In comparison to the anarchic, gun-filled streets of the Somali capital, Simon travels to the relative safety of the breakaway neighbor, Somaliland. Here he finds mass graves, a foreign minister who delivers babies and some of the oldest cave paintings in the world.

Simon Reeve travels to Moldova where he goes on a drunken fishing trip with the president, before meeting a village so poor that 32 men there sold their kidneys. He then crosses over to the breakaway state of Trans-Dniester to find a region where Lenin statues still take pride of place and "independence day" is celebrated with a show of force by thousands of troops. He also gets arrested for trying to film a secret Soviet base.

Simon Reeve has a disturbing time in two regions that have declared independence from former Soviet state Georgia. First he crosses the frontline past Russian tanks into South Ossetia - where he sees graveyards in a school and drinks with troops, before being chased out by the KGB. Then in Abkhazia, he finds an alarming legacy of Soviet times: a warehouse full of 30,000 shells, protected by a door kept closed with a piece of string.

Situated in south-western Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh is a richly fertile area of striking beauty scarred by its violent history. Soldiers still face each other in trenches only 100m apart. He goes out with a team of de-miners who fail to convince locals to take a detour around a minefield, before ending his journey at a local wedding.