South America

This 1950s amateur travelogue follows a group of tourists through Panama and South America. It opens with ships moving through the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal, then visits an Andean city that appears to be Quito, with a colonial cathedral, street vendors, shoeshine men, and women carrying babies on their backs, plus a stop at an equator monument. After a flight over the Andes, the travelers reach Peru, where a girl herds llamas, women spin yarn and weave, and the group rides on a vehicle's roof along mountain roads to explore Machu Picchu. Next come snow-capped peaks, a folk dance, and a snake handler showing a snake's fangs. In Brazil the film shows Rio de Janeiro, the Sugarloaf cable car, Christ the Redeemer, and canoes full of bananas on Guanabara Bay. It ends in the Amazon with stilt houses, the meeting of two rivers, a riverboat trip, a rainforest hike, an encounter with an Indigenous community where a visitor hands out cigarettes, and busy river villages and open-air markets.