That Guy: Nazi treasure hunt sure to be TV gold

Opinion

In 1942, Adolf Hitler sent archaeologist Heinrich Roulfson to the jungles of Peru to search for the mythical lost city of El Dorado. He never returned but many believe he just might have found it.

Next week, more than 60 years later, I will also travel to Peru armed only with my new debit card from Westpac and a top film crew to see if we can answer the mystery of what happened to Roulfson, and perhaps even discover for ourselves the mythical city of gold, El Dorado.

To be honest I don't really expect to find it, and even if we did, most of the gold would probably have to be handed over to TVNZ as they kind of need the cash at the moment and they funded the project.

TVNZ will be like the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century, plundering Peru for all it's worth, then shipping it back to New Zealand to fund quality TV shows.

I should just add that this isn't the only reason TVNZ is sending me there - it just happens to be part of a documentary series called Leigh Hart's Mysterious Planet, in which I explore all the world's mysteries that happened to be in a book I got for Christmas from my grandfather in 1978.

Naturally the book is also called Mysterious Planet, but some people in the graphics department added my name to the top of it, which gives me the credibility to be making a series of this nature.

It is by now no secret that Hitler had long been fascinated with the occult and old world treasures. It is also well documented that he mounted expeditions to the Himalayas looking for the lost city of Atlantis and the beginnings of the Aryan race.

But Hitler was also an idiot, so when Roulfson brought him a half-baked proposal suggesting he get away from war-torn Europe to go and search for Inca gold in Peru, he naturally agreed. The parallels with my proposal to TVNZ are plain to see, but at least TVNZ should get a top-rating programme out of it.

A search for Inca gold always begins in Cuzco. This was the capital during the height of the Inca Empire. In the 16th century the Spanish committed atrocities there. They wiped out most of the people, destroyed their temples and melted down tonnes of gold so it could be shipped back to Spain in the form of coins.

But the Spanish didn't get it all. Legend has it that much gold, including the "golden disc of the sun", was smuggled out of Cuzco and taken to a safe haven somewhere else in Peru - but where?

My team will follow the journey that Roulfson took around Peru as he searched for El Dorado. We will conduct a three-month search of the Andean mountains to the south, and then take a few days off in a 4-star hotel in Lima before searching the treacherous jungles to the north near Iquitos.

It is here that Roulfson is said to have made huge breakthroughs, but although we already know this we still have to go through the motions and do the rest of the trip just to fill in time for TV's sake.

Legend has it, after a number of months in the jungle Roulfson sent a communique back to Hitler via the enigma machine, a U-boat and a fax machine on Easter Island.

Once deciphered, the message indicated that he had indeed found vast riches somewhere in the jungle and he was preparing to bring artefacts back.

Roulfson then loaded some of his find on to a Nazi seaplane. Some experts dispute this fact, claiming that it wasn't a seaplane but a flying boat, but nevertheless, most agree that his aim was to get back to Germany via Lima.

The location of the lost city was known only to him, but as fate would have it, less than 25 minutes after the plane took off, it crashed somewhere deep in the Amazon jungle, and neither Roulfson nor his treasure have been seen since.

My crew will follow rumours that a native tribe, whose women prefer to be topless, knows the location of a wrecked flying boat hidden deep in the jungle.

If we find the plane, by using some basic triangulation methods and powerful metal detectors, we should be able to estimate the location of El Dorado, and the rest will be history.

To my knowledge, TVNZ has already cleared out a number of rooms downstairs, which were previously used for editing, in preparation for what we might find.

I am a little more familiar with the hit-and-miss nature of archaeology so I am taking a more cautious approach.