Holidays in the Danger Zone: Meet the Stans

Simon Reeve's journey around Central Asia begins in Kazakhstan. The country has oil deposits thought to rival those of Saudi Arabia. However, Simon also discovers former biological weapons factories with poor security and housing a hundred types of plague, a shrinking sea now home to camel farmers, and the region's best Beatles tribute band.

In the most repressive of the "Stans" visited, Simon finds himself followed by the secret police as he travels across the country. He meets the country's most famous pop star, visits a bodyguard training school, breaks the law by playing snooker and meets women at a marriage bureau for Uzbeks wanting western husbands. He then ends his journey in the stunning ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

With none of Kazakhstan's natural resources, Kyrgyzstan is the only country in the world with both an American and a Russian military base. Simon also meets a member of a banned radical Islamic group before putting on a protective suit to visit one of the world's most highly radioactive sites.

Sharing an 800-mile border with Afghanistan, which provides 90% of Europe's heroin, Tajikistan is one of the world's biggest drug trafficking routes. Simon joins a drugs raid, visits a warehouse with £100 million worth of heroin, and gets drunk with the conscripts who survive on just $5 a month while patrolling the Afghan border, one of the most dangerous in the world.