This article titled "Planet Earth II: the most amazing places, chosen by producers" was written by Isabel Choat, for theguardian.com on Tuesday 8th November 2016 11.27 UTCZavodovski Island, Southern Ocean
Chosen by Elizabeth White, producer, Islands
I can vividly remember the knot in my stomach as we approached the steaming, malevolent-looking crater of Zavodovski Island, 1,300 miles east of the Falklands in the Southern Ocean. The trip had taken more than a year of planning and caused many sleepless nights (even before the seven-day rough sea crossing), and my first impression was, “Gosh, I hope this is worth it!” But sometimes the things that push you out of your comfort zone become the most poignant.
As we boarded the inflatable and took our first steps on the island, I knew I was going to fall in love with the place. Zavodovski Island is home to the largest penguin colony in the world; it’s a wave-battered volcano covered in penguins. To many people, the rawness of this land of mud, smoke and penguin carcasses would be anything but beautiful (and yes, the place does stink) but there is something exciting about being in a place where so few humans have set foot. Places that are truly wild and untouched are very hard to find.
Watching the penguins going about their daily lives in this rugged and brutal landscape was a humbling experience. It’s a strange vision of paradise, but to me – and to the 1.5 million penguins that nest there – there’s nowhere like it on Earth.
• There are no commercial trips to Zavodovski Island, but several operators offer cruises that take in South Georgia. Discover the World has an 18-21-night Antarctic, Falklands and South Georgia tour from £6,700pp
Gokyo Valley, Khumbu Himalaya, Nepal
The Gokyo Valley is beautiful. It has sweeping glaciers and Cho Oyu – the sixth-highest mountain in the world – at its end. It’s home to the sherpa people, some of the warmest and most hospitable you will meet, anywhere. It took six days to trek there, carrying all our kit, so to arrive was an incredible feeling. We saw lots of wildlife, from Himalayan tahr to the exquisite monal pheasant, Nepal’s national bird – and one of the most colourful you can find.
The area is not famous for its snow leopards but in the last 10 years there is evidence that their numbers here may be growing. We filmed jumping spiders there: the world’s smallest but highest-living animal mountaineer. The valley has some famous viewpoints: Gokyo Ri at 5,360m is the highest point any of the Planet Earth crew reached in filming mountains. It’s a peak that towers over the Ngozumba glacier. You have to start the climb early in order to see the sunrise over Everest and, depending on your fitness, it can take several hours.
We had a wonderful time with our sherpa crew. On our last night they invited us to a cultural exchange. We listened to our head guide Nima sing and dance a traditional sherpa story about a spider. After the applause died down it was our turn but we got embarrassed and passed on the opportunity. After several more attempts to get us to perform (and a fair amount of home brewed “chang”) our cameraman Jonathan Jones burst into a rendition of You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling, and the rest of us had little choice but to join in. The sherpas seemed pleased with our efforts and soon were demanding we teach them a “traditional dance” of our own. So, we ended up with the whole room doing the hokey cokey. I like to think we did something to spread British culture to the remote Himalaya.
Other encounters weren’t so pleasant. We were camping and without fail every night a large yak would try and come into my tent. The first night was like a scene from a horror film with me screaming as I had no idea what this heavy breathing, snorting, hairy visitor was. I sat bolt upright and for a second thought it might have even have been a yeti. I have no idea why the animal was so attracted to my tent.
• KE Adventure Travel’s 20-day Ultimate Everest Trek takes in the Gokyo and other Khumbu valleys, climbing the Gokyo Ri and Kala Patar peaks and Everest Base Camp, via the Cho La pass from £2,545pp, including international and internal flights, guide, porters and all meals
Madagascar
Working in Madagascar was a real highlight for me. We went to film indri, the biggest and the most-engaging of the lemur family. Each day we trekked through hilly jungle before dawn to find the indri, accompanied by our expert Malagasy guide. Indri are not too hard to find because, as the sun rises, they sing, to tell rival indri families that this is their patch of forest. It’s a beautiful and plaintive sound and incredibly loud.
However the jungle is dense and the trees tall, and while indri can dance effortlessly through the trees, we can’t. So we had to wait patiently for the family to come to areas where we could film. Luckily, waiting in the forest in Madagascar is a treat. The jungle is full of strange insects, reptiles and birds; they are hard to spot at first, but having the friendly, knowledgeable guides meant we could find and film some unexpected jungle gems.
There is a satanic leaf gecko that lives there. It is disguised as dead leaves with a face like Dragon from the movie Shrek. There’s another leaf-tailed gecko that is so beautifully disguised – to look like the green and gold of tree bark – that you can be standing 10cm away from it and still not be able to see it. Eventually, it will lift a leg or blink and then you start to see it! The guides love showing this to tourists and seeing how long it will take them to spot. We also filmed a stick insect that looked like a green twig but revealed bright red patterned wings when it walked, presumable to scare away predators. None of the guides had seen that before.
• Naturetrek’s 14-day Madagascar’s Lemurs tour includes a visit to the Perinet park to hear the cry of the indri. From £3,395 full-board, including flights and all meals
Skeleton Coast, Namibia
This has to be one of the wildest and most undisturbed places I have ever been: you could drive for days and not see another human being. The vastness of the landscape and its stark beauty were breathtaking, and although it was largely empty, there were pockets of life, usually around dry riverbeds, where there was just enough water beneath the ground to support life.
Here you’d see elephants, oryx and lions right in the heart of the desert, but our best moment was when we saw a cheetah. Cheetahs in the heart of the desert are incredibly rare, but one day we rounded a corner and came face to face with a beautiful female in mid-hunt. I’m not sure who was more astonished, us or the cheetah, but there followed an incredible moment where neither party dared move. It probably only lasted a few seconds but it seems to stretch on for minutes. Unfortunately, the spell broke when we went to get our camera: the movement caused her to run off into the desert. We never saw her again, but knowing she was out there was an incredible privilege.
• Reef and Rainforest’s Wonderful Wildlife and Nature of Namibia trip is a 15-day self-drive tour taking in the dunes of Sossusvlei, Damaraland and its desert- adapted elephants, Etosha national park and Okonjima game reserve, home of conservation and rehabilitation foundation AfriCat. It costs £2,757pp including flights
Kaziranga national park, Assam, north-east India
Walking beneath the towering elephant grass of Kaziranga national park, it’s hard not to feel as small as an insect. The grass, the tallest in the world, is more than three times the height of a human. The dense green blades arch high over the path, creating a tunnel kept open by animals that also dwarf us – generations of elephants and buffalo. Their secretive labyrinth is shared by more than 2,000 rhinoceros, more than all other Asian rhino put together. If you include the swamp deer, wild boar, hornbills, gibbons and sloth bears, you can see why they call it the Serengeti of Asia. Looking from one watchtower with my binoculars I counted 25 rhino – there’s nowhere in Africa you can do that.
Most magical are the Kaziranga dawn safaris, taken sitting with a blanket over your lap in the back of an open-top jeep, a crimson disc sitting low in the sky as you sip sweet local Assam tea. The prize for most visitors is spotting a Bengal tiger, found here in higher densities than in any other protected site in the world. Their stripes evolved to camouflage them brilliantly in the tall grass, and as they slink off into the labyrinth, it’s nice to be reminded, in age of ever-more-intimate wildlife filming, there are magical places where creatures keep their secrets.
• TransIndus’s 16-day tour of Assam includes three days in Kaziranga national park and costs from £2,845pp, including flights to Kolkata and breakfast
Harar, Ethiopia
Travelling to Harar was like travelling back in time. It’s a beautiful city, and the warren of cobbled streets are so narrow that cars can’t go down them, so food is brought in on donkeys. It’s considered Islam’s fourth holy city, and the old town has 99 mosques. It’s a place where you feel history exuding from the walls.
I had heard about spotted hyenas roaming the streets at night but it was not until a group of eight of them brushed passed my leg on a narrow cobbled street at 1am, that I realised exactly how true this was. Spotted hyenas are the second largest land predator in Africa: they’ve been known to kill people. It was at first frightening to be encountering them on small dark streets in the middle of the night, but after seeing how comfortable the locals are with their company, I soon became accustomed.
A few nights later, I was surrounded by more than 100 fighting hyenas as two clans battled for access to the city. My lack of fear in this scenario is testament to the extraordinary peaceful pact that exists between man and beast in this city. The locals welcome them into their city, and have done for centuries. It’s an astonishing coexistence between people and perhaps the most vilified animal in our planet … and it shows us just how possible it is for us to share our streets with wild animals.
• Harar is not included in recent warning by the FCO against certain parts of Ethiopia but many UK tour operators have cancelled all trips to the country in light of the changed advice
Planet Earth is on BBC1 on Sundays at 8pm until 11 December. Episode one is now available on BBC iPlayer
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