The Indian Ocean, home to the world's most exotic islands...
..and beautiful and rare wildlife.
I'm travelling through 16 countries around the edge of this vast ocean
that stretches 6,000 miles from Africa to Australia.
Steeped in history, the Indian Ocean is vital to world trade.
It's a journey of extremes,
from stunning islands,
across pirate-infested seas,
to remote villages...
Salama.
..and war-torn lands.
GUNSHOT What was that?
This is a journey about much more than just what's under the waves.
It's about the lives of the millions of people...
..who live around this, one of our greatest oceans.
On this last leg of my journey, I'm travelling through Indonesia
and down the coast towards my final destination in the southwest of Australia.
In the beautiful waters off Bali,
I help to harvest an ocean wonder crop.
Aaaaah!
In Jakarta, I go undercover
to learn more about the disturbing international trade in exotic pets.
You are not happy, are you? Poor things.
And in the remote wilderness of Western Australia,
I have a close encounter with an ancient predator...
God, look at those teeth!
Cor!
..before I reach the end of my entire Indian Ocean journey
at spectacular Cape Leeuwin.
I'm starting this final part of my Indian Ocean journey here
at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
This is Aceh, a beautiful region of Indonesia,
which became known around the world
because of one of the biggest natural disasters in modern history.
On Boxing Day, 2004, a huge earthquake
with the power of more than 20,000 atomic bombs
shook the Indian Ocean and triggered a tsunami.
A giant wave rolled in here and almost wiped this region off the map.
The Indian Ocean tsunami hit the province of Aceh harder than anywhere else.
Almost 170,000 people lost their lives here.
The power of the giant wave tossed boats and even huge ships miles inland.
Some have been left as poignant reminders of the day the wave struck.
We're three miles inland here. Three miles.
I can see the sea in the distance on the horizon
and this ship carved its way through the houses
on the way to its resting place here.
But with the help of international aid, Aceh's been rebuilt.
It's once again a thriving centre of trade.
Aceh juts out into the Indian Ocean, so, almost inevitably,
this became a great trading centre.
Merchants would travel from across the seas
to come here to buy spices, timber, ivory and gold.
In exchange, those merchants brought their religion here.
This is thought to be where Islam first got a foothold in Indonesia.
It spread out from this island to the rest of the country
and Indonesia is now the most populous Islamic nation on the planet.
The vast majority of the 250 million people in Indonesia are Muslim.
Aceh is one of the most conservative parts of the country
and here they've introduced Islamic or sharia law.
MAN ISSUES ORDERS
Sharia law means all aspects of life are governed by an Islamic religious code.
This religious police squad is known as the Vice and Virtue Patrol.
So you're kindly going to allow us to come with you
on patrol, that's very good of you.
So, we're out on patrol with the squad. There's more vehicles following behind us.
Why do people call you the Vice and Virtue Squad?
TRANSLATION: We want the Koran To become a positive force
in people's lives.
We want religious law to govern our country.
So, where are we heading to first?
We're patrolling an area
where we often find unmarried couples cavorting.
SIMON: The religious law in Aceh says
that unmarried couples are not allowed out together without supervision,
and physical contact is out of the question.
We're stopping already, not sure why.
What's he doing?
As we were driving along, he spotted couples down on the river bank here
and he's leapt off to go and, er... well, catch them, I suppose.
I think they saw him coming.
So, there's a couple there who are racing off.
TRANSLATION: Yes, when we're on patrol, and we spot people breaking the law,
they just run from us, ashamed.
So, do you suspect they would be an unmarried couple
who were having some sort of saucy courtship, then?
Look, there's more going away, they're racing off there on scooters.
TRANSLATION: Theyy wouldn't bother running away if they were married
or if they were brother and sister from the same family.
But are they really doing something so wrong?
Yes, according to Acehnese law, they are.
SIMON: The Vice and Virtue Squad usually just issue youngsters with warnings.
But for persistent breaches of religious law, the punishments can be severe.
There, there, there! Hello!
There are public canings in Aceh, and religious hardliners
have called for adultery to be punished by death by stoning.
They've raced in there. I presume that...they've spotted somebody doing something quite serious.
So, look, this guy with the long hair, I think, is grassing...
grassing up some teenagers.
It looked like this young couple were in real trouble.
This is very surreal.
Looks like they're leading them away.
She's being taken away. Does she know what she did?
What will happen to her? Where will you take her?
Scores and scores of people have come to see
this poor couple of kids being taken away. It's, er...
pretty much a public humiliation for them, I think it's fair to say.
And they're now being taken away to the religious police HQ.
From my European perspective, it all seemed very odd and rather sad.
It just feels like in this corner of Indonesia...
..people are being denied some of the basic delights of being
a teenager and a young adult.
The right to associate with who you want, the right to meet boys or meet girls.
RELIGIOUS CHANTING
Take our life in our hands. You lead. LAUGHS
It was time for me to head on with my guide, Shinta Okta.
Hello, Shinta. Hi, Simon.
Shinta's going to be my guide across... well, across Indonesia.
We're not going to visit every island because there are...
How many islands in Indonesia?
Almost 17,500.
We must be accurate about this. Yeah, yeah.
No island should be missed.
All right, but we're not going to be able to visit very many of them, because you were just telling me...
How long would it take if you visited an island a day?
48 years.
We haven't got that long, but we'll see a bit of the country.
Shinta took me to the fish market in the region's capital, Banda Aceh.
I've tried to visit as many fish markets as I can around the Indian Ocean
because they tell you so much about, not only life around the sea,
but life in it as well - what's happening to life in it.
The fishermen told me they now have to travel as far as the sea off Burma to fish
because marine life in this part of the Indian Ocean has been severely depleted.
Good God!
He's bringing a ray in.
They've got a shark here.
I would have just seen this as a frightening fish
when I started this journey. Now, seeing it here,
it's like seeing a lion or a tiger on a slab -
apex predator of the seas.
Still with its fins on, but not for long.
Since the start of my Indian Ocean journey,
I'd regularly seen local fishermen
pulling sharks out of the ocean and slicing off their fins.
Millions of sharks are taken from our seas every month,
and Indonesia is the major global player in this tragic trade.
Indonesia is the biggest shark-fishing and shark-finning country in the world.
They're the central ingredient in shark fin soup - a Chinese/Asian delicacy.
It's a fairly obscene trade, but...
you try telling that to a poor Indonesian fisherman who's trying to feed his family.
It's not just Indonesia's ocean wildlife that's under threat.
Ohh!
Good to go? Yeah, ready, sir.
On land too, these islands are home to endangered and beautiful animals,
including tigers, rhinos and orang-utans.
I left Banda Aceh and headed to the neighbouring Indonesian island of Java,
the most heavily populated island on Earth,
in search of one very special creature.
Java was once cloaked in a giant and almost impenetrable rainforest.
But most of this habitat has been annihilated
by the growing human population.
Forests have been destroyed in Indonesia faster than anywhere in the world.
Look at that.
We're on the edge of a village now,
just a couple of hundred metres from where people are living,
and of course, they chop the trees to give themselves somewhere to farm.
It's not actually that we are close to the village, it's that the village
is too close to the forest.
SIMON LAUGHS Yeah?
So, I mean, like, this is a problem of the population here in Java.
Karmele Sanchez is a Spanish veterinary scientist working for the charity
International Animal Rescue.
She was taking me high into a protected pocket of rainforest
to see one of the rarest and most bizarre animals on the planet.
I think I've sweated about a pint already.
Up here, Karmele and her team have built an enclosure,
where they hang bait to tempt the mysterious animal
down from the forest canopy.
So, now we wait.
As darkness fell, we switched our cameras to night vision.
KARMELE: Yes, there... Now. You see? Now, now, now...
You can see the eyes, yes.
The Javan slow loris is among the 25 most endangered primates in the world.
In just three generations, numbers have collapsed by a half.
He's coming down, he's coming down. He's coming down?!
Hello.
He spreads his weight carefully, look.
With this wind, look how he can balance his body.
A nocturnal animal, the slow loris is a master tree climber.
Well, he's having a good scratch.
You must get enormous satisfaction from seeing this.
I mean, this is what it makes everything worth.
For more than five years, Karmele and the team from International Animal Rescue
have been working to protect slow lorises.
She knows many of them by name.
Our visitor was called Willis.
Willis - I think he's decided to come down the tree.
You've got to see this.
Here he comes!
While Willis scoffed his treat, the scientists caught him.
The battery in his tracking collar needed replacing.
Good lad.
Then they did a few basic tests to check his health.
That's a fantastic sign.
Bye-bye, Willis.
Willis is headed back up into the trees.
It was a real...privilege to see this because it is a remarkable success story.
Around the Indian Ocean,
forests are being cleared for farming and chopped for timber.
Animals are losing their habitat and their numbers are collapsing.
But there's another huge threat to creatures like Willis -
the illegal global trade in exotic pets.
So, how many lorises have you actually got here?
90. Where have they all come from?
They all come from the illegal wildlife trade.
All of them? All of them, yeah.
They often arrive here with horrific injuries.
Look at this.
This is a toothless loris.
And the reason it doesn't have any teeth there
is because somebody has cut its teeth out.
Mm-hm, you see. Bad trading.
They're surely among the top ten cutest creatures on the planet.
And therein lies their problem.
They may look cute, but they're wild animals with a painful and venomous bite,
unique among primates.
So pet traders cruelly rip out their teeth with pliers before selling them on.
Who's buying them? It's normally people from middle class.
They just see them in the markets, they think they are cute
and they just buy them, they keep them as pets.
That's illegal, isn't it? It is.
How do they get away with it?
The same as the animals... are not just traders,
they are sometimes big mafias and networks of people,
probably in quite high up positions, you know.
It's a very profitable business.
It's a business worth up to 10 billion a year globally.
Wildlife trade is definitely one of the top illegal activities
after drugs and arms.
12 hours ago, we were up that mountain with Willis the loris.
Now we're down here with millions of people.
Shinta and I headed towards Jakarta,
Indonesia's vast capital city,
to find out more about this hugely damaging illegal trade in wildlife.
This is the real Indonesia.
I expected more seats.
More than 30 million people live in the area around this city.
Most of them seem to be on our train.
Where the hell are they going?
To the roof. They're going to the roof?
Yeah.
I'll sit on your bag and you stand the whole way.
What a gentleman, Simon(!)
HORN BLARES
Vibrant and exciting.
Jakarta's the centre of the booming Indonesian economy.
But I'd heard about a pet market in the centre of town
with a reputation for selling endangered species.
It's an open street market, but I've been warned that violent criminal gangs control it
and our TV cameras would not be welcome,
so it was time to go undercover with hidden cameras.
My God.
The conditions they're being held in are totally inappropriate for any creature.
You are not happy, are you?
You poor things.
Thousands of creatures are sold here and many of them
are smuggled out of the country.
Among the birds and domestic animals, we saw cages containing long-tailed macaques,
leaf monkeys and even eagles in cramped, unhealthy conditions.
Within a few minutes, we'd spotted slow lorises.
So, this is an endangered slow loris.
It's rare, it's endangered...
...and it's for sale by the side of the main road.
500,000?
So, that's less than £50. Yes.
£40.
I was told that traders in the area can supply orang-utans and even tigers,
creatures that are on the brink of extinction in parts of Indonesia.
I think what's really amazing about that situation is those animals are for sale
next to the main road in the centre of the capital city.
Why is the Indonesian government not doing something to stop it?
It was time to leave Java and head towards the Indian Ocean paradise island of Bali.
But I was bypassing the tourist resorts this area is famous for.
Instead, I took a boat
to the tiny island of Nusa Lembongan.
This place looks amazing.
You can see there's a few huts here
for tourists who make it over to this island from Bali,
but the vast majority of the people here are involved not in tourism
but in a rather different trade.
I'd come to this far corner of the Indian Ocean
to learn about an unlikely treasure of the seas,
found everywhere, that could have huge implications for all of us,
for how we eat, and for what we use to power our cars and vehicles.
Simon, this is Wyan.
Wyan? Simon. Very nice to meet you, sir.
Wyan Simon and his wife Evelu are farmers.
But they don't plough the land or tend animals.
Hello. Simon.
Hello! Do I get a handshake?
LAUGHTER
Do I get a handshake?
Their crop comes out of the Indian Ocean.
Wyan took Shinta and I out to see his farm in the sea.
The water here is amazingly clear.
It's like we're going over the top of a series of gardens.
There's seaweed, tied onto bits of rope, attached to the sea bed!
It's like an underwater allotment.
Captain! What do we need to do? What work needs to be done that I can help with?
SIMON LAUGHS
OK? OK, let's go! I'll help. OK!
SHE LAUGHS
Wyan and the other islanders here grow edible seaweed,
and it's a pretty simple process.
Seaweed cuttings are tied onto a line of string.
They grow by using sunlight for energy,
and by absorbing nutrients from the sea as food.
This doesn't need lots of land space to grow it,
it doesn't need awful artificial fertilisers,
it doesn't need lots of fresh water.
It just grows in the sea.
Seaweed is amazing.
THEY LAUGH
Aaaaah!
SHE LAUGHS
Thank you, Simon.
This seaweed is something of a wonder crop
and many experts think we need to be eating a lot more of it
because it's so easy to grow and it's a good source of vitamins,
minerals and protein.
Perhaps most excitingly of all,
scientists have now worked out how to convert seaweed into ethanol,
which can be used as an alternative to petrol.
It has...enormous potential.
Seaweed could actually help us to resolve some of our most pressing global issues.
You're already using seaweed extract
in dozens of products ranging from ice cream to cheese,
even in your toothpaste.
The seaweed trade is already worth billions of pounds every year,
but it's going to get a lot bigger.
Wyan's seaweed is sold around the world
to China, Hong Kong and as far afield as Denmark.
It's a good business to be in.
TRANSLATION: It's been brilliant since day one.
Now we can pay for our children's clothes, we can eat. We're very happy.
Family's happy, missus is happy, children are being educated.
Exactly! Everybody's doing well out of it.
People are making a great living, not from fishing,
but from farming seaweed.
Who'd have thought it, eh?
Every day,
the people of Nusa Lembongan give thanks
for the prosperity the Indian Ocean brings them.
This is such a fantastic little story to encounter on our journey.
I've seen so much suffering and so many problems
as we've been travelling around the Indian Ocean.
We've visited so many communities that are just about clinging on,
even as the fish stocks they rely on are being wiped out.
I'm really delighted to have found at least one solution to the problems
facing our oceans, and our world, here,
in this little corner of paradise.
Feels appropriate, somehow.
Whoa!
Magnificent sight!
The Indian Ocean rolling in.
I left Indonesia behind and headed to the last country on my travels, Australia.
My next stop was the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
I was 1,500 miles from the finishing line for my entire Indian Ocean journey.
And I'd arrived somewhere completely spectacular.
The Kimberley is more than three times the size of England
and one of the last remaining true wilderness areas on our planet.
That's where we're headed, down to that beautiful island.
This archipelago is made up of thousands of Indian Ocean islands,
most of them uninhabited.
I'd come to meet a few of the rugged outback types hardy enough to work here.
Bloody hell, Benno, what a place to work!
Pretty amazing, isn't it, mate?
Ben Little and his team are fish farmers.
He told me their cages were packed
with one of Australia's favourite fish, the barramundi -
apparently up to 45,000 per cage.
There's one, certainly. There's one. There's definitely more than that!
Oh, I've seen two.
45,000?
Yeah. Where the hell are they?
They're in there. When we get feeding, you'll see the fish come up.
MECHANICAL WHIRRING
He's firing the feed! I mean...
Oi, oi!
Mind the camera, sunshine!
LAUGHTER
He's a cheeky bugger! Yeah, he's deliberately doing that!
These are targeted!
They minimise the impact of their farm on this spectacular corner
of the Indian Ocean by monitoring the amount of food pumped into the cages,
reducing waste and pollution.
So it's good for business and for the environment.
We need Benno in here.
You can see a turtle in the water Just here.
Coming up? Hello! Keeping our ropes clean.
He's nibbling off all the algae. One thing we don't have to worry about.
That's great! Yeah, they love it.
Fish farm and environment working in harmony.
Ah, it's great to see.
But some of the locals
are not so welcome.
The saltwater crocodile, or salty, is the largest croc in the world,
and the most dangerous.
Just here, is that one there? Yeah, these are small ones.
Probably, maybe seven foot. A small one?
Yeah.
Often more than five metres long and weighing as much as a ton,
these crocodiles are cunning, fearless and hunt almost anything that moves,
including workers at the fish farm.
At any given point in time, you can see them sitting on the collars of the cages,
like, sitting on the edges.
About two months ago,
I think we had one break through a net while there was a diver in the water.
Needless to say, he got out of the water pretty quick!
Yes, that's a pretty one-sided cage fight, isn't it?
Should I be standing a bit further back from the edge? No, I think you'd be fine.
What do you mean, you THINK?
Well, no-one else has been done yet!
Let's just move a little bit away.
It kind of gets to the point where you step off a boat
and you're a bit unsure of where to look.
They tend to pop up out of nowhere and you're like,
you know, "Where did you come from?"
Definitely stalking us, for sure.
Saltwater crocodiles were once hunted to near-extinction,
but conservation efforts
have led to a recovery in their numbers and around here,
they've become a very real threat to the workers on the fish farm.
So, they've called in the croc catcher.
Morning. Thank you. Welcome to the Kimberley.
Thank you very much indeed. Marshall? Simon, nice to meet you.
How are you going, mate?
Hello. Simon, nice to meet you. Good to meet you, mate.
Mark Jones and his mates have years of experience
working with crocodiles in the Kimberley area.
These are their essential supplies.
Just for breakfast, I imagine!
I'm sure you're quite happy to share, aren't you?
Well...
SIMON LAUGHS
In this camp, they haven't had any crocs walk into their camp...yet.
But certainly in the other camps around the Kimberley, they are known to come in.
Is their concern justified?
Well, there's been a lot of people killed by them
and they are, as we say in Australia, as cunning as a toilet rat.
Previously, they used to shoot the animals and indeed a licence was given here,
but now, they're coming to us and saying,
"Can you remove this animal?" and we do it in a way that saves the animal,
looks after the people here and both animal and human can coexist.
No matter how much many of us might fear them,
crocodiles are a vital part of the ecosystem here
and Mark works to control their numbers without harming them.
So, this is our vessel for the evening.
Is it big enough? So, this is luxury!
Flippin' heck! LAUGHS
I'd agreed to go out on a crocodile hunt at night
and it seemed I was going to be in the thick of the action.
You're right in the front, you're kneeling down,
I'm over the top of you with the harpoon.
You're near me with a weapon and I've got the light.
So, I'm like the tethered goat.
Your last line of defence, if the crocodile was to come at you,
is to throw the light down its mouth.
Brilliant. You can just stop laughing, mate, all right?
It might work!
LAUGHTER
Anything above six foot is a dangerous animal,
so yeah, we do have to have our wits about us.
As the sun set and we switched our cameras to night vision,
the mood became more serious.
Can I have everyone's attention, please?
When you find one, Simon, you must keep that spotlight on that animal's eyes.
If you remove it from his eyes, he'll then take flight.
We'll motor into the animal, heading straight into him.
When we come up close to the animal, we'll cut the engine and we'll glide in,
hit it in the back...in the neck, it doesn't hurt the animal at all.
I'll have the lasso ready.
Once we've got that on and secured, he's ours.
In the darkness, we began searching, hunting the hunters.
Good luck, everybody.
THEY WHISPER
I don't want to fall in. Don't fall in!
Don't fall in! Rule number one!
There. Oh, yeah.
There it is.
Shh! Shh! Straight ahead. Straight ahead. Straight ahead.
Mark and the team hunt the crocs by mesmerising them with a bright light.
Then the plan was for us to drift in close enough to attach a line to it
with a harpoon.
We're getting quite close now, aren't we?
Keep on him, Simon. Keep on him. Keep on him.
Keep on him.
Keep on him, keep on him, keep on him.
All right, back off, mate, if you can.
All right.
They can hear the water lapping on the edge of the boat.
They're bloody clever, aren't they?
They've been around people, so they're very cagey.
Let it go. Let go, let go, let go.
Other hand line. Get the other hand line.
All right.
He's out front. Here he is.
Just go with it, don't pull too hard. Don't pull too hard.
SIGHS
There he is, on the surface there.
He doesn't seem overly concerned by the fact he's got a line in him.
It can't be hurting him because he's not thrashing around or anything.
The harpoon sits just under the tough skin on the back of the salty's neck,
holding it firm, but not harming it.
It's coming up, it's coming up, it's coming up.
Right here. There he is, just there!
Whoa!
Now it's just a case of waiting till he gets tired.
There is a croc at the end of this line.
How big do you think he is, or she?
Eight to eight and a half feet, just under three metres.
What's the most stressful bit?
This bit. This bit. It's the most dangerous.
Steady, mate. Just watch the rope with that little death roll.
I don't want to sound grotesque, but an animal this size,
if it grabbed you by the hand and it death rolled you,
it would quite easily roll your arm out of the shoulder socket.
There's a lot of power in an animal this size.
It's getting tired now.
He's gone under.
There we go. Here we go.
At the ready, there.
It's right in. Oh!
Hear that clap of the jaws? I didn't just hear it, I bloody saw it.
Careful, careful, careful, oh!
Right, next rope!
Quick!
God, look at those teeth!
God, it's ferocious!
He's tying himself up, anyway. That's good.
He's done it for you, hasn't he? Bring him up!
We're going to pull it in with us. We need to clear the decks.
Yep, deck is pretty clear.
Right, guys. I'm going to bring him up and over. I'll hold the torch.
I need the cameras back just a little bit. One, two, three.
Up and over!
Right, one, two, three, go!
On his back!
Good God!
Put a little bit of weight on.
Bloody hell! You just pulled a bloody crocodile into the boat!
It feels like we are gnats on this creature's backside.
You can feel the power within it.
This is like touching Godzilla.
It's completely freaky.
What a beast!
Good on you too, Simon. Thanks, mate.
Pretty good job for your first time, mate! Thank you.
Mark Jones runs a renowned wildlife sanctuary down the coast
called the Broome Crocodile Park.
The croc will be transferred there, where it could live without posing a risk to humans.
We're going to get Simon to sex the animal.
OK. LAUGHS
What we're going to do, Simon, is we're going to roll him over
and expose this animal's vent, or cloaca...
OK. Right. ..so we can sex it. Right.
If we just expose the belly there, you'll see this vent.
Can you see it? Yeah, I see the vent.
OK, grab two of your fingers...
Oh, you're joking me.
..and finger it.
Can you feel a rod or is it just an open cavity?
No, I can feel something poking from the right.
Let me have a go.
Yep, that's a boy.
Sorry about that, buddy. Yeah, erm...
don't hold it against us.
So, this croc is now going to go on a little journey to your sanctuary?
That's right, where he'll live and reproduce.
Have a happy life.
Thanks for letting us come out with you and see this.
It's been a fairly awesome experience.
The pleasure's been all ours.
What happens now? We go home and we have a beer!
Mark Jones is much more than some modern-day "Crocodile" Dundee.
He's a world expert in crocodile conservation
and a leading light in the campaign to preserve the great wilderness that is the Kimberley.
Back on the mainland, Mark wanted to show me more
of what makes the Kimberley so extraordinary.
It's easy to forget the size of Australia.
The state of Western Australia on its own is vast.
If it were a country in its own right, it would be one of the ten biggest in the world.
It's 11 times larger than Britain.
I'd seen some amazing and remote places on my long journey
but the Kimberley has the most pristine coastline
in the entire Indian Ocean.
What a view!
LAUGHS
What a place!
This place is absolutely spectacular and completely pristine.
If you sat here all day, you'll see 200 or 300 whales come through with their calves.
We see manta rays regularly coming through here.
It's beautiful.
But, like many other areas of Australia,
the Kimberley sits on vast reserves of natural energy and mineral resources,
and giant multinational corporations are desperate to start digging them out.
What's being proposed for this stretch of coastline?
The big plan is to actually turn this into a major industrial plant.
The first thing will be a gas plant, but as the gas comes in here,
it can then drive the turbines of all the other industries
and it will grow very quickly.
And we know this because we've seen it in other parts of Australia.
600 kilometres down the road we have Port Hedland,
which is going to be the largest port in the world in 20 years' time,
bigger than Shanghai.
This will be bigger again.
Wouldn't most Australians say, "We want to be rich,
"we want to sell off our resources, it's our right"?
At what cost? China's certainly going to be better off for it,
India are going to be better off for it.
In this country, in 100 years' time, because of its short-sightedness,
we'll be left with a great big hole in the ground
and everybody scratching their heads,
hearing the old stories about these wilderness areas
and not seeing them any more.
This will be completely destroyed
and you will never, ever be able to bring it back. That's it.
Dozens of enormous industrial projects are now planned for the Kimberley.
It seems the insatiable global demand for energy and raw materials knows no limits.
The result here in Australia could be the ruining of a wilderness
of planetary importance.
It's not difficult to see what might lie in wait for the Kimberley.
A few hundred miles down the coast is the Pilbara,
a centre of Australia's amazing resource boom.
This country is making vast sums
from selling off its iron ore, gas and natural wealth.
But of course, it's a messy, destructive business, needing trains,
vast mines, roads, huge ships and towns.
These are some of the longest trains in the world.
This is resources being shipped out, put on ships
and sent off to fuel the economies of China and India
and provide the rest of the world with consumer goods.
Here in the Pilbara region, huge mines have opened up
and the place is being industrialised.
HORN HONKS
They've taken wilderness and they've stripped it of all of its resources,
and people don't want that to happen in the Kimberley as well.
Oh, my God!
Look at this!
Ooh!
The scale of this is quite something, eh?
This is just a tiddler compared to what they're planning in the Kimberley,
and the gas plant they're planning there is just one of dozens of industrial projects
that are being proposed for that currently pristine region.
Using and selling off their natural resources
has brought great prosperity to Australians in recent years,
but the environment pays a heavy price.
It left me wondering how we can ask poor countries around the Indian Ocean
to protect their wildlife and forests
when wealthy Australians are exploiting what they've got.
I was on the home straight now, with the end almost in sight.
I headed south towards the city of Perth
and the finishing point for my entire journey at Cape Leeuwin.
This is glorious, look at it!
SAT-NAV: After 600 metres, cross the roundabout, second exit, then keep left.
You have reached your destination.
Windows up, grab those sunnies and don't let the seagulls steal your chips!
LAUGHS
As I'd circled the Indian Ocean,
I'd been privileged to see some incredible marine wildlife,
from magnificent sharks to giant manta rays.
But for me, one creature symbolises
both the mystery and the majesty of life in our oceans, and finally,
just offshore south of Perth, I was about to get close to it.
There's at least half a dozen of them in the second wave!
They're actually coming to us, to the wave of the boat. Look at this!
They just cannot resist playing when a boat turns up
and creates a big wave behind!
LAUGHS
These wild bottlenose dolphins
are one of the most familiar creatures in the sea.
Highly intelligent and friendly, they live in groups
of between 6 and 60 animals, called pods.
We've drawn a crowd.
Let's go and say hello.
Dolphins have been closely studied in captivity and we know that, in the wild,
they enjoy human company.
But despite their willingness to approach us,
there's still so much we don't know about their life beneath the waves.
That was so exciting, I actually forgot to come up to breathe!
My lungs started to burst!
We don't fully understand even friendly dolphins
and we're a long way from understanding the rest of the mysterious marine environment.
But one thing my journey had shown me, beyond all doubt,
is that human impact on all our oceans is reaching a critical level.
Out there,
it's a free-for-all.
Nobody's really in charge and our seas are suffering from endless pollution and overfishing.
It's a bit like the Wild West.
So, before I reached the end of my epic journey,
I arranged to meet a world-renowned expert whose research is helping to change our understanding
of the Indian Ocean and our seas globally.
For most people, when they look at the ocean, all they see is the surface
and they have no idea how much lies beneath,
so for us, our research is really about pulling that curtain back,
that barrier, and allowing people to see and scientists to learn
about all the special things that we have.
So, revealing the deep blue. Indeed, indeed.
Professor Jessica Meeuwig is the director of the Centre for Marine Futures
at the University of Western Australia.
Really looking forward to this. It's a real opportunity to peer into the depths.
I get excited every time we go out because you never know what you're going to see.
Jessica specialises in marine biodiversity and fisheries ecology.
The Indian Ocean is the least studied of the world's oceans
and also one of the most biodiverse, so it's really important that we get out there and understand it.
One aspect of Jessica's research is using small, waterproof cameras
to document life under the sea
in areas of the Indian Ocean we know little about.
We call it pulling back the blue curtain
because that allows us to actually see below the surface of the ocean.
By people being able to see beneath the surface,
they can get excited, they can really enjoy it,
they can value it, and if they value it, they'll protect it.
This camera system means you're able to see
what is actually down there. Out there, and count them.
And because it's hard to sample fish, because they're in the ocean,
we actually don't have that basic information.
The camera's being lowered.
Jessica films at depths of more than 500 metres
to collect crucial research material.
Her team have already recorded more than 5,000 hours of footage.
This is footage from other cameras you've dropped down,
right on the floor of the ocean.
This is what gets me excited about being a scientist,
when I get to actually watch these things unfolding before my eyes.
So, it basically films on the sea bed for an hour
and we take the videos back to our lab
and we can figure out what species are out there,
how many of them there are and, most importantly, how big they are,
because one of the first signs of overfishing is when fish get smaller.
I was finishing my Indian Ocean journey
next to one of the most important areas of ocean on the planet.
It's now clear the sea here has greater levels of biodiversity
than even the Great Barrier Reef.
Almost every week, new species are being discovered.
Most of them are found nowhere else on Earth,
but less than 1% of the sea in this area is protected.
Around the planet, we're witnessing a collapse of marine life.
Two-thirds of the world's coral reefs are dead or at risk
and it's estimated up to 90% of the world's large fish have been annihilated.
If we don't change our behaviour, we'll be left with lifeless oceans.
Something that's really amazed me on this journey
is the almost cavalier way we are fishing the oceans to death.
That's how it's been described to me by several people I've met.
Do you think that's a fair description, and how is this happening?
Well, we're effectively emptying the oceans of fish.
We've got industrial-scale fleets
that have nets that are bigger than, you know, airplanes.
We drag these heavy metal things across the sea bed,
basically clear-felling everything in their way.
Can you imagine if we dragged something like that through a forest,
knocked down all the trees, took out all the birds and animals?
That's what we're doing to the ocean.
I mean, the fish have nowhere to hide.
We need to allow our fish stocks to recover
and that means implementing sanctuary zones
or national parks in the ocean.
We need some areas where the fish can be left alone to grow big, old and fat
and produce lots of more fish.
Is that one of the key solutions, then?
Absolutely, and Australia's actually at the forefront of this.
It's developing a system of national parks around the entire continent
and what's really critical in that is that it includes national parks
where you can't go fishing and you can't drill for oil and gas.
Protected marine parks where fishing is banned
ensure that fish have a place to breed.
And that means their numbers can recover from overfishing.
It's an idea that has overwhelming public support.
70% of West Australians want to see strong national parks in the ocean.
Public opinion, at least here in Australia, wants it,
but how do you persuade people off the...
desperately poor people on the coast of Mozambique,
or in Madagascar or off Bangladesh,
to accept national parks when they're struggling to survive?
Actually, in some countries, like the Philippines,
they have been willing to put aside significant areas
as sanctuary zones, where they don't fish,
and they're seeing that the fish numbers are increasing and coming back and spilling over,
so in poor countries,
we've actually seen some of the biggest successes.
That's quite... That's quite hopeful.
If they can do it, there's no excuse why Australia, Britain, America, Europe, can't as well, surely?
Absolutely.
We're increasing our understanding all the time
of how the marine environment works,
so no, I'm totally optimistic, but we do have to act now.
Now I hear it, the answer seems blindingly obvious.
We have national parks on land, of course we should have them in the sea as well.
They're not a silver bullet. It's not the single solution that's going to protect the seas,
but it is part of the solution, it is part of the answer.
We have got to protect life in our oceans, and national parks in the sea,
or marine sanctuaries, are part of the solution.
Here it comes!
Yup.
My journey had also convinced me
that we need more global co-operation to police the high seas,
the millions of square miles of international waters
that are currently being fished relentlessly.
The Indian Ocean is a spectacular region of our world.
Hundreds of millions of people rely on it to survive.
Preserving and protecting it is vital for the future of us all.
After months of travelling by land, air and sea,
I was finally nearing the end of my journey.
Cape Leeuwin is the point where Australians say the Indian Ocean ends.
My goodness.
That's the ending.
I've got a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye.
Look! "Two Oceans Meet.
"Cape Leeuwin marks the point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean."
Indian Ocean to the right, Southern Ocean to the left.
This has been my most exotic and extreme adventure.
And it ends just down here.
I've gone from the horrors of the front line in Mogadishu in Somalia
to the glory of the Maldives and the Seychelles.
I've been to 16 countries.
This journey has really taught me there's so much more to the Indian Ocean
than just glorious, gorgeous holiday islands.
It's a vast, tantalising, historical and absolutely vital part of the planet.
This is it!
This is the end.
The end of my journey.