Treasure Quest - Season Two or the Boondoggle Continues

Season Two of Treasure Quest – Snake Island has begun without the Snake Island part but with many more snakes, almost all of them described as the deadliest in the world. These are highly venomous snakes and the world’s largest constrictor. While I would argue the point about the venomous snakes being the most toxic,

A Green Anaconda because I wanted a picture

to illustrate this post.

the constrictor, the anaconda, is recognized as the world’s largest snake. But I digress.

For those who haven’t lost interest yet, it seems that this Treasure of the Trinity isn’t the gold and silver that was massed to ransom the last emperor of the Inca, Atahuallpa, but treasure collected by Portuguese explorer Alexio Garcia in Brazil in 1524. This treasure, mostly silver, though our pals on Treasure Quest keep talking about gold, apparently ended up with the Guarani in Paraguay. The history of the region suggests that the Guarani used the treasure in trade, or in other words, used it for their own purposes and there is no longer a large stash to find but never let the historical record get in the way of a television adventure. Far be it for me to throw cold, dirty water on this quest.

The team, augmented with a local guide this year, have moved from Snake Island onto mainland South America, more specifically, Paraguay where they claim to be at one of the Guarani villages. Here they are assaulted by snakes, scorpions, spiders and even piranha. We see a venomous snake found in their camp but it is captured by the team herpetologist Bryan Fry (who has been bitten by snakes 23 times which suggests he’s doing something wrong), put in a box and taken away. I don’t know what they did with it but hey, it is a venomous snake so I don’t actually care that much.

We have scuba diving into a river that is so murky that it is impossible to see the bottom while standing on it or about even about two inches in front of one’s face, if one is in the river. There is a sudden problem that might relate to the piranha and those left on the boat begin throwing chum into the water to draw the piranha away from the divers but we don’t really know if there are any piranha in that section of the river at that time… this seems like drama for the sake of drama but with no real basis in what is actually going on.

I could go on but I’ll just jump to the end in what seems to have been staged. We’ve got a couple of people wandering around on the bank of the river, pounding in stakes as if involved in some archaeological dig (does the Paraguayan government know about this?) when they find a pottery shard. The diver/archaeologist Meghan Heaney-Grier says that its 300 or 400 years old. Minutes later, and buried about three inches below the surface they find what seems to be an intact pot. It just seems to me that a pot that close to the surface, in terrain that is muddy at best would have been crushed long before these people show up to discover it. To me, that smacks of producers hiding it to be found to underscore the idea that they are on the site of an ancient Guarani town/village where the Treasure of the Trinity might once have been hidden… Sorry, I just don’t buy it.

For those interested, I will hang around for a couple more shows, but they’d better produce something more than drama with snakes and piranha if they expect me to make it through the season. Let’s have some treasure for crying out loud before this turns into another boondoggle like that Oak Island show where they have yet to find treasure.