Ben Anderson's latest journey takes him to five of the world's most dangerous rivers, from the jungles of Brazil, to the sacred Ganges and the combat zone of Iraq.

Interview

BBC Four: Was it very obvious which countries you were going to visit?
Ben Anderson: Yes. There was an original list of five. The only one we had to change was the Indus for the Ganges. Twenty-four hours before we were due to fly we still thought we were going to do Pakistan, but we had a real struggle getting visas. In the end they said we couldn't go near the border with Afghanistan, couldn't go into the Islamic fundamentalist area and couldn't do anything about al-Qaeda or Taleban men hiding here. That didn't leave us with much of a film!

BBC Four: Was there any unifying thought or theme behind the locations apart from them all being rivers?
Ben Anderson: Originally it was a quote from former UN secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali. He said that one day water will be fought over in the same way that oil is today. It doesn't actually stand up to close scrutiny, but every river we went to has been the scene of conflict, even if access to water wasn't directly the cause of it.

BBC Four: It seems you had to endure more physically than in the previous programmes.
Ben Anderson: It did feel like an endurance test - no sleep, terrible food, bites.

In the Amazon I got covered from head-to-toe, I looked like the Elephant Man. Basically with Congo, Amazon and India we were travelling across countries that are roughly the size of Western Europe, often with no roads. The barges in Congo - the only way to get from city to city unless you're UN

Ben on the Congo, with his fixer, Emery, and UN translator

or very wealthy - are just horrific. Bad food can wipe out hundreds of people; people fall off and drown regularly.

BBC Four: Travelling like that must have given you an acute insight into what life was like for these people.
Ben Anderson: Yes. And the rivers we concentrated on are real lifelines. People bathe in the Ganges everyday because they believe it washes away sin and they'll ascend to heaven faster. In Congo the river is the only way people can move up and down to buy and sell goods. These people have got no choice, but I'd rather never travel again in the way they do every single day.

BBC Four: What are the key issues in this series?
Ben Anderson: With the Jordan it's access to water. In a region where water is so scarce people have had to fight to secure the rights to it, sometimes at the expense of others. And that's still going on. We went to a small Palestinian town whose water source is constantly vandalised by settlers. Almost daily, Oxfam were trying to rebuild their spring and actually surrounded it with concrete. The settlers would come down and smash up the concrete and smash the pipes again, so to this day there's a fight over water there. Elsewhere, in the Congo for example, it's simply a very tough way to get between trading posts. That was the main issue there.

One issue in the Ganges is pollution. They believe because it's a holy river it can clean itself, yet we found 29 different sewage outputs being pumped straight in and dead bodies floating down the river constantly. Not only is the river badly polluted but now it's also under threat: global warming means that the inland

At the source of the Amazon

glacier, which feeds the Ganges, is drying up at twice the rate that scientists previously thought.

BBC Four: People who saw Holidays in the Axis of Evil will be interested to see you go back to Iraq. What was that like?
Ben Anderson: We actually go back to some of the exact same places. I'm not saying it was better under Saddam, obviously it wasn't. But last time we could walk around Basra freely. This time we had to walk around with a full Danish or British military convoy. In Basra I couldn't talk to people because I couldn't get out of the armoured personnel carrier. Outside of Basra I managed to talk to people. They all said they're happy Saddam's gone but there's no security, no electricity, there are constant fuel shortages and there's no access to clean drinking water. One person even said, "Before the war we had one Saddam, now we have four or five Saddams". The police force and the military, even though they've been trained by the British or the Americans, are still using their old tactics. They're taking former opponents and arresting them, torturing them; often to death. No fair trial, there's been a 100% conviction rate in the South and in Baghdad.

BBC Four: Were there any lighter moments?
Ben Anderson: Yes, but I feel very uncomfortable putting the lighter moments in the film when you're seeing suffering that you really cannot imagine. Actually the people you meet, even though they're suffering, still provide light moments. They still tell jokes. Apart from the rape victims we spent a day with in Congo, everybody at some point has to get some relief whether it be over a meal or showing us wildlife. We were taken to see some wild hippos in Congo right after we'd been told that armed militias kill anybody there and that this national park, a World Heritage site, is now a no-go area. We also went to a sanctuary where an Italian woman is looking after Bonobo orphans. Just to see Bonobos, which are our closest relatives and so human in the way they act, the way they hug and greet you, was remarkable.