Will Smith has swapped Hollywood soundstages for ice runways, jungle rivers and desert salt pans in Pole to Pole with Will Smith, the new National Geographic docuseries that tracks a 26,000-mile journey from the South Pole to the North Pole.

Filmed over 100 days across all seven continents, the production follows the actor through some of the most extreme environments on Earth, using each stop not only to test his physical limits but to explore big questions about happiness, resilience and humanity’s relationship with a rapidly changing planet.

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From Antarctica’s Polar Plateau to the Geographic South Pole

The series opens in Antarctica, where Smith begins his odyssey at the bottom of the world. Filming took place on the continent’s icefields and along the route to the Geographic South Pole, with polar athlete Richard Parks guiding the expedition on skis across the frozen plateau. Crews captured the unforgiving reality of temperatures that can plunge toward minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, katabatic winds and the whiteout conditions that define life on the highest, coldest continent.

Production based itself around established Antarctic logistics hubs before moving out onto the ice, where lightweight camera systems and drone footage record Smith hauling a sled, crossing crevasse fields and climbing blue-ice ridges that rise like frozen waves from the polar plateau. Scientists working at research stations appear throughout the episode, bringing viewers inside laboratories that study everything from ancient ice cores to cosmic rays, and giving a rare glimpse of the personal sacrifices required to live and work in such isolation.

Visually, Antarctica offers the starkest canvas in the series. Long tracking shots of Smith and his team skiing across endless white are intercut with close-ups of wind-scoured rock and fragile surface snow crystals. The filming underscores how deceptively empty the continent appears, even as it holds critical clues to sea level rise, planetary climate systems and humanity’s future. For travel-hungry viewers, it is also a primer on the expedition-style tourism that now reaches the Antarctic interior, where only a tiny fraction of visitors ever venture beyond the coast.

Deep in the Amazon and the remote Yasuní rainforest

From the ice of the south, Pole to Pole pivots into the humidity and bio-diversity of the Amazon. Filming for two episodes was centered on Brazil and Ecuador, where Smith confronts his long-standing fear of spiders and ventures into some of the most biologically rich and politically contested rainforest on Earth. One of the most striking locations is Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve famed for record-breaking species density and for being home to Indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation.

Camera teams follow Smith as he joins herpetologists and biologists on nocturnal river expeditions and jungle treks. In one sequence, he assists scientists and members of the Indigenous Waorani nation as they locate and briefly capture a giant green anaconda estimated at around 16 feet in length. Researchers take scale samples before returning the snake to the floodplain waters, using the data to assess how top predators are faring in an ecosystem facing threats from oil exploration, road building and pollution.

Another Amazon segment takes Smith into limestone caves and sinkholes, where arachnologists carefully extract venom from large tarantulas. The filming in these tight, dark spaces required specialized low-light cinematography and compact rigging, documenting how compounds found in spider venom may hold clues to new treatments for human disease. For Smith, who has spoken openly about his discomfort around spiders, the cave expedition is presented as a psychological as well as physical trial, one that ties into the series’ broader theme of confronting fear in pursuit of knowledge.

High-altitude journeys in Bhutan and the Eastern Himalayas

Leaving the rainforest, Pole to Pole climbs into the Himalayas, with key filming based in Bhutan. The Himalayan kingdom, known for its Gross National Happiness philosophy and carbon-negative forests, provides a vivid contrast to both Antarctica and the Amazon, blending dramatic topography with a culture that explicitly measures success in terms of wellbeing rather than wealth.

Smith travels to the remote village of Laya, one of the highest permanent settlements in Bhutan, perched at roughly 13,000 feet in the Eastern Himalayas. Access to Laya remains by multi-day trek along steep, often snow-covered trails, a reality the crew leans into by filming pack trains, river crossings and acclimatization stops along the route. The village itself, with whitewashed stone houses scattered on a grassy slope beneath glacier-clad peaks, becomes a visual anchor for conversations about community, change and resilience.

In Laya, Smith spends time with the semi-nomadic Layap people, who split their year between the village and higher yak-herding camps. Filming captures traditional songs, communal gatherings and the rhythms of life at altitude, while local residents discuss how climate shifts are altering snowfall patterns and impacting their livelihoods. Drones and long lenses showcase sweeping panoramas of the greater Himalayan range, but the narrative stays grounded in personal encounters, positioning Bhutan as both a destination and a living case study in alternative development models.

Across the Kalahari Desert with the San of southern Africa

Far to the southwest, another major chapter unfolds in the Kalahari Desert, a vast semi-arid basin that spans much of Botswana and extends into Namibia and South Africa. Here, filming took place on the Kalahari’s iconic red sand dunes and in sparsely vegetated savannah dotted with acacia trees. From a travel perspective, this is safari country, home to black-maned lions, meerkats, oryx and other wildlife uniquely adapted to hot, dry conditions.

For the series, however, the Kalahari is as much about people as it is about animals. Smith meets with members of the San, often described as one of the world’s oldest continuous hunter-gatherer cultures. The cameras follow as San guides demonstrate ancient tracking techniques, traditional fire-making and water-finding skills, showing how generations have learned to survive in a landscape where surface water can be absent for months at a time.

These scenes, filmed around small desert encampments and in the open veld, highlight how traditional ecological knowledge can offer insights into living sustainably in marginal environments. Interviews touch on land rights, modernization pressures and the challenges of preserving language and culture. For viewers, the Kalahari episode doubles as an invitation to explore less crowded parts of southern Africa, moving beyond big-name parks to understand the human stories threaded through the dunes.

Under Arctic pack ice at the North Pole

The northern bookend of the series is the Arctic, where Smith heads to the top of the world. Production traveled to the high Arctic Ocean to film on sea ice near the North Pole, a region typically accessed via icebreakers or seasonal ice camps. There, Smith joins polar scientists studying microscopic life forms that thrive beneath the ice and may help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, tying the episode directly into climate-change research.

One of the most talked-about sequences from the shoot is an under-ice scuba dive. Wearing drysuits and full-face masks, Smith and a team of divers descend through a hole cut into the thick sea ice, entering a dim, aqua-tinted world of suspended ice crystals and softly glowing light. While filming, a series of equipment issues briefly leaves Smith in a precarious position beneath the ice sheet, an incident he later described as genuinely terrifying and which production retained to underscore the real risks involved in working in such an environment.

Above the surface, cameras capture ridged pressure ice, open leads of dark Arctic water and the distant silhouettes of icebergs. Scientists explain how the region is warming at roughly four times the global average, and what that means for sea ice thickness, ocean circulation and the wildlife that depends on stable ice platforms. For many viewers, the North Pole remains an abstract point on a map; Pole to Pole gives it texture, turning coordinates into a place of genuine sensory detail and high-stakes science.

Islands of the Pacific and the front line of sea-level rise

Connecting the polar regions are a series of stops that show the human scale of environmental change, including filming on low-lying islands in the Pacific. While individual island names receive less on-screen attention than the poles or the Himalayas, the settings are instantly recognizable: coral atolls fringed by turquoise lagoons, narrow strips of land barely a few meters above sea level, villages where the ocean is ever-present.

Here, Smith meets local leaders and residents grappling with saltwater intrusion, coastal erosion and increasingly powerful storms. The cameras record community meetings, shoreline surveys and daily routines that already include flood adaptation. For travel-minded audiences, these segments illustrate both the allure and the fragility of Pacific island tourism, showing destinations that may be dramatically altered within a few decades without significant global climate action.

Filmmakers balance these sobering themes with cultural immersion, filming dance, food and religious ceremonies that underscore the deep ties between island communities and the sea. The Pacific episodes extend the series’ core premise: that understanding extreme environments is inseparable from listening to the people who call them home, and that the places tourists often view as paradises are also ground zero for some of the planet’s toughest challenges.

Behind the camera on a seven-continent shoot

Although the series frontlines Smith’s journey, Pole to Pole is also a story of logistical ambition. The seven-part production required filming across seven continents within a tightly constrained 100-day window, coordinating aerial permissions in the Himalayas, scientific access in Antarctica, community approvals in Indigenous territories and safety protocols for everything from tarantula-handling to crevasse rescue.

The show’s producers have described it as a hybrid of blockbuster adventure cinema and classic natural-history documentary. That approach is evident in the visual style: sweeping drone flyovers of Antarctic ice shelves, cinematic time-lapses of star-filled desert skies, close focus on intricate insect life in the rainforest and steady-cam shots that shadow Smith as he navigates cliff edges or crowded village streets. Crews used lightweight 4K cinema cameras, stabilized rigs and custom housing systems for underwater work, with teams often operating in extreme cold, intense humidity or thin air.

The production timeline also reflects a shift in how travel storytelling is being framed for a global audience. Rather than simply ticking off iconic postcard stops, the series anchors each destination around a question or scientific puzzle: What can Antarctic ice cores tell us about our future? How are Amazonian communities defending their forests? Why does Bhutan measure happiness instead of GDP? In that sense, the route from the South Pole to the North Pole becomes a narrative spine for a broader inquiry into how people adapt to, and shape, the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

How Pole to Pole reframes extreme travel for viewers

For TheTraveler.org readers weighing their own bucket lists, Pole to Pole with Will Smith offers a blueprint for a different kind of extreme travel. Antarctica appears not only as a place for once-in-a-lifetime scenery but as the heart of discussions about climate tipping points. The Amazon is not presented merely as a backdrop for wildlife encounters, but as a living, contested territory where Indigenous nations and scientists work side by side. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan steps into the spotlight as an example of how policy and culture can center wellbeing, while the Kalahari and Pacific islands illustrate that survival skills and local knowledge are as crucial as cutting-edge gear.

Crucially, the series highlights that many of these locations are accessible to travelers in some form, though almost always with strict environmental and cultural considerations. Antarctic interior expeditions, guided treks to high Himalayan villages, community-based tourism projects in the Kalahari and carefully regulated visits to sections of the Amazon all exist, but Pole to Pole makes clear that responsible travel in such places requires humility, preparation and respect for those who live there year-round.

By tracing a line from the South Pole to the North Pole and stopping at some of Earth’s most extreme environments along the way, the series answers the question of where Pole to Pole was filmed with a simple response: almost everywhere the planet is at its most intense. From the creaking ice of Antarctica to the sweltering sands of the Kalahari, from Yasuní’s flooded forests to the underwater ceilings of Arctic pack ice, Will Smith’s latest project turns the world itself into a set, and invites viewers to imagine not only visiting these places, but understanding what it takes to keep them alive.