I'm on a huge journey.
I'm travelling the length of the Americas,
the two continents that, together, form more than a quarter
of Earth's land surface.
On this adventure,
I'm travelling down through South America.
We're in such a remote part of planet Earth.
It's a journey of more than 4,000 miles
through some of the world's greatest landscapes...
..encountering spectacular wildlife.
The cat is on the move.
From its iconic cities
to the Andes Mountains,
it's a continent of dramatic extremes.
Down!
Along the way, I meet the inspiring...
Yolanda! Abrazamos?
..and the surprising people...
These guys are Mennonites.
..who make South America so extraordinary.
CHEERING
There's Wi-Fi here,
nowhere else for miles around, apparently.
We do our own thing. We're happy here, man.
WIND WHISTLES
Oh, it's epic! Look at this view!
So, down beneath me, and all around me,
is the driest desert on planet Earth, the Atacama.
To get a bit of perspective on this incredible landscape,
I've taken to the air, paragliding.
I was in Northern Chile,
starting the final leg of my journey down through South America.
Below me, the Atacama Desert
is 40,000 square miles of sand, red rock and arid mountains.
It's endlessly, pitilessly dry,
and also one of the oldest deserts on Earth,
arid for tens of millions of years.
Floating above it was as close as I'll get to paragliding on Mars.
It's the very particular conditions of the area here
that make the Atacama what it is.
The snow-capped Andes Mountains block rain coming from the east,
and the cold upwelling waters of the Pacific
conspire, really, to mean that, in some areas of the Atacama,
there is less than one millimetre of rainfall per year.
Wow!
Now we're just on the edge of the desert, right next to the sea,
and even here, there is a human settlement.
This is the industrial city of Iquique.
Yeah.
All right.
OK.
SIMON LAUGHS Sorry! Sorry!
Ah! Ah! That was pretty good, though...
..except for following the final instructions.
Yes, you forgot. I forgot the final crucial bit.
Oh, that was astonishing.
It's nice to be back on solid ground, though.
It might seem bizarre there's a thriving modern city
plonked down here in such a remote
and extreme corner of planet Earth...
..but they've been mining the desert here for centuries,
and Iquique is now a bit of a boom town.
Chile has been one of the great
South American economic success stories
in recent decades.
Average income levels here
aren't far off those in parts of Europe,
partly because Chile exports enormous quantities of copper.
They make a fortune from mining copper here,
but Chile's government has also made Iquique
one of the biggest tax-free ports in South America,
which means hundreds of firms import and export electronics, appliances,
toys, booze, and especially clothes.
I drove outside the city to the fringes of the desert.
This is a strange, barren area...
..right underneath these looming cliffs.
Oh, my God!
I've just had one of those moments of awful realisation.
So, what I'm standing on...
..is clothes.
Underneath my feet, underneath the ground over here,
there are tens of thousands of tonnes of clothes.
I was above what is basically a mountain of used,
discarded clothes.
Each year recently, here in Iquique,
it's thought an incredible 60,000 tonnes of clothing
have been dumped illegally.
The council have just bulldozed it all into the ground,
creating an enormous landfill.
You can see these layers and layers of clothing
coming out of the ground here.
A pair of trousers here.
It is mad that we create this clothing
and then so readily throw it away.
It takes more than three tonnes of water
to produce a pair of jeans...
..and then, boom...
..it's chucked.
Traders here import bales
of recycled clothes from Europe and the US.
They resell them across the continent,
and many clothes do find a new home,
but due to the explosion in so-called fast fashion,
there's now just so much - a tidal wave of cheap clothing -
that millions of pieces are dumped here,
showing perhaps how wasteful we've become.
Bloody hell!
This is a...
I almost can't believe it.
So, this is a 100% pure cashmere jacket.
This is madness.
This was something called Peterborough Row,
"Only at Bloomingdale's,"
one of the finest stores in New York.
I'm just staggered.
Clothes with tags on.
These have come straight from stores.
Ah!
Gap.
It's not quite my size.
We're addicted to clothing trends and fast fashion.
In the UK, in 2019,
we spent a whopping £61 billion on new outfits -
the highest level in Europe.
Many clothes are worn just a few times and then chucked.
And there's an environmental cost. The clothing industry pollutes.
It's said to use a quarter of all the chemicals made on Earth.
This is really
the clothing industry's dirty secret.
This is where fast fashion and old favourites go to die.
In the UK now, we throw away something like
13 million items of clothing...
..per week.
I think the clothing industry, globally,
it has got away almost under the radar,
environmentally, for far too long.
There's a focus on other industries,
but the clothing industry has an enormous ecological footprint.
It's responsible for about 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
That's as much as international flights
and shipping combined.
Just next to the dump and the sands of the Atacama Desert,
I found a new makeshift settlement that's sprung up from nothing.
This is a really basic little shanty area.
It's been chucked together at...
..at relative speed by people with very little.
It's mostly migrants living out here in the dust and heat.
Many have made an extraordinary 3,000-mile journey
from Venezuela to the north,
where the collapsing economy, poverty and hunger
means almost a quarter of the population has fled.
It's one of the biggest migrations in the world,
a humanitarian crisis largely ignored outside this continent.
At different points on my journey down through South America,
we've seen the difficulties facing Venezuelan migrants
as they attempt to find safety, a job...
..a home, a future.
But this is the furthest south that I've seen that they've travelled.
My God, they have been through hell, often, to get here.
Say hello.
I stopped off to meet some of the new arrivals -
a young couple who made the gruelling journey from Venezuela
with their two young daughters.
Hiya. Simon? Simon. This is Maria?
And you're...? Mayason. Mayason. Mayason? Mayason.
So, where have you come from, and why?
When you say the situation in Venezuela was complicated,
what do you mean?
What has been the worst bit of the journey to get here for you?
I can't imagine a situation where my partner and child,
they're on the road somewhere and you're, what,
getting phone calls saying what's happening
and you're trying to send money to them?
How was it for you?
I feel like we've just sort of landed in your world
at what looks like quite an important moment
because you're in the process, I am guessing,
of building and decorating your own shop.
Is that right? Is that what you've got the paint for?
This is a big moment.
This is you two properly building a future here.
Well, I thought they were fantastic, inspiring, and genuinely moving.
Thousands of miles from home, on the edge of the Atacama Desert,
this young couple were building a future for themselves
and their children, and that future starts with their little shop.
It's a small space...
..but I reckon you two could do great things.
What would you like the outside world to know?
What would you say to other people in Chile and South America
and elsewhere in the world about your situation
and the situation of Venezuelans?
Millions of Venezuelans have now left the country
and they are travelling enormous distances across South America
to get to somewhere like Chile in the search for a better future,
an education for their children, a job.
Not all of them will end up somewhere like this,
but a lot of them will.
Right, I'm going to be one of the first customers,
and I would like a bottle of delicious orange juice
and maybe some Tuareg biscuits, which look pretty good.
Oh, man! A drink for the whole team.
Brilliant. OK. Gracias!
It's underway! The shop is happening!
He's a good businessman, as well. He didn't give me a small bottle.
Gracias!
Buena suerte! Igualmente. THEY LAUGH
I wish them all the luck in the world.
It was time to leave the Atacama
and continue my South American journey
heading ultimately to the bottom of the continent.
Chile is, of course, the longest, thinnest country in the world.
Move it over Europe and it would stretch
from the Arctic Circle to Southern Spain.
I crossed the border to Argentina and headed to the capital -
one of my favourite cities.
Buenos Aires was built on waves of European migration.
In the late 19th century, millions of Italians and Spaniards,
plus Germans, French, Poles, Russians, Scandis and Brits
came here seeking their fortune in the New World.
They poured out into the rich land of this,
the eighth largest country on the planet.
Now, Argentina is blessed with incredible natural resources,
and it's easy to forget now, but for many decades,
Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world.
In the late 1800s, the GDP per capita here
exceeded that even of the United States.
There was an expression, "As rich as an Argentinian."
I'd arrived late and it was getting past my bedtime,
but my guide in Buenos Aires, Catalina Sarabi-Rouse,
took me across the city for a drink in a trendy area.
Where we're driving through now, I mean, it looks... Pretty.
It looks gorgeous. Yeah.
It looks like we're in an incredibly wealthy,
very European...
It is a very European city, famously.
It's a nice place, pretty place. It's pretty cool.
Culturally, intellectually, emotionally,
so much of this city keeps its connection with the Old World.
Yeah, and my family, my great-grandfather,
he was the first one to come to Argentina, and I'm 26,
so it's not that far away, for my family,
the first one to come... Right. ..in a boat. So, we all...
Whoever you talk to, they are going to tell you,
"Oh, yes, my grandfather was the first one to come to Argentina."
Even into the early 1900s,
this was among the top ten richest nations,
and then it all went wrong.
Like a punter in a casino who keeps betting badly,
for decades, Argentina lurched
from one economic disaster to another.
Over the last 100 years,
no other country in the world has suffered
such a steep economic decline, and the problems are still ongoing.
They impact millions, especially the young.
Cheers. Cheers! Thanks for bringing us here.
Tuesday night. It's quite cold. Still, there's people out.
Life goes on, doesn't it?
The thing is that it's not something that you can do that often.
That's how it works.
I'm 26 years old and I have to get three jobs.
I end up not being able to earn enough money
to face my day-to-day -
things I want to spend my money on,
pay your rent, pay your food, your insurance, your -
I don't know - your phone, whatever you need.
I gather that the economic problems here
disproportionately affect the young.
Hmm. Do you feel that? Do you see it?
I feel it in a way that
it's related with our hopes and our dreams.
I have lots of friends that they start deciding,
instead of working here and trying to make a career here,
they just go abroad because when they realise that
buying a house will be impossible,
renting a house or a small flat will be very hard,
and there are not so many opportunities,
they say, "OK, maybe if I go to Europe..."
They try different countries.
There's something deeply tragic, I feel,
about a country that was so built on immigration
now being such a potential source of emigration.
Yeah, I have lots of friends that they decided to just go
and try some luck, as we say here... Yeah.
..somewhere abroad because they realise that,
here, things are not that simple.
Here, why should I keep on trying if everything is so, so hard?
One survey of under-25s in Argentina
suggested seven out of ten of them want to leave the country
because, despite the glitz of Buenos Aires,
there is a massive cost-of-living crisis here.
Any country most youngsters want to leave
is clearly in dire straits.
The problems here can be pinned on decades of poor leadership,
economic mismanagement, bad luck, a self-serving elite, corruption,
and international money markets turning against the country.
And one aspect of the crisis impacts everyday life here
perhaps more than any other - crazy levels of inflation.
So, Catalina is taking me now to, I suppose,
the heart of the economic problems of the country.
Is that fair? Yeah. Where are we going?
We're here - the supermarket. Come on, let's go.
We've got problems with inflation,
but imagine what it's like for people here.
At one point, it was 1,000%,
and it was still 60% when I visited.
Well, milk.
Last week, this one - this milk - was 140.
One week ago. Seriously? Now it's 160. Exactly.
The price grows week to week.
If we take two, we are going to win some money this time.
Win some money? So, you're almost...
You're spreading your risk with that, aren't you? Exactly.
There is another way we find by saving,
and it's through toilet paper.
OK. I wasn't expecting that! Yeah.
Come with me. I'm going to show you. Over here.
I'm going to tell you what my mind is thinking. OK. OK?
I look at how long the toilet paper is.
Yeah, how many sheets per roll. Yes. Exactly.
What I think is, "OK, if I take four of these ones..."
Yeah. "..I will be able to handle them for -
"I don't know - maybe four months."
So, this way, when I come back four months from now... Yeah.
..I will find this price
500 by then.
You think it could go up to 500 pesos,
but you've saved that increase over the next few months. Exactly.
Inflation means prices keep rising,
but usually wages don't keep pace, making everything really expensive.
But it's gone on so long here,
people lose track of what things are actually worth.
In the UK, those four packs of loo roll,
based on our average salaries, would be £60.
Oh, wow! Look!
CATALINA LAUGHS Buenisimo!
There's quite a lot of value in that, isn't there?
So, if you can fill your house with toilet paper... I definitely would.
This is gold.
# Ah! #
Big business and the wealthy elite here
insulate themselves from the economic problems.
They turn their pesos into US dollars
and get them out of the country.
Some suspect there's more Argentinian investment wealth
stashed in American banks than there is in all of Argentina.
In Latin America, the richest 1%
hold almost half of all personal wealth.
It's just about THE most unequal region of the planet.
So, what's this place? Well, here we are
in a place where they give food for the little children.
Hola! Hello! Hola!
It's like a food kitchen? Exactly. It's a food kitchen. Hola!
The poorest in society suffer, but, here, there's organisation...
Wow! ..and inspiration.
It smells fantastic. It looks pretty bloody good, as well.
Elena Gonzalez runs a soup kitchen from the back of her house.
In a country of 45 million,
more than 4 million people now rely on thousands of food banks
and soup kitchens for sustenance.
Very roughly, how many meals - individual meals -
do you think you serve out to people?
Do you pay for this out of your own pocket?
It's very impressive to see, actually,
the children at the table here.
Yeah, most of the boys are waiting for...
..until they all have food to start.
Elena's never been so busy.
Even before the Covid pandemic,
many parents struggled to put food on the table.
Now, since the pandemic started, the number of people
living in extreme poverty on the continent
has risen by 16 million.
Almost two-thirds of Argentina's children live in poverty.
Communities and countless charities, like Barrios de Pie,
who fund Elena's kitchen, fight to help families survive.
So, what's your own personal story, your background? Can you...?
Can you empathise with the struggles of the families here?
You had a stroke, I think, just a few weeks ago.
Why are you still...?
Why are you still doing this? It must be physically draining.
People like Elena, and others who run these community kitchens,
are real heroes in this economic crisis.
Day after day, week after week, they provide thousands -
hundreds of thousands - of meals,
and often with very limited resources,
and they do it with ingenuity and with heart and with love.
I travelled south,
back towards the Andes Mountains
that run like a spine
between Argentina and Chile.
This is completely spectacular.
I'm arriving now into one of the most glorious landscapes
in all of South America - Patagonia.
The region of Patagonia
covers the south of the continent on both sides of the Andes.
Its lakes, forests, grasslands and mountains will keep me company
through to the end of my South American journey.
There's a little bit of rain, and we're heading uphill,
because we are climbing up into the Andes Mountains,
and we're going to cross into Chile.
It's quite exciting to see snow in the Americas.
Thanks, mate.
I love the extremes of South America.
On this journey, I've been from the rainforest of the Amazon
to the largest tropical wetland in the world - the Pantanal.
There was the dry forest of the Chaco,
the desert of the Atacama, and now, here, look at this!
It's like we're in Lapland!
I love South America. HE CHUCKLES
Down from the cold, snowy peaks of the Andes,
I drove towards the border on the Chilean side of Patagonia.
Now we're on the Pacific side of the Andes again
and it's a lot wetter on this side.
We're into, well, you were saying rainforest.
Rainforest, cloud forest,
but a much more lush environment on this side.
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.
We're now at the official border with Chile.
There's a long queue.
It's very boring. Passports, documents.
We need to get across, then find a hotel
and pick up filming tomorrow.
This heavily forested region of Patagonia
is the ancestral land of the Mapuche people -
South America's largest indigenous group.
There's around 1.5 million Mapuche in Chile.
Like so many indigenous groups I'd met on my long journey
through the continent,
the Mapuche no longer own the expanses of land
that once was theirs.
Much of the land here
is now owned by farmers and logging companies.
In some places, old forests have been cleared
and replaced with plantations of non-native trees -
thirsty, exotic trees that suck scarce water.
All right.
Juan Pichun campaigns for these forests
to be returned to the Mapuche people.
He's been labelled as a militant.
This is eucalyptus, isn't it?
And this is non-native. This isn't from Chile.
This isn't a South American plant or a tree, at all, is it?
Is it fair to say, then, that, as Mapuche,
you're not just angry about your land being taken from you,
it's also how the land is now being used?
A lot of Mapuche see these as almost like the final insult.
It's not just that their land,
as they see it, has been taken from them,
but it's now being used for these eucalyptus trees.
There's a growing conflict over this land.
Forestry is a lucrative industry in Chile,
generating more than $2 billion in exports.
Companies don't want to give that up to the Mapuche,
but I travelled on to an area
where some Mapuche are resorting to extreme tactics
to push out what they see as outsiders.
Another burnt-out house.
Mapuche activists here are targeting logging companies,
farms, and even homes.
Oh, my God!
Can we stop? Can you just stop here?
I'll be able to just jump out.
Bloody hell!
So, this was, say, a little vineyard -
not so little, actually - vineyard restaurant,
and a couple of nights ago, it was burned to the ground.
The talk locally, and on the news, is that
it's a militant Mapuche group that is responsible.
It's very hard to know.
I found restaurant owner Grasiella and her husband, Jose,
surveying the wreckage.
This is my wife's dream and she had many plans for it.
It's all gone now.
They burned it.
Who is "they"? Well, the...
..terrorists. They are terrorists.
They say they are Mapuche, but they are terrorists.
They're telling us that we must leave the area,
and that all the farm owners must leave, and things like that.
Do they claim your land?
No, not yet, but it's a matter of time.
They start asking for more and more and more,
so I think they want everything.
For many years, armed Mapuche groups
have been attacking the equipment and property
of forestry companies and large firms.
They've caused hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of damage.
And then, much more recently,
the groups seem to have started attacking even small farms
and people have been killed.
This has rapidly become a crisis in Chile.
The government has declared a state of emergency in this region.
It was upsetting to hear from those who've lost livelihoods and farms
to the direct action.
And when you remember what happened to indigenous people here
after Europeans arrived,
and how they've been oppressed and marginalised,
even over the last century,
it's also hard not to feel sympathy for the Mapuche.
The bloody door is broken.
HE GRUNTS OK.
Over the top. HE GROANS
And this...is where we're staying.
Oh, look.
"Stop the repression of the Mapuche people."
This is a gorgeous area of the country,
but they don't get as many tourists here,
in part because of the...
I was going to say problems, but it's a conflict, really.
And, my goodness, it is heating up.
I'd arranged to meet up with one Mapuche group.
Early start, and we're heading up a mountain
for a Mapuche New Year ceremony.
It was the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere -
winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.
The Mapuche celebrate the imminent return of the sun.
Elders tell stories and make offerings to the Earth.
Local Mapuche leader, Alberto Curamil,
was in charge of the New Year ceremony.
Alberto, what's happening today?
HORNS PLAY
The Mapuche have a grand but tragic history.
Renowned as fierce warriors,
they were never actually conquered or colonised by the Spanish,
but were forcibly incorporated into the Chilean state
in the late 1800s.
During the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet,
which started in 1973,
many Mapuche leaders were murdered, imprisoned or exiled.
Vast areas of Mapuche territory
was then handed to rich, connected families
during the 1970s and '80s.
Loggers and miners moved in,
and anger and resentment still runs deep here.
We've been asked to keep a bit of a distance...
..which is understandable. This is a...
These are a traumatised people, in many ways,
and they don't trust outsiders entirely,
and they certainly don't trust people with cameras.
Chile has long lagged behind other South American countries
in terms of recognition and protection
of its indigenous peoples.
Many of the Mapuche feel left behind
by the economic growth this country has experienced
and by what they feel is discrimination against them.
After Chile returned to being a democracy in the 1990s,
the government said it would give land back to the Mapuche,
but progress has generally been very slow,
and a lot of the Mapuche are saying they've just really had enough.
Mapuche ancestral territory
covered a vast area of Southern Chile and Argentina,
stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Many now talk of taking it back and forming their own nation,
which they call Wallmapu.
What tactics are acceptable, do you believe,
for the Mapuche to reclaim what you believe is yours?
Alberto is an award-winning champion
of the environment and indigenous rights.
Like many, he supports the campaign of sabotage
and he's completely committed.
He's been shot, arrested and jailed in pursuit of the Mapuche cause.
I was getting closer to the end of my journey
down through the continent.
From the Amazon to Bolivia and Paraguay,
I'd met with indigenous groups,
and I'd heard and seen how they're still struggling.
Many believe the Mapuche insurrection
is a warning that other countries in the region
need to address the marginalisation of their First People.
I think what I've seen here
is actually one of the most important issues
I've encountered on my journey down through South America,
on my journey down through all of the Americas, actually.
How can the millions of indigenous people
reclaim more of their rights and their wealth
after hundreds of years of discrimination and exclusion?
I headed towards the Pacific coast of Chile,
where I had a ferry to catch.
I'm leaving the mainland now
and I'm heading for the first of two islands
that I'm visiting on this final leg of my journey.
This island we're heading to now is called Chiloe.
The island of Chiloe is one of hundreds
that pepper the Pacific coast
all the way down to Tierra del Fuego,
my final destination.
Islanders here have always relied on fish.
Trawlers would head out into the ocean,
often for days on end,
to bring back their main catch of anchovies, mackerel, hake,
as well as shellfish, like crabs and mussels.
But in the last few decades,
there's been something of a revolution
in Chile's fishing industry,
and the affects have rippled out across the ocean
and around the world.
Chilean conservationist Liesbeth van der Meer
is one of the leaders of Oceana,
a global campaign group focused on ocean conservation.
She took me to the local fish market.
So, this is the fish market in...
..for the island, for the town?
Yeah, for the whole island.
So, right here, you have...
This is hake, salmon.
Salmon and...?
Merluza.
Before, we used to have over ten species here -
native species -
but now you can see all we get is hake and salmon,
and you can see this in every single stand repeating itself.
These markets used to be filled with native fish.
These are giants!
HE SPEAKS SPANISH
He's going to weigh that salmon. OK.
Flippin' heck!
Pesa siete kilos. Seven kilos. Where would this have come from?
Artisanal fishermen fished it. Right.
This comes from escaped salmon. Escaped salmon?
And how can you be so sure that it's escaped?
Because it's Atlantic salmon.
And we are not by the Atlantic. Exactly.
Fish farms are the revolution here.
Hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon
have escaped from farms off the coast
and become an invasive species in the Pacific.
With few natural predators,
they've caused havoc in the ecosystem,
and native fish have taken a hammering.
Fish farming is booming globally, and Chile's a major player,
second only to Norway as the world's largest producer of salmon.
About a third of the world's farmed salmon comes from here,
comes from Chile.
It's an enormous industry.
It supports more than 60,000 jobs.
And I'm hoping that one of these fishing boats,
if we can just arrange it with them, is going to take us out
to see where all the fish are coming from.
Right, success.
I can remember when salmon was a luxury
we ate at Christmas as a special treat.
Now, around the planet, we consume more than 4 million tonnes a year.
That massive change, for better or worse,
is the result of fish farming.
We can see them jumping, can't we? Yeah, those are the salmon.
Is there an average for the amount that's in there?
What are we talking?
This whole facility probably has around...
..100,000 salmon in there.
100,000 salmon.
Because what you see here, it's only, you know,
one-tenth of what is actually underneath the water.
It's almost 40m down,
so 20 floors of a building, filled with fish.
These fish are very confined.
I mean, you can see them jumping here. Yeah.
They're extremely confined.
This is why they also get sick, and they have sea lice.
Sea lice? Ugh!
They... That's a creature
that almost eats away at their bodies, isn't it?
Exactly, and so we have to use anti-parasites on them.
These are like insecticides.
And because they're so close together,
this has become a plague.
So, imagine... A plague? Yes. Is that what you said? A plague?
Yes. This is exactly like... Wow. ..in humans, you know,
when their immune system is down,
they're sick, they need antibiotics.
They're crammed into these small spaces -
relatively small spaces, arguably -
so it's easier for parasites and disease
to transfer from one to the other. Exactly.
So, we use 2,500 more times antibiotics
than Norway does to produce the same amount of salmon.
Oh, my God!
In Chile, Liesbeth's group, Oceana, warns that excessive use of drugs
could result in the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria -
a potential threat to human health.
Oceana also accuses salmon farms of polluting the sea with pesticides,
salmon faeces and uneaten food.
That, in turn, spurs the growth of algae,
which starves parts of the ocean of oxygen.
The fish are moving away.
The oxygen that we used to have here is not the same quality,
so now there are less fish, they have to go further,
and maybe the most that they can find is salmon.
The salmon industry says
it's trying to reduce the use of antibiotics,
and the Chilean government's trying to curb the environmental impact
of salmon farming under pressure from conservationists
and local fishermen who say they've lost out
because of the industrial fish farms.
You can see it in these people. Yeah.
These people are now fishing crab,
but, before, this used to be very productive waters
with a lot of valuable fish,
and now we're down to only a few species.
You will see it in the markets, you will see it in the water,
and that is worrying.
What are you fishing for here?
Right, it's got to be bigger than that. OK.
How has the salmon farming affected your fishing?
Chile's fish farm industry says farmed salmon is actually
one of the most sustainable ways of creating animal protein.
The aquaculture industry, as it's known,
says it's one of the best ways
of feeding our burgeoning human population.
That may well be true,
but hopefully not at the expense of local fishermen,
the ocean or other fish.
Back on the road, I travelled south through the forests of Patagonia.
This was the final stretch of my journey,
as I headed right down to the bottom of South America.
It's isolated down here,
but on a continent of more than 400 million people,
it's not empty.
Hola, buen dia. Hola, buenos dias, caballero.
This ferry is going to take me to the end of the world -
el fin del mundo.
It's nearly 20 past nine in the morning,
but I'm so far south and it's winter,
so the sun's only just coming up.
I was on my way to South America's biggest island,
which forms the toe of the continent.
When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan came this way in the early 1500s,
he saw so many fires along the beaches
lit by indigenous people
that he named this area the Land of Smoke.
The Spanish King decided that was not catchy enough,
and he renamed it the Land of Fire.
This is Tierra del Fuego.
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago
and the most southerly land on the planet outside of Antarctica.
It's split between Chile and Argentina.
It's remote, windswept and jaw-droppingly beautiful.
This landscape is absolutely breathtaking.
We've got to stop here, haven't we?
All right, let's go and have a quick look.
This is the end of the Andes in South America.
The mountain range really ends completely in Antarctica,
a few hundred kilometres to the south,
but, here, this is where it ends in Argentina and Chile.
You've got the mountains bathed in this almost candy-floss colour.
I'd seen so much destruction
travelling down through the Americas,
but also so much beauty, so much diversity,
so much that is still left to conserve.
Marcelo Noria is a mountaineer
and my guide through this majestic and faraway land.
Look at this place. Mm.
You know, all over the world, there's a lot of people,
they're running all the time.
But here, we have peace.
These trees are very special -
the most southerly forest on planet Earth.
It is the sub-Antarctic forest.
We are the nearest point to Antarctica.
Australia is 2,000km more north than the point we are now.
That is amazing.
I'd travelled 4,000 miles
through a continent stuffed with spectacular landscapes,
but the end of my journey really was in sight now.
So, we're now arriving into the most southerly city
on planet Earth. This is Ushuaia.
The city of Ushuaia is the gateway to the famous Beagle Channel,
a 150-mile, east-to-west waterway
which links the Atlantic with the Pacific.
One final treat.
The channel was named after the ship Charles Darwin sailed on
when he came here on his famous voyage.
What he found was natural wonder teeming with life.
"No-one can stand in these solitudes unmoved,"
he wrote, and he was right.
In the middle of the Beagle Channel is Sea Lion Island.
SEA LIONS GRUNT
Look at them all!
They're so bloody noisy! It's brilliant!
The males can actually grow to almost three metres long.
They can weigh a third of a tonne.
And this whole area's a really important breeding site for them.
A thriving sea lion colony
needs abundant fish stocks and a healthy marine environment,
but plans were recently put forward
to introduce salmon farming in the Beagle Channel.
The farms would bring some jobs and economic development,
but the people of Tierra del Fuego
worried they would lose out in other ways.
The people from Argentine and the Chilean side,
they kayaked in together
and they stayed in the middle of the Beagle Channel
and held up banners to say,
"No to the salmon. Out, please."
And after that, the authorities heard the people
and said, "No salmon industry in the Beagle Channel."
So, the salmon farming was stopped? People power worked?
The government listened? Yes, it's true.
I'd already learned salmon farming can affect biodiversity in the sea.
People here were worried
salmon farms could impact their tourism industry
and also Mother Nature.
Even down here at the bottom of the continent,
people are facing one of the great issues
challenging the rest of South America and all of us -
how to build an economic future without destroying the environment.
There is hope.
Vast areas of land across the south of this continent
have been turned into national parks and protected areas.
We used to hunt sea lions in huge numbers.
Now their numbers,
I'm pleased to say, are pretty stable.
They're fairly protected.
We can protect them, we can protect this
and we can protect more.
Throughout my journey through South America,
and down through the Americas,
I'd been awed by the wildlife,
but I'd been left marvelling at the sheer wonder of humanity,
and I'd been overwhelmed by a desperate hope
that we will get better at looking after our only home.
I'm really coming to the end now. I feel very emotional.
These have been the greatest journeys of my life.
I've travelled the length of the two continents that, together,
form more than a quarter of Earth's land surface.
It's been such an honour, such a privilege.
Thank you so much to everybody I've met
and all those who've joined me on this journey.
It's been amazing...
..but this is the end.