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This is the story of ajourney of a lifetime.
l'm circumnavigating the world in just five months.
My quest is to seek out 80 of the greatest treasures created by mankind.
Some of the treasures l've chosen are undisputed wonders of the world.
Others are not as well known, but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
And some of my choices are surprising - even shocking.
My mission is to reveal what has driven man over thousands of years
to create art and architecture that is incredibly beautiful
and which tells the story of mankind, of civilisation.
Along the way, l'll visit some of the
most mysterious places on earth, and the most dramatic.
l'll come face to face with the legacies of great ancient civilisations,
and encounter cultures which are clinging onto survival in the modern age.
l hope to learn something about human aspirations,
about the secrets of life and death,
and ultimately about myself.
l face an exhilarating and daunting challenge.
l'm going to 40 countries and six continents in 150 days.
Here we go. This is it - starting. The waiting's over.
Months of planning, months of planning's over - and we're now going.
lt feels great actually to be on the move.
Setting up such an ambitious expedition has been a logistical nightmare,
with all the visas to obtain and arrangements to make.
l'm booked onto 90 flights and will cover more than 80,000 miles,
seeing a new treasure every other day.
My schedule's so tight that
if anything goes wrong the whole enterprise could fall apart.
l wonder what l've let myself in for.
The finest moments of human creation in five months flat.
My odyssey begins with a 15-hour flight from London to Peru.
There's no better place to start.
Peru is home to some of the world's great treasures
and most enigmatic lost civilizations - not least, the lncas.
Their achievements and way of life are still celebrated in modern-day Peru,
500 years after the lnca world was destroyed by Spanish conquerors.
To find what l'm looking for,
l head deep into the lncas' mountainous heartland.
l'm travelling - on a narrow gauge railway through the High Andes.
l'm going to a place that
l'm told is one of the most beautiful and spiritually uplifting on earth.
lt's Latin America's Shangri-la.
A place shrouded in mystery.
lt had a short life, little more than half a century.
lt was lost in a cloud forest for 400 years
and only rediscovered in 1911.
lt's gone on to become one of the most famous places in Latin America.
Machu Picchu, which - stands on a natural shelf high in the Andes,
2,350 metres above sea level.
lt's a staggering location,
an amazing place to build a city.
Machu Picchu feels like it's on top of the world,
the realm of the gods.
lt's thought to have been built in the 1460s
by the lnca god-king Pachacuti lnca.
l'm intrigued why he built a city in such a remote and difficult location.
This is the main gate to Machu Picchu, and it's amazing it's so small,
and that tells us a lot about lnca society,
and indeed about Machu Picchu.
The simple fact is that the lncas are very advanced in some ways and not in others.
They didn't have the wheel, didn't have great forms of transport,
great carriages, therefore didn't need to bring things inside the city.
Things would be delivered outside and brought in by hand.
So the city gate could be no bigger really than the door to a - to a room.
lt's really quite astonishing.
Machu Picchu has about 200 buildings,
was home to around a thousand people.
lt's laid out with streets built on terraces cut into the mountainside.
Most people lived in small humble houses.
And here is a very intact house in Machu Picchu. Absolutely staggering.
All here apart from the roof, roof timbers and thatch outside,
that had been tied on with ropes onto sort of stone pins on these gables.
Otherwise, all here.
Now, the lncas didn't have much furniture. l believe lived most on the floor and carpets,
but would keep some things in these little recesses here, cupboards, this little niches.
Oh erm, gosh more niches, and a wonderful view.
God. The sacred mountain.
The lncas were amazing civil engineers.
They were great road builders and they built sewers and water systems,
and here you see at Machu Picchu how water was supplied to this - the city itself.
Water was gathered - from the high mountains up there,
brought down into a little canal here,
running through and then into this cascade, waterfall.
Roman quality really.
Look at this. That's a fantastic example of lnca stonework.
Massive blocks cut to fit together like ajigsaw.
Beautifully finely jointed. No mortar of course.
Just astonishing.
Creating a very, very, very strong walling, anti-earthquake.
This of course must be, yes, a temple complex.
More temples. Two more temples here.
And in front of me the temple of three windows, as it's now called -
- relating, l think, to lnca creation myths about three caves.
Wonderful view through those windows of divine landscape beyond. Here -
- is what's the called the principal temple -
- a massive altar stone.
And just look at this masonry, it's incredible.
Cut precisely by hammering one stone against another.
And the size of those blocks of stone. Good Lord.