A couple of weeks ago I was packed off to Istanbul armed with a weird and wonderful list of obscure features and locations to track down. With four days in which to do this, the race was on.

Here are a selection of highlights.

First stop: The Blue Mosque.

Truly as magnificent as it sounds, the Sultanahmet Cami is one of the most famous of Istanbul’s sights. Situated in the heart of Sultanahmet (the quarter of the city jam packed with history, culture and tourists), the Blue Mosque shimmers: its six minarets starkly framed against the Bosporus, which lies just behind. My task was to check out the tuk-tuk friendly status of the Roman Hippodrome, adjacent to which the Blue Mosque was built over 1400 years later. After a couple of circuits of the mosque and twenty minutes spent squinting at sharp corners and large curbs, I can confirm that the tuktuks will be happily tootling past yet another stunning building on their way to London…

Next Stop: The Basilica Cistern.

After surveying the lie of the land around Sultanhamet (honestly, every gradient however slight is magnified when on three wheels) it was time to turn subterranean. The Basilica cistern is a system of underground chambers built in the 5^th century as water storage for the city. The abandoned ruins of the cistern were later discovered during Ottoman rule and re-used by the Sultans at nearby Topkapi Palace. Today only a foot of water remains, however, the columns are beautifully uplit and visitors can wonder around the very bowels of Istanbul. The tuk-tuks won’t make it down here, but I’m sure the Tracing Tea team will devise a way of bringing this excellent example of early water management to your screens…

Bringing it home through the city walls.

Venturing further afield, my shortlist of hot spots took me up the Golden Horn to the Roman city walls. Boarding a ferry at the busy port of Eminonu, I yo-yo-ed up the narrow channel of water which separates the North and South parts of the European side of the city. The walls run on the Western edge of the old Roman city and, to this day some 4 miles are still standing, built into the very fabric of the city. After much scrabbling up and down along the walls, I guarantee you can expect to glimpse the tuk-tuks as they skirt around, past, and through, this piece of history. Is that yet another great ancient engineering feat which ‘Tracing Tea’ have brought to your screens I hear you ask? I believe it is…

Job done, I boarded a plane back to the UK, scribbled on map under one arm, a box of Lokum (Turkish Delight) under the other, and a certain amount of smugness as I looked down on Istanbul below me. Long distance tuk-tuk journeys are all very well, but there is certainly something to be said for getting home in a couple of hours…

Cath.

(Of course, copious amounts of Turkish tea, taken from the delightful tulip shaped glasses, are a pre-requisite for any budding location scout, and are fully endorsed by this one…)

A couple of months ago, Max and Sophie went to speak to Graham Middle School’s 7^th graders about Tracing Tea. All the students have been studying places along the Tracing Tea route as part of their social studies class and last autumn had engaged in a Skype video call with the Tracing Tea team in Pakistan. This time they were going to quiz them in person.

Donned in Pakistani dress – an embroidered long wedding coat for Max and a Chittrali hat for Sophie, the students got to hear all about Tracing Tea from the project’s Director and Assistant Producer. Questions ranged from what do people wear and what do they eat to, “how do you go to the bathroom in the wilderness?”

The students were very interested in the rest of the world’s perceptions of America and also happy to have their own preconceptions of other countries challenged and enhanced.

At the end of the talk Tracing Tea presented the students with a framed flag and letter from Minister Turusbek Mamashov at the Tourism Ministry in Bishkek. The letter wrote of the importance of education, inter-cultural understanding and the hope of learning more about our global neighbours: a concept at the very heart of Tracing Tea.

As you will have read, the Graham Middle School students were delighted to have received letters from Glenburn. This package was kindly organised by Husna-Tara of the Glenburn Estate, and Harry Le Page, a gap year student working there. The picture above shows Harry with some of the students. The Tracing Tea team would like to say a big thank you to Husna-Tara and Harry for all their hard work in organising such a fantastic package to send to California!

- Megan

Sitting for 14 hours in an airless government office in Delhi or Kolkata often drives me towards homicidal thoughts, but at least there is the recompense of being in an exciting foreign country and the excuse that I’m having to pick my way through the red tape of a third world bureaucracy. I have far less patience for dealing with incompetence and delays when I’m trying to work in an MEP production office in Cambridge or California and I appear to have been swallowed by the automated phone service of an airline, customer service helpline or directory enquiries for the 10th time that day. If you ever thought life between Tracing Tea shoots was a breeze, think again. I’m about to introduce you to some of the trials and tribulations of our past few weeks.

When Max left Kyrgyzstan at the end of February, he shipped out 11 cases of our equipment with Turkish Airlines freight division. The flight time to Chicago from Bishkek, even considering transfers, should have been no more than a couple of days but a month later there was still no sign of the luggage. The airway bill number we had was not entered on the Turkish Airlines computer system, their agent in Bishkek had taken our cash and refused to answer his phone or emails, and 356kg books, clothes and filming equipment appeared to have vanished into the ether. The shipment included all our our audio gear, including mixer and microphones, all of our camera batteries, chargers and accessories, and the IoHD machine which compresses footage to a small enough size for the computer to read. We called and emailed every part of the supply chain, left a zillion answerphone messages in Kyrgyz, Russian, Turkish and English, heard nothing, learned from the lawyers that if an airline loses your baggage they don’t have to reimburse you for it, and finally, last weekend, got hold of the airline’s CO in Istanbul. Whipped into action from above, the luggage was located in Istanbul and flown out to Chicago. It was 5 weeks late and appears to have been sat in Bishkek for an indefinite period whilst the agent loaned out the cash he’d been paid for the shipment. Don’t we love corruption. Still, the saga does not quite end there. It appears that US customs likes you to sign for your baggage in person. This is fine if you are flying in with the suitcase but if, as we are, you are some 1800+ miles away, it’s a little less convenient. This necessitated about 40 phone calls, hiring a customs broker in Chicago, giving him power of attorney, faxing permissions to everyone under the sun and then getting Fedex to collect the shipment from the brokers to deliver it here. Fingers crossed 11 cases will arrive on Friday, but after all the other debacles I’m not exactly holding my breath.

Frustration 2, which has so far required input from myself, Max, Megan, Cath, both Sams, every Piaggio dealer in the USA and Canada and most of the ones in Europe, has been trying to get replacement parts for our Italian Stallion, the Piaggio Ape 50 tuk-tuk. Getting Bajaj spares was fine; we called the dealer, told them what we wanted and yesterday they arrived by DHL in Bishkek. Easy stuff. Piaggio is more of a challenge. Each country has its own, local approved dealers and won’t ship their equipment abroad. The ROW dealer is based in Switzerland, and, due to the self-proclaimed higher standards of his country, can he justify charging more for a new engine than we paid for the original Piaggio, body work, wheels, engine and all. At well over 3000 Euros (excluding shipping), this is a prohibitively expensive option. What we’d like to do is take a different, larger and more efficient engine and put it into the Piaggio. However, no one seems to know what a Piaggio Ape engine looks like. The latest manual we can find dates from the 1970s, contains no useful diagrams, and is in Italian. The Piaggio dealers have never looked inside an Ape, th US dealers aren’t able to order in Ape parts, and the company we originally bought the Piaggio from in the UK, Pro truck, appears to have sunk without trace. It’s certainly a challenge. The next step is to call Piaggio’s Investor Relations and Marketing departments in Italy, for which we need a more fluent Italian speaker, and to cajole them into parting with a precious engine. A replacement window, gear box and brake and fuel lines would also be nice.

The final company driving me to distraction is Stratos, the people we bought our satellite phone from. As you may remember from previous blogs, the sole time we managed to place a call out from the expedition was in Besham and that was using a Pakistani government sat phone made in China. Ours, which was repeatedly described as ‘the brick’ or ‘that piece of junk’ sat in the truck from Kolkata to Bishkek and made one successful phone call: across the car park in Islamabad. On every other occasion we used it, including from the roof of the Holiday Inn in downtown Lahore and in places with a clear line of sight for a couple of hundred miles, we couldn’t get so much as a glimmer of a signal. The sat phone was supposed to be our back-up in case of accident or other emergency and it was a complete and utter failure. Since we’ve been back in the US we’ve been trying to return the phone as it’s not fit for purpose. The phone itself, as their tech department have confirmed, works perfectly well… providing you are in the US. However, despite their claims that it works everywhere in the world, we’ve proved categorically it doesn’t. The endless phone calls and emails are infuriating and we can’t wait to be rid of the damn thing. If you ever think of buying a sat phone, discount Stratos and the Bgan system. A locally purchased SIM card is far more effective and costs a lot, lot less.

Wish us luck for the coming weeks!

Students from Graham Middle School, California, who are taking part in the Tracing Tea Education Project

Tracing Tea is a creature of many guises. You probably know most about the TV documentary, but did you know we’re also involved in an education programme in the USA?

The main driving force behind the Tracing Tea tuk tuks is the idea of building inter-cultural understanding. And yes, tea is the way to do this. Although it is the second most popular beverage in the world (second only to water) the way it is consumed is culturally specific and provides a vehicle into learning about social practises, histories and people in any given country along our route. With the expertise of the Krause Center for Innovation we’re bringing these lessons to students at Graham Middle School, California.

There are many facets to the education programme as the material Tracing Tea collects on the expedition feeds into history, geography, religious and social studies lessons but the one I want to tell you all about today is our pen-pal link.

This pen-pal scheme will allow the students to communicate with students from all along the Tracing Tea route. This month, after receiving a fabulous package full of hand written letters and pictures from students who live around the Glenburn Estate in Darjeeling, students from Graham Middle school are sending over video diaries, hand written letters and pictures in response to the Indian letters they received last month. In addition emails are flying between Graham Middle School students and students from the Lahore American School in Pakistan.

Although the idea of pen-pal links may sound very simple, first impressions can be very deceiving. Organising such a link across several continents takes time and commitment. I’d like to thank Graham Middle School’s Tom Sayer for his patience and unswerving enthusiasm, Husna-Tara Prakash and Harry Le Page at Glenburn for organising the packs from their students, Caroline Bleske at the Lahore American School for sorting out correspondence there and all the students involved in the project. The film crew may be on a winter break but the message of Tracing Tea keeps going, and for that, we couldn’t be more delighted!

If you know of 11 – 14 year old students who’d be interested in taking part in this project please email me: megan@maximumexposureproductions.com

- Megan