Tropic of Cancer - Season 1 (2010)

Simon starts his world trip along the northern border of the tropics in Mexico, a country of contrasts. Tourism and NAFTA-investment bring dollars and affluent foreigners, while poor Mexican (mostly illegal) migrants and drugs leave to the US. Exploitation, a violence-saturated culture (even a patron saint of drug crime) and ecological disaster result. Simon also tries "lucha libre", the local show wrestling. On Castro's Cuba, anti-Americanism and the US blockade are harder to bear since the Soviet collapse. Bermuda, a Caribean paradise resort, also has its ...

Simon starts his world tour around the Tropic of Cancer in the Saharawi people's sand desert home, the south of the former Spanish colony of Rio Oro, disputed by Polisario's Western Sahara republic and Morocco, which occupies most militarily behind a sand ditch acting like an Iron curtain. Former French colonies Mauritania and Algeria next, rich in mineral resources, but the first obsessed with fattening up women, the second recovering from a very bloody Islamist civil war. Finally colonel Khadaffi's Libya, rich in oil and subterranean water, hence gigantic ...

In southern Egypt, where the official baby-sitters prove extremely bothersome, Simon visits the Aswan dam's giant lake, pharaoh Ramses II the Geat's Abu Simbl monuments, the modern Nubians. Further east, Bedouin nomads who abandoned desert life because of global warming and the Red Sea, a unique, still relatively well preserved marine biotope, under threat from tourism development. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, on the oil-rick Arab peninsula, Simon studies the mix of Islamic conservatism and western affluence. He meets a luxury sports cars street race gang in Jeddah ...