Radio Times: Review by:; David Butcher

There’s often an environmental undertow to Simon Reeve’s travels. His general point could be boiled down to: look how beautiful this is... but it’s all doomed.

He doesn’t have to go far on the shores of the Indian Ocean to find ruinous overfishing or vast rubbish heaps and this programme features both. That might sound like it would make for a sombre eco-lecture but Reeve goes at things in a roundabout way. The scene where he goes out with fisherman to catch skipjack tuna with a pole and line is good fun, with only the slight problem that just over the horizon are trawlers with 7-mile-long nets dragging every living thing out of the sea.

About this programme

4/6. The fourth leg of the adventurer's journey takes him from Oman to the Maldives. He starts in the Strait of Hormuz, where oil from the Gulf is shipped through the narrow channel, then moves on to Mumbai, the ocean's biggest port. In the Maldives, Simon finds arguably the most beautiful collection of tropical coral islands in the world - but the fragile underwater environment is a barometer for the changing nature of the sea, as he witnesses how bleaching has damaged the coral and one entire island has been manufactured as a landfill dump to deal with the problem of rubbish.