Travel Shows

Have been searching for good travel shows to help plan a world tour sometime in the next 2 years. I was inspired by my cousin who works as a programmer in the silicon valley. He and my sister in law took a long break between their US citizenship and the first child. They chose Africa, latin America and SE asia which they thought would be hard at a late age. Here is a couple that has travelled the world, yet never been to Paris ! They decided to bias themselves to non tourist places. The collection of negatives they returned back with were slide shown on a film projector for the rest of us. Some images were breathtaking and replicated the visual joy of visiting Africa. Of course, not a substitute for the "real thing" but if only you could get a high resolution movie for every major site you wished to visit, maybe something like IMAX with to the point narration. That got me to search the library catalogue and the web for quality travel shows. I did not like Francesco's trip to the mediterranean aired on BBC, nor too much the Destination series. The hosts talk too much and the focus of these shows is not the touristy places that one would pay to visit but wherever the traveller goes. I realize there is a difference between a traveller and a tourist. I probably fall in the latter category. I had also seen Ron Fricke's Baraka. Produced with a small 4 million dollar budget, this lavish film consists of artistic wide angle clips of many major religious and cultural destinations. It includes some interesting time lapse photography taken with an automated camera. Since this is an art film, there is no narration or causality. It is an exercise to identify the locations. I wish I could get some technically gifted people to make IMAX quality clips of all the major "patel points" and release them on Blue Ray. Maybe some day you could go to your neighborhood dome theatre and virtually walk through inaccessible places in Latin America, Southern & Eastern Europe and Africa.