3 days ago
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Dan Snow & The Lost City: Like the foggy view, Dan Snow's trip to Machu Picchu is a damp squib
Dan Snow & The Lost City (Channel 5)
The fabled Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru is apparently the wettest place in South America. It certainly was on the day Dan Snow visited.
Panting for breath, nearly 8,000ft up in the Andes, the historian and his camera crew found themselves engulfed by mists. Every time it looked as though we were going to get a glimpse of the jagged mountain landscapes, on Dan Snow & The Lost City, another layer of cloud swept in.
Dan was forced during one deluge to take cover in a restored Inca house with a thatched roof. Rain was pouring off the straw, coming down in a curtain of water.
It occured to me that Machu Picchu ought to be twinned with Britain's soggiest city, Cardiff.
But, when I looked it up, the reality was even stranger — the Inca capital's twin town is Haworth in Yorkshire, home of the Brontë sisters. Well, they are both Wuthering Heights.
Emily, Charlotte and Anne B all had a taste for the macabre, and would have enjoyed Dan's discovery of a 500-year-old Inca corpse, frozen in ice. The victim was a 13-year-old girl, a human sacrifice.
Archaeologists believe she was raised in luxury, before being ritually killed with a blow to the head and her body placed on a mountaintop as a gift to the gods. The extreme cold preserved her hair, clothes and skin — 'literally frozen in time,' Dan pointed out.
Helping museum curators to weigh her remains, checking that she was not decaying while on display under glass, Dan was first fascinated and then repulsed.
'That was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had,' he mused. 'I kept thinking, why would a family willingly give up the most precious thing in the world, one of their own children? It's just very difficult for us to understand today.'
It's a poignant question, but one he did not attempt to answer. Instead of scratching his head, he could have sought out anthropologists to help us make sense of how human sacrifice was viewed by these ancient people. Was it an honour, or just one more of life's cruelties?
The same lack of depth marred his visit to a local cook named Elena and her mother, both Inca descendants, where he tried the traditional cuisine.
The women were wearing tall white stovepipe hats with black ribbons, but Dan didn't ask whether their Inca ancestors might have worn the same style. He did, however, inform us that his own wide-brimmed fedora was a tribute to Indiana Jones.
Then he tucked into a bowl of freeze-dried potato soup, washed down with chicha beer made from maize (or, as we call it, sweetcorn). The potatoes looked like shrivelled chestnuts and the beer like a rancid milkshake. But how did it taste? Dan didn't think to tell us.
We could have learned so much more. But, like the foggy view, this show wasn't nearly as spectacular as it could have been.
