Afghanistan is not so much a country as a series of shifting borders. A place with no easily definable physical or civil boundaries. A place where war is an everyday fact of life. A place where more children will learn to use a gun than will go to school. About 1.5 million have been killed during the past 20 years of war. Perhaps another 4 million have fled. Every major road has been torn apart by tank treads. Almost every major building left standing has been blown full of holes. This is the most militant Islamic state on Earth but it was once was peace loving and Buddhist. In the Bamian Valley north of Kabul the two largest statues of Buddha on the planet were carved in the third century. David Adams was the last Westerner to exhaustively film them before they were blown up in 2001.
Iran is one of the earth’s final frontiers. It’s a country little visited by western travelers in recent years, yet it has been at the center of world affairs for millennia. I wanted to take a peek “behind the veil” of modern-day Iran. What I discovered was a complex, incredibly hospitable people living in a much-misunderstood country at the heart of a troubled region. My journey takes me from the bustle of Tehran, via the Valley of the Assassins to ancient cities unchanged since Marco Polo first entered them eight centuries ago. But this isn’t just a journey through an ancient landscape. It’s a journey in search of one of the world’s least known religious sects ... the ancient Fire Worshippers Of Yazd.
Legend tells of a utopian kingdom hidden among the towering mountains of inner Asia. A paradise on Earth, yet a place apart. A place of spiritual contentment and eternal life. A place that’s become known to the West as Shangri-La. For century’s romantics, adventurers and the devout risked their lives searching for this heaven on Earth. Many perished in the quest. Those who returned told of a journey through hostile lands, of crossing treacherous mountain passes & desert gorges in their search for a valley where people live for hundreds of years. To this day its whereabouts remains a mystery... David Adams goes in search of Shangri-La in the icy valleys of the Himalaya and Karakoram Mountains in Far North Pakistan.
In the far-flung reaches of Siberian Russia there’s a place unlike any other on earth. A place nine times zones from Moscow. A place so far east it’s almost west. A place called Kamchatka, the snowbound Eden. One hundred thousand lakes; 300 geysers; 414 glaciers; 100 volcanoes all crammed into a peninsula the size of California. But it’s also a nuclear no-go zone. Off-limits to the world for most of the 20th century. In fact, more Americans have been into outer space than have crossed Kamchatka in the last hundred years. It’s into this unforgiving icebox cold corner of the world that David Adams goes in search of the last of the Itelman, the semi-legendary wild men of Siberia’s Far East.
Inca (ing-kàh) ....... The two flinty syllables strike at the imagination like the sudden hard beat of an Andean drum. Cities of gold; sun worship; virgin sacrifice. The stuff of legend. Legends that for the most part remain hidden in the impenetrable no-man’s land of Peru’s high country. For the better part of 400 years people have searched the deep canyons & towering ice peaks of these mist-covered cloud forests trying to locate the lost cities of the Inca. They were all after one thing; gold. Any gold would do but there was one thing desired above all others, the Great Golden Disc of the Sun. The most sacred of all Inca relics. The Inca Holy Grail. It is in search of this Holy Grail that David Adams goes on his journey to Puncuyoc, sacred Sister City of Machu Picchu; the city sought but never found by Hiram Bingham.
David Adams re-lives the last days on the last trail of two American heroes, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, through the deserts of Bolivia. In 1908 the two legendary outlaws disappeared in the south of Bolivia not far from the border of Argentina. Were they killed by the Bolivian Cavalry? Or did they fake their deaths and escape to the USA and Europe as rich men? This is the mystery tackled by David Adams and the “Journeys” team. He recreates the lives and adventures of Butch and Sundance from La Paz in the north, to San Vincente to the south. And in the process he discovers what life was really like for them, and the true story of what happened in their final hours.
The Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia are how Asia used to be. A surviving pocket of intact wildlife & wilderness that’s been untouched by history. And not just any history. It’s survived Year Zero. Pol Pot. The Killing Fields. History at its most vicious. David Adams enters this lost world in search of the khting vor, a mysterious snake-eating animal known as the “Cambodian unicorn” which was until recently believed to be extinct. On his journey he runs the gauntlet of renegade bands of the Khmer Rouge and Mekong River pirates, goes trapping tigers and discovers the jungle-choked remains of what was once the biggest city on Earth.
Nowhere else on Earth is the difference between the tranquillity & beauty of the physical world and the brutality & disorder of the people who live in it brought into such sharp contrast as it is in the former Soviet satellites that span the gap between Europe & Asia. Nagorno Karabagh. Ossetia. Abkhazia. Ingushetia. Chechnya. Dagestan. Who’d even heard of them before the 90s? Nowhere has the millennial thirst for independence combined with exploding nationalism to such deadly effect as it has in the new nations and ethnic enclaves of Caucasia. And right in the middle of them all lies Georgia. Today it’s a place trying to emerge from the iron grip of the Kremlin but once it was a land of mystery and dragons… This is where Prometheus was bound to his rock. Where Medea cast her spells. Where one of Noah’s sons set up house after the biblical flood. Where Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece. David Adams follows in the footsteps of Jason and his Argonauts on a journey from the Black Sea to the Caspian in search of the truth behind the myth of the “Golden Fleece”.
Adams travels across the simmering heat of the Sahara with a Tuareg caravan, haggles for a pillar of salt and skis down the biggest sand dune in the world. This is the Land of Fear.
Libya is Africa’s last great unknown. A vast desert country veiled from the West by fear, prejudice and misunderstanding. Once it was home to the richest cities in Africa. The headquarters for the African empires of Rome & Greece. Now it is reviled as “a desert with a dictator in it”. David Adams follows in the wheel tracks of Ancient Rome’s “chariots of fire” - the first wheeled vehicles to explore the Sahara - and discovers a little-known land of exotic brilliance, ancient cities & forbidding deserts.
David heads high into the Ethiopian Cush - a place known to the ancients as Punt, The Land Of Ghosts - in search of The Lost Ark. The “lost” Ark of the Covenant is believed to be the most powerful object ever made by man. Its frightening power turned the Jews from Egyptian slaves into a powerful people of destiny. It destroyed whomsoever it touched. It razed cities to the ground. Then in 586BC it disappeared. It’s believed to have ended up in Ethiopia & that’s why David’s gone there. Not in search of the Ark itself - no mortal can look at it without being consumed by fire - but in search of those who look after it, the Keepers of the Lost Ark.
The battered dhow carves its passage though the tourmaline waters of the South Indian Ocean. Its patched lateen sail fat with monsoon wind, the salt air fragrant with cloves. Barely heard at first, the faint cry of a muezzin crackles through the dawn’s early light. Heads turn to the horizon. The turbaned helmsman eases off the sailrope & utters just one magical word.... Zanzibar. Zanzibar. The Spice Island. A real world Shangri-la. The island at the end of the earth. David Adams sails south in search of the lost world of Arab seafarer.
Sudan is one of the world’s last frontiers. It’s a mineral treasure trove (unmined gold, uranium, oil) hobbled by a brutal history. It’s Africa’s largest country - it stretches from Boston to Key West - yet virtually all of its 33 million inhabitants have no electricity, no telephones, and no postal service. It’s also the scene of one of the longest ongoing civil wars ever played out. Once though this vast desert land was the home of an advanced & mysterious civilisation. An ancient kingdom that was the glory of Africa. A kingdom that once ruled Egypt. A kingdom known as Kush. David Adams travels down the Nile from Lake Nasser to Khartoum in search of the mysterious kingdom of pyramid builders and sun worshippers on a journey into the land of the Black Pharaohs.
