Where in the world?
This was my travel television show idea. So this one didn't get made, but you'll like it anyway and maybe learn something fascinating
Just a quirky journey revealing the world as an unexpected, interconnected web of stories. This was supposed to be an unconventional travel-adventure series that takes viewers on a nonlinear world voyage where maps and cell phones are verboten.
Think IN SEARCH OF meets an intrepid ON THE ROAD guide who offers viewers a chance to meet wondrous people from all cultures, learn something astounding about the world, and be inspired to take their own journeys of a lifetime by drawing on one-of-a-kind travel pointers and anecdotes.
Call it the ultimate off-the-beaten-track discovery. In our processed, digital, prepackaged world, we consume goods, information, and experiences that are delivered to us without having any idea of their origins. You’ll never believe where these stories will take you, or where they will end.
And of course it encourages us to activate our senses and to get off our iPhones, to put down the guidebooks, and to throw out the Top 10 Lists along with our expectations.
And here were some of the episodes.
You can fly on Hello Kitty Airlines
Yes, there is a Taiwanese airline themed with the Japanese animated character, Hello Kitty. We board this EVA Air Hello Kitty plane from Taipei, to the birthplace of manga comics, Japan. Although this art dates back to the 12th century, today it’s on the streets of Harajuku, in Tokyo where we get dressed up as comic characters with locals. From here we jet to the Pyramids in Egypt, where we will be educated on the first comic-like drawings we know of: hieroglyphics. Digging deeper to find where cartoons have come to life, we go behind the scenes and feel the 5Gs on the themed roller coasters at the “Happiest Place on Earth,” Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Florida. Then, in order to understand more about the 21st century’s need for thrills, we take up skydiving at the most challenging place of all time, Mount Everest, Nepal.
Prehistoric plants are being traded illegally
Cycads, fossil seed plants, date back 280 million years, and today they’re almost extinct - one of the reasons is the illegal poaching in South Africa for the gardens of the rich. It’s a status symbol, and also a terrorist’s source of income. Yes, they trade cycads on the black market for guns. We travel to the Botanical Gardens in Durban, South Africa where cycads are implanted with tracking microchips. And from one illegal trade to another: we venture to the Kruger National Park, also in South Africa, where rhinos have drones to protect them from horn poachers. Exploring trade routes, we find ourselves on the Silk Road - a trade route that ignited many wars, made fortunes and shaped globalization. And today it still runs: from Istanbul, Turkey, through the Stan countries - Kazakhstan, Tajikistan etc. - all the way to Beijing, China. Along the way we visit ancient grand bazaars, singing sand dunes, hidden terracotta warriors, flaming mountains and architectural masterpieces.
Urban climbers compete to scale skyscrapers without ropes or a harness
Competing to be the tallest building in the world is a national sport - from the days of the Empire State Building in New York projecting America’s strength, to the first wooden skyscraper in Norway that opened this year. We travel to Saudi Arabia, where the tallest building in the world, the Jeddah Tower is nearing completion at 3x the height of the Eiffel Tower (1km/3300 ft). But before Dubai’s Burj Khalifa loses its crown, we visit to see how urban climbers or “builderers'' successfully scale it. Fascinated by all things tall, we climb the tallest tree in the world at 330 ft, in Borneo, with our own tape measure. Next with a group of scientists and native tribes, we visit the deepest parts of the Amazon, where deforestation is impacting the forest’s greenhouse gas absorption.
What happened to tan M&Ms?
You stuffed your face with these as a kid, and so we start our journey at Mars HQ in Virginia; asking where they have disappeared to, We discover that the company replaced them with “America’s vote” - thus, why we have blue ones today. We then travel to a cacao plantation and chocolate factory in Tabasco, Mexico, known to be the birthplace of chocolate thanks to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. From there, we hop over to Africa, to see how the two leading producers of cocoa in the world, Cote D'Ivoire and Ghana, harvest it. We discover a slave trade that is astonishingly alive; where children are forced to harvest cocoa beans. What can we do to stop the abuse of these children?
250 people are born worldwide every single minute
The planet currently houses 8 billion people. And so we visit the extremes: driving around the largest city in the world, Chongqing, with more than 31 million people, in a taxi, and we walk around the smallest city-state in the world, the Vatican, which has just 800 people. Next we stay in a yurt in Mongolia, a country with the least amount of people per square mile. And then we trot over to the Republic of Uzupis, inside the city of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, where what started as an April Fool’s Joke has now evolved into a micronation with its own president and currency.
Hallucinogens sparked the Salem Witch Trials
So there weren’t any witches, just a bunch of girls high on LSD, or so we discovered in Salem, Massachusetts. Next, we go back centuries to when dinosaurs roamed the earth - at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, in Linyi, China - and we see how they were the first users of LSD. We then travel to Peru for an Ayahuasca retreat with a Shaman; to a medicine doctor’s yurt in Siberia, the birthplace of Shamanism; from there we venture to the modern-day Goop inspired wellness retreat: a 10 day detox at The Ranch, in Malibu, followed by a Zen Buddhist retreat hosted by MIT professors at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur. We round this all off with a 10 day completely silent meditation retreat in Rishikesh, India at the Parmarth Niketan Ashram.
France has a Naked City
In Idaho, it’s illegal to skinny dip, even in your backyard. But that hasn’t stopped nudism as it is growing worldwide. Besides visiting Germany, where “Free Body Culture” is promoted at local lakes and beaches, we pop over to this “Naked City” in Cap d'Agde, and to a member’s only nudist resort in Lutz, Florida. From there we visit a Korean spa in Seoul, where nudity is mandatory. We also partake in the World Body Painting Festival in Austria, join in the Naked Festival in Japan to celebrate fertility and, we end this trek by getting naked in South Africa at “Africa Burns,” (a version of “Burning Man”), where getting nude is all part of the creative process.
The world’s smallest flat screen TV is embedded into a coin
The dollar bill is not made from paper, it’s a mix of cotton and linen. So, we start our trip in Fort Worth, Texas, where most of America’s money is printed, to see how it's done and how a cashless society is slowly taking shape. From here we hop over to the Cook Islands to find their currency implanted with a tiny television. Next we pop over to Cameroon, where bottle caps are used as secondary currency to pay for taxi rides and bribing police officers. From here we go to Somalia to find colorful, oddly shaped coins (ranging from guitars, to motorbikes, to flags) that are still in circulation at street markets. In terms of edible currencies, we find the “reng,” a yarn-ball of turmeric spice wrapped in coconut fibers, used for trade in the Solomon Islands. We fly to the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan in Sudan to meet the Nyimang, an ethnic subgroup of the Nuba peoples, who use cattle as their only currency.
2% of Americans say that the earth is flat
YouTube is partially credited for the enormous growth of The Flat Earth Society over the last 5 years. We hop onboard their cruise ship to see earth for ourselves - first stop, their edge of the earth (Antarctica); from there we trek over to Space X in Nevada, to see what earth will look like from Mars; and just for extra measure to Space Port, Virgin Galactic’s center of operations for commercial space travel in New Mexico.
The Silbo Gomero language is made up of just whistling.
We travel to the Canary Islands where the Silbo Gomero language has had a resurgence amongst the youth, and then travel to learn some conversational titbits of other unique languages with phoneme substitutions: the Taa language of Botswana; and Archi, a language spoken only around Russia’s Caspian Sea. We then do a “Game of Thrones” Tour of Northern Island to learn the made-up language, “Dothraki.”
Monopoly helped POW escape during WWII
The Nazis allowed Allied Prisoners of War to play board games - the British Government was even allowed to send games over. Of course, inside one of the Monopoly boxes were tools for escape. So next, we enter a Monopoly Tournament in England, to learn about the game and its century of fandom. Speaking of games, when the Lego mini-figure was created in 1975 in Denmark, the company felt that yellow was racially-neutral. So, we head over to Lego’s new HQ in Denmark to see Lego’s next pivot, and also to Apple HQ in California to see how emojis are continually being created in various hues depicting race. We then explore Barbie and Ken at their very own museum in Montreal - Mattel, Barbie’s creators, recently produced nine unique body types, 35 skin tones and 94 different hairstyles, and they have added a line of gender neutral dolls. But toys and games are not just for kids, so we then travel to Guangzhou, China, to see how the $300k world's first electric passenger-grade autonomous aerial vehicle (basically a drone that you can get into) operates.
Chairman Mao had human flesh banquets
Chairman Mao created gourmet cannibalism during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 60s - so we venture to Guangxi, China, where in the last century, there is evidence of human flesh banquets. From here we go to Papua New Guinea, where cannibals still live today and where a member of the Rockefeller family went missing in 1961. With plant based eating’s increase in popularity, we jump to the Himalayas, India where ashrams have been promoting “no flesh” veganism since 877-777 BCE to eat a few meals. Next, we find new sources of plant proteins in the Peruvian rain forests with a local chef - where new super foods are being discovered. We then go to a bush dinner under the stars in remote Western Australia with aboriginal chefs where unheard of superfoods, like green ants, wattle seed and lemon myrtle, are served.
Coffee was originally chewed
3 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day. After oil, coffee is the world's second most valuable commodity exported by developing countries. We start our journey in the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia, where coffee cherries were first chewed, before the custom of fire roasting and brewing them. Next, we venture east to meet fincas in Java, Indonesia (home to “poop coffee” Kopi luwak); and then to coffee plantations in Brazil, the biggest producer of coffee in the world, to see how global warming is changing the growing region. We also travel to Europe to the oldest operating cafe in Paris, Café Le Procope, and the ornate Cafe Central, Vienna, where Freud and Lenin famously caffeinated. We finish off our journey to the New Wave haven of coffee, Panama, where Geisha beans are grown with great difficulty.
Americans spend $3 billion a year on “mystical services,” including Astrology
We start our journey in New York City by visiting a psychic on 8th Avenue to have a palm and tarot reading. From here we venture to Arizona to spend time with Navajo elders in a sweat lodge session learning about what they say nature has in store for us. Following that we get a hand etched bamboo Sak Yant tattoo, from Thai monks, in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, after they read us our astrology zodiac chart. Of course next we need to see these constellations for ourselves and with powerful telescopes, so we go to the darkest place on earth, where these stars are the brightest - the Namibian desert.
I mean I’d watch this show…right?