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From Mexico's beautiful Pacific coast to the coral paradise of the Bahamas, this first leg of Simon Reeve's epic circumnavigation of the globe is a spectacular journey revealing much about life on the northern edge of the Tropics.

Simon starts his journey in Baja California, Mexico, where he discovers a region living in the shadow of the United States, its giant northern neighbour, and visits a new holiday resort with $12,000-a-night rooms.

It is just the first example Simon encounters of American influence on this leg of his trip, as he then takes a ferry across the Sea of Cortez to the infamous city of Culiacan, headquarters of the fearsome Sinaloa drug cartel, where he goes on patrol with an elite police unit engaged in a brutal and violent struggle against drug gangs. The war is being fought to stem the flow of cocaine to the United States, and it threatens the very stability of the Mexican state.

Simon heads east, over-nighting in a bizarre abandoned Western film set once owned by John Wayne, discovering villages emptied as Mexicans have headed north to work in the US, and visiting a picturesque community split by a huge mine.

He experiences the joys of Lucha Libre, a hugely popular form of masked wrestling, and gets a battering during a training session with a female wrestler called The Princess.

The Tropic of Cancer skirts Cuba and in Havana Simon learns how city allotments have transformed agriculture in Cuba and countered the effects of the US trade embargo against the country.

This first stage of the journey ends in the Bahamas, where Simon peers behind the wealthy poster images of these paradise islands, and finds slums inhabited by Haitians who fled violence and poverty in their homeland in search of a better life.

Finally, he discovers a hidden menace lurking in the tropical waters that make these islands famous: a plague of beautiful but deadly lion fish have escaped from American aquariums and are now devouring the local sea life in this corner of the Tropics.