Around the World in 80 Treasures (2005) s01e01 Episode Script

This is the story of
ajourney of a lifetime.
l'm circumnavigating the
world in just five months.
My quest is to seek out 80 of the
greatest treasures created by mankind.
Some of the treasures l've chosen
are undisputed wonders of the world.
Others are not as well known,
but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
And some of my choices are surprising
- even shocking.
My mission is to reveal what has
driven man over thousands of years
to create art and architecture
that is incredibly beautiful
and which tells the story
of mankind, of civilisation.
Along the way, l'll visit some of the
most mysterious places on
earth, and the most dramatic.
l'll come face to face with the
legacies of great ancient civilisations,
and encounter cultures which are
clinging onto survival in the modern age.
l hope to learn something
about human aspirations,
about the secrets of life and death,
and ultimately about myself.
l face an exhilarating
and daunting challenge.
l'm going to 40 countries and
six continents in 150 days.
Here we go. This is it
- starting. The waiting's over.
Months of planning, months of planning's over
- and we're now going.
lt feels great actually to be on the move.
Setting up such an ambitious expedition
has been a logistical nightmare,
with all the visas to obtain
and arrangements to make.
l'm booked onto 90 flights and
will cover more than 80,000 miles,
seeing a new treasure every other day.
My schedule's so tight that
if anything goes wrong the whole
enterprise could fall apart.
l wonder what l've let myself in for.
The finest moments of human
creation in five months flat.
My odyssey begins with a 15-hour
flight from London to Peru.
There's no better place to start.
Peru is home to some of
the world's great treasures
and most enigmatic lost civilizations
- not least, the lncas.
Their achievements and way of life are
still celebrated in modern-day Peru,
500 years after the lnca world was
destroyed by Spanish conquerors.
To find what l'm looking for,
l head deep into the lncas'
mountainous heartland.
l'm travelling
- on a narrow gauge railway through the High Andes.
l'm going to a place that
l'm told is one of the most beautiful
and spiritually uplifting on earth.
lt's Latin America's Shangri-la.
A place shrouded in mystery.
lt had a short life, little
more than half a century.
lt was lost in a cloud
forest for 400 years
and only rediscovered in 1911.
lt's gone on to become one of the
most famous places in Latin America.
Machu Picchu, which
- stands on a natural shelf high in the Andes,
2,350 metres above sea level.
lt's a staggering location,
an amazing place to build a city.
Machu Picchu feels like
it's on top of the world,
the realm of the gods.
lt's thought to have
been built in the 1460s
by the lnca god-king Pachacuti lnca.
l'm intrigued why he built a city in
such a remote and difficult location.
This is the main gate to Machu
Picchu, and it's amazing it's so small,
and that tells us a
lot about lnca society,
and indeed about Machu Picchu.
The simple fact is that the lncas are very
advanced in some ways and not in others.
They didn't have the wheel, didn't
have great forms of transport,
great carriages, therefore didn't
need to bring things inside the city.
Things would be delivered
outside and brought in by hand.
So the city gate could be no bigger really than the door to a
- to a room.
lt's really quite astonishing.
Machu Picchu has about 200 buildings,
was home to around a thousand people.
lt's laid out with streets built on
terraces cut into the mountainside.
Most people lived in small humble houses.
And here is a very intact house in
Machu Picchu. Absolutely staggering.
All here apart from the roof,
roof timbers and thatch outside,
that had been tied on with ropes onto
sort of stone pins on these gables.
Otherwise, all here.
Now, the lncas didn't have much furniture. l
believe lived most on the floor and carpets,
but would keep some things in these little
recesses here, cupboards, this little niches.
Oh erm, gosh more niches,
and a wonderful view.
God. The sacred mountain.
The lncas were amazing civil engineers.
They were great road builders and
they built sewers and water systems,
and here you see at Machu Picchu how water was supplied to this
- the city itself.
Water was gathered
- from the high mountains up there,
brought down into a little canal here,
running through and then
into this cascade, waterfall.
Roman quality really.
Look at this. That's a fantastic
example of lnca stonework.
Massive blocks cut to
fit together like ajigsaw.
Beautifully finely jointed.
No mortar of course.
Just astonishing.
Creating a very, very, very
strong walling, anti-earthquake.
This of course must be,
yes, a temple complex.
More temples. Two more temples here.
And in front of me the temple of
three windows, as it's now called -
- relating, l think, to lnca
creation myths about three caves.
Wonderful view through those windows
of divine landscape beyond. Here -
- is what's the called the principal temple
-
- a massive altar stone.
And just look at this
masonry, it's incredible.
Cut precisely by hammering
one stone against another.
And the size of those
blocks of stone. Good Lord.
lt's absolutely superb.
The large number of temples
at Machu Picchu shows
what a special place
this was to the lncas.
The most important of these
is the Temple of the Sun.
At this time of year, the
winter solstice in Peru,
the stone altar and the window are in
perfect alignment with the rising sun.
l'm approaching a temple, but before l get
there, there is this very strange stone.
This is the profile. Well,
you may think not too strange,
but behind it you realise this profile
is a miniature version, a model -
- of the mountain range in the distance.
So evidence, l think
- of lnca veneration for the high lands, the mountain peaks.
Machu Picchu was once thought to be
home to beautiful virgins of the sun,
who dedicated their
lives to the lnca sun god.
This may be fantasy,
but there's little doubt that Machu
Picchu was a sacred city, a holy place.
l'm at the highest point of Machu Picchu,
and this must have been the site
- of a temple,
because here is an altar, an altar -
- of a very magnificent, though
- peculiar, kind.
lt's cut from the mountain itself.
No one really knows quite what this
- meant to the lncas.
Some people think it's to do with
the veneration of the Sun. Why not?
Could that be a sundial up
there? The protruding part.
Or, another rather charming notion,
this was a hitching post for the Sun.
At the winter solstice,
the lncas would fear the
Sun would never return,
and anchor it to the earth.
Now l understand. Obviously for the lnca this was
- the axis mundi,
the axis around which the world
turns. The centre of their world.
lncredible sight.
And now, my goodness me,
a rainbow's appearing.
And of course a rainbow, to the
lnca, was very, very important.
They believed that the rainbow was the son of the Sun
- God made manifest.
And there it is
- stretching right above, arcing over Machu Picchu as l stand here.
Machu Picchu is a magical vision of heaven
that enabled the lncas to be at one with
nature and to venerate their great gods:
the mountains and the Sun.
The following day l traveled to
the old lnca capital of Cuzco.
lt's a very special day.
The winter solstice is a time of great
celebration for the descendants of the lncas.
The ancient
- lnca festival celebrates the sun's return,
the rebirth of the great
sun, the giver of life.
Hello. Where's
your - ah this is -
they want to show me their
ovens. Let's have a look.
Everywhere people are baking potatoes.
lt was the lncas who developed the potato,
which is fact a tasty
hybrid of poisonous plants.
They're lovely
- little earth ovens, made on the site from the earth on which we stand.
How very efficient.
The potato is not my next
treasure, but it provides a clue.
My treasure has a key
role in the food chain.
lt's a product of the lnca genius
for manipulating the landscape
to improve their lives.
My dream is to see it from the skies,
like the lncas' holy bird of prey,
the condor, by soaring high over
their sacred valley on a paraglider.
- Just hang on this?
- No, like this.
l push with my knees?
Yes. No, you push with your hands.
At an altitude of over 3,000 metres
l'm feeling light headed and
more than a little nervous,
so l chew coca leaves,
which are used to make cocaine.
What we do is we make offerings
- before we do a flight.
We let some of the leaves go into
the wind as offerings to them.
Then we always put
- put a couple more in our mouth.
A
- a couple, a couple in me.
This - what -
what will it do?
Just
- it does seriously help with the altitude situation, does it?
Yeah, it increases the
circulation in the system.
So it oxygenates the
mind a little bit more.
Okay, makes oxygen go further. Yeah.
- Which is the opposite of altitude sickness.
- Yeah.
Let's go. Run, run, run, run.
Keep running.
Oh, that wasn't -
Srry.
Don't worry.
Keep running.
Running, running -
Keep running. Run, run, run
Well done.
We seem to be airborne.
At first it's promising,
as we fly upwards and
onwards towards my treasure,
perched on a mountainside
across the valley.
You're flying, Dan.
l am a condor. Absolutely
amazing, amazing.
But the conditions aren't right
and we're soon sinking towards the ground.
lt's so disappointing.
l must revert to a
four-wheel-drive vehicle,
but it's still touch and go whether
l can reach my treasure before sunset.
lt's a surprising choice,
but it's one of the lncas'
most enduring legacies.
l see the sun's fading. Going down below
- the mountain range.
And this is it. An extraordinary abstract
work of sculpture in the landscape.
The salt pans are a
most appropriate choice.
Salt is one of the foundations
of all civilisation.
lt has enabled man to create the
wonders l'll enjoy on my journey.
Below me are these salt pans
- that date from the lnca times or earlier,
four or five-six
hundred years -
- old. Strange geometry. Tier upon tier.
And what happens is
- is this,
there's some water carrying salt
that comes out of the hill over there,
gushes out from a cavern,
flows through here,
and then is diverted into these salt pans,
where it cascades down through pan after
pan and the water stands in the sun,
evaporates, leaving the salt.
The salts gathered. An
industry of the lncas.
They only used it, they
didn't establish it.
And it goes on to this day.
l look down and l can see the
salts evaporating on the side.
The salt pans capture the
essence of the lnca way.
ln harnessing nature, they create
something live-giving and liberating.
To be able to preserve food at times
of plenty gives man the
time to think, to invent,
to produce great works
of art and architecture.
That of course is what
happened with the lncas.
This is one of the keys
to their civilisation:
they had time, and that time
was bought, acquired, with salt.
Tragically, few lnca artistic
treasures have survived.
When the Spanish conquered
Peru in the 1530s,
they melted down lnca gold
and attempted tojustify
their greedy conquest of
this land by eradicating
all evidence of lnca civilisation.
l head now to the desert coast of Peru.
But before seeing my next treasure,
l want to sample an lnca delicacy.
Oh, my favourite thing. A
nice meal for the flight.
l say, l've wanted a guinea pig for ages.
What will they say of
this in England? Oh my god.
Oh, delicious.
Very tasty.
Lovely. Save the rest for later.
l'm about to witness one of the
most mysterious treasures on earth.
lt's the largest work of art in the world.
So enormous, in fact, you
can only see it from the sky.
- Goodbye, sir.
- Bye, bye.
lt's even been suggested
that it was created by aliens.
This is my treasure
- the Nazca lines.
These great images
- carved, so to speak, into the pampas below me.
These images, huge in size, not
visible, not apparent from the ground,
from up here are absolutely
dramatic and wonderful.
There - there - there's the monkey,
there's the monkey with the spiral tail.
There it is very clear.
And there's the humming bird.
Of course, this is all a mystery.
But what's certain, it's carrying a message,
but it's a message we can't understand.
There's the spider.
lt's like a dictionary
- of sacred images from this part of South America.
There is
- the amazing astronaut figure.
lt does indeed look like a modern
image of a man from outer space.
Great goggle eyes, waving benignly at
his fellow space travellers, l suppose.
As well as his image, the whole landscape's
crisscrossed by these straight lines.
They go everywhere, for
mile upon mile upon mile.
lt's like flying over an airfield really.
lt's as if we've stumbled into a
secret, ancient magical landscape -
- floating above it almost like
you have no business to be here.
lt holds secrets we don't
understand, can never understand.
But yet, here it is.
A message written in the landscape.
l return to terra firma to find out how these
huge figures were fashioned in the landscape
up to 2,000 years ago
by a people whose history is now lost.
Here we can see how the great images,
how the straight lines were constructed.
A very simple process actually.
All over the terrain are
these reddish boulders,
l suppose brought here
through the act of glaciers
thousands and thousands
of years ago, rounded.
All the Nazcas did was to move the
stones to expose the gypsum underneath,
creating a different texture, a different
colour to the boulder-strewn land -
- on each side. A very minimal
manipulation of the landscape.
The lines have survived over the centuries
because Nazca is one of the
driest places in the world,
and it's remoteness has saved these fragile works
from the destructive tendencies of modern man.
l'm drawn into the mystery surrounding
these astonishing creations.
What on earth could they have been
for? Who made them on this vast scale?
Surely the artists couldn't have
seen their complete masterpieces?
The mysterious nature of
these images has provoked
many speculations about
their origin and meaning.
Some of these speculations
are pretty wild indeed.
Among the more sensible ones, l suppose,
are that these are maybe an astronomical
clock, a bit like an early zodiac.
Or perhaps they're part of a
- an agricultural calendar -
- telling people when
to reap and when to sow.
Other people, of course, think these images were made
- for men from outer space,
because one can only see these
- images when looking down from above.
These images, l presume
- are forms of communication with the gods.
The all-seeing eye above.
l'm becoming more and more enthralled
by the mystical world of ancient Peru.
l travel north to see my next treasure,
the legacy of another lost
civilisation called the Moche.
The Moche people are known for their
sinister beliefs and extreme blood lust.
They flourished in northern
Peru almost 2,000 years ago.
The quest for my treasure
takes me first to Sipan,
the site of a priceless treasure trove,
the Latin American equivalent
of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt.
lt was discovered by tomb
raiders as recently as 1987,
buried deep in muddy hills
which were once huge majestic
pyramids pointing to the heavens.
Sipan was the scene of
a gunfight over a prize
so valuable people were
willing to die for it.
This is the tomb of what
is now known as Lord Sipan.
Here we see in the centre, Lord Sipan
with various bodies arranged around him.
l believe there were eight
bodies in all found in here.
One so-called guardian
with his legs cut off.
A savage civilization. Moche, fascinating.
For the Moche people, human sacrifice
was central to their religion.
But they were also brilliant
goldsmiths and metal workers.
An amazing hoard ofjewels was found
in several different tombs in Sipan,
dating from between the
first and third centuries AD.
The jewels now on display at
the tombs are reproductions,
the originals have
removed for safekeeping.
My treasure is to be found among them.
So l head to the nearby
town of Lambayeque,
where a museum has been specially
built in the shape of a Moche pyramid.
Among the violently
beautiful jewellery are works
which reveal another of the
Moche's artistic obsessions:
the creation of explicit
fertility symbols.
lt seems that death and
sex were their passions.
By my treasure chills the blood and
cuts to the heart of the Moche world.
Now, this is my treasure,
because
- well, it's very beautiful and l have seen nothing else like it.
lt's a necklace. lt's from
the tomb of the old Lord Sipan,
about 1900 years old nearly, maybe 2,000.
The spider god had many
powers. He was a god of healing.
The web, of course, heals
wounds, stops blood flowing.
The spider encapsulated, represented many of the
- feelings, the religious beliefs
and what we would now regard as rather
barbaric rites and rituals of these people.
Through sacrifice,
decapitation of the enemy,
the head has great power.
These people, l imagine they would
- tie up their victims before sacrifice, bind them up,
so the web symbolises the binding up, the tying of the
- sacrificial victim.
The spider consumes the bodily fluids
of its victim. lt devours the victim,
and of course, these people, they would
drink the blood of their sacrifices -
- devour their power, their spirit.
So the spider represented much of their
- actions during the - ritual sacrifice.
On the back, l notice
something very strange.
A spiral, a sacred pattern
one finds in many religions.
This necklace is my treasure
because it tells me so much about the world
of the enigmatic people that produced it:
a world in which delicate beauty and
shocking violence went hand in hand.
This is history that still
has the power to shock.
For my next treasure, l travel
to the charming city of Trujillo.
Trujillo was founded in the early
16th century by the Spanish conquerors,
by which time my treasure
had passed into history.
lt's three miles from Trujillo, on
the Pacific coast of northern Peru.
Legend has it that it was
created a thousand years ago,
by a god called Ninelap,
who came from the ocean.
l made my way along the coast to seek out
the fragile remains of a
city once drenched in gold.
lt served as the capital
of the mighty Chimu empire,
which extended 600 miles
along the coast of Peru,
as far north as Ecuador.
Chan Chan was the largest
mud-built city in the world.
lndeed, when at its prime,
about 700 years ago -
- this was one of the
largest cities in the world.
lt is also, in its form
- and planning, a very, very wonderful and extraordinary place.
Chan Chan spreads out
over eight square miles
and is linked by wide streets
protected by tall walls.
Some of the walls were once
decorated with beaten gold panels,
which have long since disappeared.
The city has suffered at
the hands of the elements,
but there's enough left to
show what brilliant builders
and engineers the Chimu people were.
The mighty city was divided
into ten separate citadels,
each really a little walled
city in its own right.
These were defined by high walls
- about 15 metres high.
And within each of these little citadels
- there was, well, all the sort of things a city has.
Public buildings, administration
buildings, temples,
private houses, and a palace or two.
And here we see the remains of this
- complex and strange urban structure.
These tall walls were partly for defence,
but mostly they were to make life as
comfortable as possible in the town.
They acted as windbreaks, and also,
being made of mud, adobe brick, they
have incredible properties of insulation.
Thick mud walls keep the heat out
- in the summer and the warmth in in the winter.
Here also, you see these
net pattern is perforated,
so this can let air creep in,
cross-ventilation from the outside
to inside in very hot summer days.
All in all, a very
ingenious arrangement -
- making this natural material
do a lot ofjobs at once.
Keeping you warm, keeping you
cool, and keeping you safe.
The Chimu people's reverence for nature
is reflected in their architecture.
Some of the walls take
the form of fishing nets
and are decorated with
images of their gods,
including sea birds and fish.
This decoration is largely
- original,
maybe partly repaired,
but most of it is, l
suppose, 700 years old.
lt says so much about the
- the belief
- beliefs of the people here.
We have fish and we have pelicans.
They venerated the sea and water,
sea water for fish,
fresh water for life itself, for
- for plants,
for irrigation.
lt's water, l suppose, too represented
there by the horizontal band.
Water made the difference between
the Chimus' survival and extinction.
Their great achievement was to
build a thriving civilization
in the most arid and exposed of locations.
Golly. From up here one gets a sense of the
- vast scale of Chan Chan.
lt stretches as far as the eye can see.
Citadel after citadel and wall
after wall, one beyond the other.
Also from here one can see what
this place is all about. Water.
Over there you can see
the sea. Waves breaking.
So there we have the fruits of
the sea, fish being gathered.
And just there
- what looks like a pond.
Ornamental now, but originally
that was full of growing vegetables,
things to keep the population alive.
These people, they dug right down
to ground water to get fresh water.
So fresh water, salt
water. Fish and vegetables,
to support and sustain
this gigantic population,
a population that depended almost entirely
for its livelihood on irrigation
and on the fruits of the sea.
No wonder they venerated water.
The Chimu empire was
crushed, not by the Spanish,
but in the late 15th century by the
lnca king who created Machu Picchu.
Chan Chan was plundered for its
riches and abandoned to the elements.
l continue my journey by flying
from Peru to Santiago in Chile,
then onwards to the
remotest island on earth.
lt means a massive detour,
but l'm about to see one of the
undoubted wonders of the world.
l'm in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -
- over 2,000 miles away from
the South American mainland.
And l'm on my way to see a treasure that's gripped my
- imagination for decades.
l've chosen to see my
treasure from the sea,
because that's how it first appeared to
startled European sailors almost 300 years ago.
The giant statues or Moai on Easter lsland
were first seen by Europeans
on Easter Sunday 1722,
giving the island its name.
Locally it's known as Rapanui.
At first the explorers didn't know
what they were or who had created them.
The story of the Moai is
powerful and disturbing.
lt's about man's relationship
with his world and with his gods.
lt says much about his hopes and fears,
and the fragile nature of existence.
One of my earliest, most memorable -
- visual experiences was seeing the Moai
on the staircase in the British Museum.
l was very, very young, but
it burnt itself into my memory.
lt wasn't frightening, just incredibly
- powerful.
The face, so elemental.
l wanted always to know more about it.
The solemn stare, what did it mean?
So l've come here to see other
Moai, to see them in their landscape,
in their setting, in their context, to find out
- more about them.
l've just seen this group here,
and they are absolutely stunning.
These are definitely amongst
the great treasures of the world.
The Moai are believed to represent
the souls of dead ancestors
and face inwards towards the
island, protecting their descendants.
And here's a Moai lying on its back.
lt must have been on its way to
the sacred platform
- over there.
The stone, the figure was carved -
- not here, not in situ, not at the
the site at which it was to be erected,
but where the stone was quarried.
And that is over there, that
broken volcanic peak in front of me.
lt's a mystery why so
few of Easter lsland's
900 Moai are mounted on
their sacred platforms.
Because, extraordinarily,
there are dozens of Moai
loitering around here -
- on this slope leading up to the quarry,
facing all different directions,
some out to sea, some inland.
l suppose this is like a
- a storage area for the Moai.
They've been carved in
the quarry right up there,
and here l can begin to
see the little recesses
where they've been cut out,
and l guess slid down here
and then stored in these pits.
And here you see the key
characteristics of the Moai.
The jutting chin.
The pouting lips.
The great extended nose, slightly concave.
The beetling brow.
There are an amazing 400 Moai
still at the Rana-Raraku quarry,
almost half the total ever carved.
Crikey, this is the crater of the volcano
that spewed out the stone called tuff,
from which the Moai are carved.
And over there more Moai, standing
looking into the crater itself.
l suppose they're - again,
they're - they're in storage.
Here we can see
- very clearly how the moai was made,
how it was quarried from the volcano face.
This end is still attached to the
- to the rock. There you are.
lt's been cut round, been freed from its
- bed.
A bird nesting underneath it.
Here's the
- the arm. The torso here.
And here the incredible head taking shape.
The nose.
And here is the mouth and chin.
Now this stuff, called tuff, was shaped
using a bit of harder rock like this, basalt.
Basalt is harder than this
compacted volcanic ash called tuff,
and the mason would simply
chip away, chip away, chip away.
But what happened here one day,
this particular mason downed tools and
walked away leaving it never to be completed.
Clearly something dramatic
happened, and very rapidly.
A sacred tradition suddenly
stopped, was abandoned.
Normally after completion in the quarry
the moai would have been
dragged using ropes and
log rollers down to their
platforms by the sea.
Here the finishing touches
would have been applied.
When the moai had been placed on its ahu,
eyes made of obsidian,
which is a volcanic rock,
and coral were put in place.
And those eyes, it is said,
brought the moai to life.
But the moai did not live forever.
Long ago in the mists
of time, the cult appears
to have been ended by
some cataclysmic event.
The following morning, l set out to discover
more about the tragic fate that befell the moai.
There are eight moai here. Each
one has been toppled face down.
You see their faces buried
in the ahu, in the ground.
Now, this could have been
a great wave, a tsunami -
- but that wouldn't have
had quite this effect.
No, these have been toppled by men.
These moai have been murdered,
have been killed ritualistically.
They have been robbed of their
power and made meaningless.
Some have even had their
- their necks broken, their heads crushed.
l guess, their eyes gouged out.
What this tells us, of course,
is that something terrible happened
on this island many years ago.
Something led people to
fight, to turn on themselves
and to murder their own gods.
The moai were almost certainly toppled
by rival clans about 500 years ago
when the island descended into civil war.
The islanders had cut down most of
the island's trees to move the moai,
and didn't have enough timber
left to build fishing boats.
So food supplies began
running desperately short.
Locals replaced worship of the moai
with the sinister cult of the birdman,
whose image can still be
seen carved into the rocks.
But this new cult involved rival clans
competing for control of limited resources.
l head for a dark and hidden place
which holds the grisly
secrets of the birdman.
Wow, a painting of birds,
great birds. Wonderful.
They're very fresh, bright,
as if painted just yesterday.
This cave is a
- a solemn place indeed.
Grim l guess known
locally as anakai tangata,
which means the cave where men eat or
- the cave where men are eaten.
So this is perhaps
evidence of cannibalism.
The story of Easter lsland is really a
- a parable.
lt tells the story of
very heaven becoming hell,
of benign gods becoming malign.
And all to do with the exploitation
of the resources of the island -
- and frightful things happening.
As l head back to the
mainland of Latin America,
l'm about to witness the
sorry tale of Easter lsland
repeating itself in 21st century Brazil.
l'm at Cuiaba in western Brazil -
- and l'm about to fly,
go by car, and by boat,
around 750 kilometres
into the Amazon rainforest
to find my living treasure.
My treasure's not an ancient artefact,
but something very special
that continues to be created and
used by people deep in the rainforest.
Of course, l've heard about the
devastation of the rainforest,
but l'm shocked by the
sheer scale of this.
Over hundreds of miles,
valuable timber has
been removed by loggers
and the forest transformed
into grazing land for cattle,
to feed the world with beefburgers.
After several hours,
we cross the threshold
into what remains of the rainforest.
lt's been fenced off and is now
protected by the Brazilian government.
l head down the Warema river, a tributary
of the Amazon, towards my treasure.
lt's an unbelievably
beautiful work of art,
created by a tribe called the lgbatsa.
The lgbatsa people are clinging onto their
traditional way of life as hunter gatherers.
Their world has being threatened
by the loggers and cattle ranchers
as well as Roman Catholic Jesuit missionaries
who forcibly removed their children
as recently as the 1960s.
Excellent reception committee.
Wonder who l approach.
Hello.
That is what l've come to see
- the headdress.
My most colourful of treasures
is a symbol of the Amazon
and an object of immense
importance to these people.
Oh my god. Wow.
l expected one, maybe two,
umahara, but a whole hut full.
Beautiful objects, beautifully made,
but more to the point, they're
full of meaning to these people.
They celebrate their culture,
their aspirations, their religion.
And made from human hair, parrot
feathers. Ah, absolutely wonderful.
The umahara headdress is worn with
great pride by the lgbatsa people.
lt's the emblem of an endangered culture.
lt once played a key
role in war ceremonies
and is still used in dance rituals.
This dance takes place every day
for 90 days after the first of June.
lt's a celebration of
birth and all things new.
During the dance wives have the right
to ask favours of their husbands,
who are obliged to grant them.
After the dance, l talk to members of the
tribe about the headdress and how it's made.
Can l ask what it
- what it means to them today, the umahara headdress.
He says the umahara represents a
great richness in their own culture.
And for their future.
For their future, they couldn't stop
creating it and using it for their own use.
Represents their sense of identity really.
lt represents the identity
of the lgbatsa people.
So we've got feathers from parrots and
- and female hair.
That - that is correct, is
it? On - onto some - some -
This is from the
- a marella clan.
lt's all rather perplexing.
To preserve their traditions,
the lgbatsa have to make
the umahara headdresses.
Yet in so doing, they must kill
protected bird species for their feathers.
While the faces and bodies of the men and women
are brightly painted in the traditional way,
they sport natty shorts and bikini tops.
Bit by bit, the lgbatsa are
being drawn into the modern world,
whether they like it or not.
As evening approaches, preparations
are being made for supper.
A rather tasty feast awaits me.
This all brings back very deep
- memories.
The family halls scattered
round about the compound,
the main hall where the
communal ceremonies take place -
- the people gathered round
the fire at night eating.
The fields round about.
lt's like a Anglo-Saxon village in
England a couple of hundred years ago.
lt's like meeting one's
ancestors coming back here.
After the tranquillity of the rainforest,
one of the world's most energetic
and romantic cities awaits me.
lt's a place bursting with contradictions.
Alongside the glamour and wealth,
the samba and the football,
is some of the most appalling
poverty in the world.
My treasure expresses the paradox of Rio.
lt's the first great colossus on my
trip, and an icon which shouts out Brazil.
Christ the Redeemer was built
to mark the centenary in 1922
of Brazilian independence from Portugal.
lt was finally inaugurated
in October 1931.
As l approach, a dense fog descends.
This is not how l expected
to meet my redeemer.
At 38 metres high,
the largest art deco statue in the world.
lt's become a symbol not only
of - - Rio de Janeiro and Brazil,
but also of South America.
The great arms embracing
- the people of this land, the different mix of people.
Very powerful.
ln fact, he's offering welcome and peace
and love, understanding, and of course is -
- a great Roman Catholic image.
That is the religion of the land,
replacing the older religions,
the various religions we've seen,
and lamented their loss really.
So for good or ill, this is the
image of the new South America.
Amazing, as the mist comes down,
the figure is disappearing before me.
l had hoped to enjoy spectacular view
of Christ the Redeemer from the air.
lt's not to be.
But the flight does give me the chance
to reflect on Rio and my
travels in Latin America.
The treasures l've found in South America
have revealed it to be a place of
thrilling and at times disturbing contrasts,
and of deep mysteries.
Mystery when it comes to the fact that the
old civilisations, the lncas, for example,
their civilisation was so
fragile, had no written language -
- that it made it very easy to obliterate
so much of what they had discovered,
so much of what they stood for,
so many of their achievements.
And Rio is a great emblem, l
suppose, of the new South America,
the South America formed on the
graves of the old civilisations.
The conquerors come, they bring
their new religion, Roman Catholicism,
and the great civilisations of the past
are laid in the dust surrounded by history.
And that's really what my
treasures have revealed,
the glories of the past, the indigenous
civilisations here, and also -
- the emblem of the
new, Christ the Redeemer,
presiding over this great
teeming, thrill-seeking city.