Amazon

Season

2008

UK

8.4

British explorer Bruce Parry journeys the Amazon across South America, interacting with tribes, locals, foreign companies, drug traffickers, rebels, and military forces as an anthropological observer.

Episode List

S1 • E1

Episode #1.1

Former Royal Marine Bruce Parry starts his journey along the Amazon at its Peruvian source in the Andes, the other domineering feature in South America. There live the Quechua, the ethnic Inca descendants, who still mix pagan and other traditions with the conquistadors' Spanish Catholic culture. Bruce's host family chew coca-leaves and herd alpacas, llamas producing the best wool. In the valley down-stream, past world-class daunting rapids, lives the Ashaninka tribe, who cultivate coca, which legal and has legitimate uses to chew against the altitude. Coca is also processed chemically, involving grave river pollution, into a paste which is the basis for cocaine, illegal but without realistic alternative in market terms, although their share of the drug trade profit is minute. Bruce joins a US-supported army raid on the cocaine production, which has no net effect. Their jungle is invaded by loggers and guerrillas. Bruce's brain-infected producer Matt's life depends on an urgent far helicopter flight to Lima.

S1 • E2

Episode #1.2

Bruce visits the Peruvian Achuar tribe, which lives in a pristine Amazon forest region. His host village is reluctant and mistrusting, which makes sense as neighboring communities, which accepted deals with oil companies, suffered wide-spreading pollution and cultural ruin. Bruce finds helping with logging and fishing particularly hard because of the daily purification with wayous, a beverage from a bitter vine, which induces violent vomiting. Much more is supposed to allow visions, but Bruce's rational ego resist. That occurs again in a city downstream, where it's mixed with hallucinogenic leaves such as dattura. He passes the Brazilian border and arrives in a town just before carnival, Rio style with a weird twist: everybody cross-dresses.

S1 • E3

Episode #1.3

Bruce visits by river Itui the Valle de Javari, a relatively pristine Brazilian nature and tribal reserve. It's home to various tribes, including the Matis, where Bruce spend a month for his Tribe series, so they welcome him as an old friend and implore help as even more terrible diseases such as STD hepatitis B spread, beyond shaman therapy. Next Bruce meets the Marubo, the reserve's largest tribe, made up a century ago by remnants of deep forest tries fleeing rubber slavery. He partakes in the macho excruciating trucadeiro ant bites ritual and ritual drum logging. Finally he joins a band of non-industrial loggers, who try to harvest hardwood selectively, claiming the track grows back even more diverse.