy.
The steel pan, or steel drum – often considered to provide the soundtrack of the Caribbean – originated in Trinidad and Tobago.
Cuba is the largest of the islands in the Caribbean and Saba is the smallest.
Puerto Rico is home to the world's largest single-aperture telescope – the Arecibo Radio Telescope.
The highest point in the Caribbean is the Pico Duarte in the Dominican Republic. Its deepest point is the underwater Cayman Trough.
One of the oldest botanical gardens in the Western Hemisphere is located in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, having been founded in 1765.
Only 2% of the Caribbean islands is actually inhabited. The three most populous island territories are Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where roughly 75% of the Caribbean population call home.
Presenter
Simon Reeve
Simon Reeve was born in 1972 and is the older brother of award-winning photographer James Reeve.
He was brought up in West London and took up a series of jobs after leaving school that saw him working in a supermarket, a jewellery shop and a charity shop. He then found employment as a postboy at a British newspaper and began to research and write in his spare time, eventually becoming one of the newspaper's youngest ever staff writers at the age of 19.
Simon began making travel documentaries for the BBC after the attacks of 11 September 2001. His first foray in front of the camera was for Meet the Stans – a four-part BBC series on Central Asia that took him from Kazakhstan, through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
Since then Simon has filmed a number of successful travel series including Equator (2006), Tropic of Capricorn (2008), Tropic of Cancer (2010), Indian Ocean (2012) and Sacred Rivers with Simon Reeve (2014).
His extensive travels have seen him survive malaria, play polo with the corpse of a headless goat, blackmailed and abandoned by drivers in an Ebola zone and arrested for spying by the KGB.
Simon is a New York Times bestselling author. His first book was The New Jackals, published in the 1990s, and it is the first book in the world on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. This was followed in 2000 by One Day in September, which deals with the 1972 Munich massacre. His books have been translated into over 20 languages.