In the Americas with David Yetman

The small city of Tultepec, a suburb of Mexico City, specializes in the production of fireworks, supplying much of the country known for fireworks in its festivals. In March of each year Tultepec celebrates with dazzling, flamboyant, and hazardous displays of fireworks that wildly exceed any other in Mexico--or anywhere else.

Southern Chile is a land of forests, rivers, lakes, and volcanoes. It is also home to Native American and immigrant communities. We visit Mapuche Indians and descendants of German and Italian immigrants and the vast landscapes they inhabit.

In the early 1920s, a small group of Japanese peasants received a land grant deep in the vast forests of the Amazon. Today their descendants have become prosperous farmers, raising tropical crops and pepper, all the while protecting large tracts of primary tropical forest.

Archaeologists have only recently begun to restore the important Maya city of Ceibal, situated along the Passion River deep in the Petén forest of Guatemala. We travel to the site with scientists directing the latest excavations and visit the homes of the Maya workers who are restoring the site.

California's Sierra Nevada is the largest and highest mountain range in the contiguous United States and, until recently, a geological puzzle. The source of colossal wealth in the form of gold and, now, water, it was a formidable roadblock to settlement of the state. We visit the range with renowned tectonic specialist Eldridge Moores.

Each year on January 6, pilgrims travel to the ancient Maya city of Tizimín in the Yucatán Peninsula to celebrate Epiphany. The festival of the Day of the Kings combines pre-Columbian and modern themes, all of them gilded with the touch of the Mayas.

Panama City has been a pivotal shipping port for hundreds of years-over water and over land. Today it has become an economic powerhouse, the Hong Kong of the Americas, thanks to its booming canal. But the canal cannot function without the services provided by the huge rainforest that envelops it.

African-Brazilians provided Brazil with renowned symbols of samba and carnival. The center of their culture is in Salvador in the state of Bahia. Its connection to Africa-physical and social--helps us understand the historical and culinary contributions from this repository of African influence, and to acknowledge the heritage of slavery.

Yellowstone National Park is U.S. national park, and one of the most visited. In winter, access is limited, and visitors and wildlife are challenged by deep snow and fierce cold. The frozen landscape is utterly transformed from summertime, and its explosive potential is even more evident.

The Chinantec people of mountainous northern Oaxaca, Mexico, speak by whistling as well as by talking. We visit their isolated community and see for ourselves how they use whistled speech to supplement-and sometimes replace-spoken speech.