Equator 1: Africa

Equator - Africa.
Hosted on Guba

Simon Reeve's journey along the equator begins in Gabon, where he meets villagers who have been banned from hunting. They now perform traditional dances for tourists to earn a living. When it is time to continue, the team's drivers suddenly demand £1,000 per day to continue working. When the BBC crew refuse to pay, the whole team is abandoned in the rainforest. But Simon develops a temperature of 40C and starts vomiting blood. He is diagnosed with malaria and forced to rest before continuing along the path east. A narrow patch of Congo-Brazzaville lies on the equator, but locals blame foreigners for an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus and the crew are told they could be attacked and killed if they land their small plane, so the next stop is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). DRC is the size of western Europe and at least 4m people have died there since 1998 in the deadliest conflict since World War II. Simon meets villagers who tell him about the fighting and take him to a mass grave. Leaving DRC, he heads to Uganda, where he watches a water-down-the-plughole experiment, to see if water really does spin in the other direction on the equator - and goes rafting on the Nile. A short flight then takes him on to Kenya, where he is greeted by father-and-son circumcisers at a bull fight. News arrives that conflict has erupted in Somalia, close to the equator, and Simon realises he cannot follow the line to the coast. Instead, the team travels to a refugee camp near the Somali border, where they meet a mother forced to leave two of her children in the capital, Mogadishu, and a woman who has lived in the camp for 17 years.