Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Mexico

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Mexico

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Presenter Toby Amies hooks up with alternative arts guru Pancho Lopez, who exercises his democratic right to eat wherever he damn well pleases by staging elavorate dinners in public places - such as a traffic island, smack in the middle of a busy Mexico City thoroughfare.

Pancho’s friend Kimberly Sumano guides Toby through the historic canals of Xochimilco gathering flowers for the forthcoming Day of the Dead celebrations. Kimberley introduces Toby to peroxide-topped La Lucha Libre hard man Shocker who kits him out in wrestling gear and initiates him into the mysteries of the world’s most theatrical fighting organisation.

Kimberly and Toby celebrate “”Dia de muertes”" with traditional Aztec dancing in Xochimilco and the following night in Mixquic, with a feast and candlelit vigil in honour of the dear departed.

Pancho takes Toby to the counterculture El Chopo market where he meets social activist Daniel Sanchez conducting an orchestra playing instruments recycled from the city’s trash.

Toby helps filmmaker Andrea

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Auckland

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Auckland

The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents. Auckland Presenter Asha Gill hooks up with cartoon graffiti artist Misery to help her transform a campervan into a unique work of art. Misery takes Asha to Polynesian fashion designer and fa’fa’fine Lindah E, who co-opts Asha into an all-black wedding shoot. On K road, Asha meets Reverand Mua, a freestyle rapping man of God preaching the righteous path to Auckland’s Polynesian youth. Lindah hooks Asha up with Auckland firefighter Mags, who dangles her off the floodlights of Eden park and then takes her altitude gardening off a 60-metre waterfall. Asha plants trees on tribal land with Maori chief Joe Hawke and goes hunter-gathering with master chef Garth Hokianga, plucking salad from the nearest bush and digging dinner out of the sand. Asha joins high-access rope worker Ed Dennis as he works on the outside of Sky Tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere.

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Mumbai

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Mumbai

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Mumbai

Determined to fulfill her dream of being in a movie, presenter Asha Gill gets the lowdown on Bollywood’s raunchy moves from acclaimed choreographer Vaibhavi Merchant.

Asha meets street photographer David de Souza chronicling the itinerants that work on Mumbai’s streets and grasps the chance to understand who these people are before they disappear by helping in a studio shoot of a traditional flagellant.

Asha is invited to a hijra house by the flamboyant cross-dressing eunuch Lakshmi to get an insight into India’s ‘third sex.’ She gets an inkling of Mumbai’s place in the global economy when joining Afshan at a call centre where the workers are undergoing surreal voice training to mimic American accents. And finally Asha gets her big break as she dances in the latest Bollywood movie with the biggest star in Indian cinema history - Amitabh Bachchan… ”

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Berlin

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Berlin

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Berlin

Presenter Toby Amies hooks up with puppeteer Christian Bahrmann as he gives the big bad wolf a workout. Christian puts Toby in touch with the Natural Born Golfers who’ve taken the distinctly unsexy game of golf and reinvented it as an extreme urban sport.

Getting into the swing, Toby meet surreal performance artist Maren Strack, a one-woman compendium of avant garde Berlin art with a penchant for hanging from tall trees by her hair.

Toby gets a crash course in chess-boxing - the ultimate challenge for the body and the mind - from world champ lepe the Joker, and cycles the route of the Berlin Wall with architect Benjamin Koehrcih who takes him to meet one of the city’s longest surviving squatters.

Toby gets a taste of the high life at an elite garden party hosted by art patron Jorg Starke, who hooks Toby up with Russian painter Nikolai Makarov - the Bernie Ecclestone of Berlin’s cockroach rating scene.”

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Paris

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Paris

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Paris

In Paris, Toby goes from the avant-garde of an artist squat led by the charismatic Gaspard Delan

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Sydney

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Sydney

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Sydney

Presenter Toby Amies enrolls in surf school at Bondi Beach and meets artist and novice surfer Mai Long. Toby attends a gallery opening with Mai’s larger-than-life art dealer Ray Hughes to get the lowdown on contemporary Australian-Asian art. Toby gets an insight into Sydney cuisine when society caterer Sawa Sawas foolishly persuades him to help cater the launch of the Sydney Arts Festival.

Toby gets out and about on the water with Dr. Olivia de Bergerac, who takes him swimming with dolphins in order to calm his frenetic brain waves. Street photographer Peter Moyle shows Toby the city’s underbelly on a photographic safari of Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious nightlife district.

Toby visits pyrotechnic wizard Fortunato Foti at his firework factory, and lights up the night sky from a barge in Sydney Harbour to celebrate the opening of Sydney’s Gay Games…”

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 London

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 London

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

London

Presenter Asha Gill does her bit to save London being six feet underwater and counts the city’s bat population with nutty naturalist Bridget Nicholls.

Foot-stomping bus conductor Duke Baysee fills a classic red double-decker bus with the blues as he drops Asha at iconic London nightclub Kashpoint where she spends the night talking turkey with club promoter Matthew Glamorre in the ladies loo.

Propositioned by the Chaps at the Civilise the City campaign, Michael Attree teaches Asha how to appreciate the values of a British gent and initiates her into the eccentric world of mudlarking on the River Thames.

Asha meets celebrity erotica shop entrepreneur Sam Roddick for an insight into Londoners mating and dating habits and tries on the alternative crown jewels in the magical glass workshop of Alternative Miss World creator Andrew Logan. ”

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Singapore

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Singapore

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Singapore

Presenter Asha Gill hits the ground with fast-talking, Vespa-riding foodie KF Seetoh, who gives her an insight into Singapore food as performance art. Seetoh hooks Asha up with local Malay surf punks Force Vomit, who embark on the ‘Liberate Singapore’ campaign to promote their band at the Great Singapore Sale.

Force Vomit introduce Asha to gender-behding, sari-clad, cabaret icon Kumar, who shows her how even a non-mainstream personality like himself can be accepted into the Singapore mainstream.

Asha continues to meet people in the strangest places, bumping into Jack Sim of the Singapore Restroom Association in the ladies powder room. He cajoes her into joining their Happy Toilet rating campaign designed to improve the quality of public lavatories in the cleanest of clean cities…”

User Ratings and Reviews

1 Star Interesting toilets and a band called vomit…
This has to be the worst DVD I ever saw and I have seen a few… I wanted to learn something about Singapore as a travel destination and all I saw was this lady who inspected toilets, ate and hung out with a band called vomit…. Avoid at all costs.

Too bad it’s impossible to give 0 stars…

1 Star Bad if using as travel or introduction to Singapore
While this was interesting in a “look at all the colorful people the host can meet” sort of way — it really gives you no sense of Singapore as a travel destination. Unless you count the tour of public restrooms!

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Hong Kong

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 2 Hong Kong

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Hong Kong

Presenter Toby Amies gets the essential Hong Kong survival kit from fashion tracker Davena Mok, who hooks him up with commentator Nury Vittachi for an insight into the city’s greatest passions - money, gambling, and feng shui. Nury takes Toby to a high society costume party, where he masquerades as a colonial prig and scores an invite from designer William Tang to celebrate the Chung Yueng Festival.

Davena introduces Toby to Hong Kong movie producer Bey Logan to bring his martial arts fantasy to life, and Bey puts Toby in touch with marine police officer Tim Worrell - the man with the fastest boat in town bar none - for some high speed thrills on the high seas.

Toby meets Hong Kong’s Dr Doolittle, Su Burnett, at a workshop for troubled dogs, and then joins artist Amy Cheung for a little mischief with a life-size sculpture of a Hong Kong cab. Toby gets his just desserts in a classic rooftop martial arts finale.”

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars Not very helpful for a traveler
I was hoping this would be a good overview of things to see on my trip in Hong Kong. But it didn’t really offer much information.

The host is nice enough, but there wasn’t much info about things to see, places to go, what to expect, etc…

If you’re looking for something to help plan your trip. Save your money. On the other hand, the Frommers guide is quite helpful.

5 Stars Fun Look at Hong Kong, and best of all…
I’m in this! Okay, in something that can’t even really be called a cameo, but nonetheless…in one of the early scenes the host goes to a ‘costume party’ where almost no one else dresses up; he starts looking at all the people there and describing them to the audience, “Suit, suit, suit, suit, suit, a couple of dresses, suit, almost a costume, suit, pirate.”

And yes, I am the pirate.

I’ve never been prouder. It was a benefit for the Hong Kong ballet.

And, dammit, if they hadn’t been filming the show, I would have won!

Oh, but about the DVD, they explore the seldom seen parts of HK, from some lovely kayaking in the outlying islands, to a fantastic traditional village house; they visit local racconteur Nuri Vittachi and a fascinating and somewhat strange photographer/visual-performance artist identified only as Amy; they go shopping in Mong Kok, one of the most densely crowded places on Earth; they ride along with the marine police on a night patrol to catch smugglers (which they don’t actually manage to do), and they meet a kung-fu artist/stuntman. It’s loads of fun, and I saw parts of Hong kong that I hadn’t seen here in real life having been here 17 years! But it was rather odd that the majority of people they met here were NOT CHINESE. Sure, there are a lot of expats living here, but you’d think that more locals would give you more of a local sense of the place.

And keep an eye out for the pirate. (The Marine Police still haven’t brought me in! HAHAHAHAHA!)

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Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Havana

Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1 Havana

“The best way to explore a new city is to connect with the people who live in it. Join jetsetting presenters Toby Amies and Asha Gill on a radical urban adventure as they plug into city after city with the help of its most colourful and clued-in residents.

Havana

Presenter Toby Amies hooks up with fixer Flacco who gains him entr

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