Episode list

In the kingdom of the queen of Saba, the pharaohs searched for the mythical incense country "Punt" almost 3000 years ago. A liaison with the biblical king Salomon is still attributed to the ruler over the legendary incense road today. She founded an empire whose legendary reputation lasted for centuries and reached Babylon, Rome and Greece. Camel caravans loaded with gold and precious stones from the Egyptian Gaza with incense from Yemen and today's Oman were stored in the caravanserais of Marib, the capital of the Sabaeans. The trade route laid the foundation for the legendary wealth of the priest kings. We are in Yemen, the ancient kingdom on the southern Arabian peninsula. The kingdom was sealed off for hundreds of years. Tribal feuds of the sheikhs with warlike peoples in the highlands made the land impassable for foreigners. Only a few years ago the country opened up to adventurous tourists. It is still not completely safe to explore the myths and legends of the old kingdom. A proverb reminds caution: "If you go to Yemen, you perish in it."

"Ata Spor" - the "sport of the fathers", the name applies worldwide only to one kind of physical exercise: the "ER MEYDANI", the wrestling match of heavyweight men in the semicircle of Anatolian village squares. For more than 2000 years, shiny oil bodies have been wrestling in front of the eyes of spectators, sultans and presidents, formerly for the physical training of Ottoman warriors, today exclusively for reasons of tradition and prestige: it's all about fame and lots of money. Officially the "ER MEYDANI" - the "meeting of venerable gentlemen in a semicircle" - has been held for exactly 639 years. Mass gatherings, congested streets, balladeers, fortune tellers, market criers: all this has to be feared - no, is expected - when the "Baspehlivan", the "master of all wrestlers" near Edirne, the old capital of the Ottoman Empire, is determined every year. In former times the sultans showered the winner with gold pieces and jewels, he was untouchable and enjoyed for one year the "protection of the caliphs". Today this event is still marked with a red pencil in the diary of the country's highest politicians. The film follows the "Champion of the Century", the "Bashpehlivan" Ahmet Tasci, during the competition days. Will he defend his title, the ninth time already ? The highlight: the final fights - a true folk festival in oil.

The carnival in Venice - next to the "Carnaval" Rio de Janeiro the most bizarre and traditional - dates back almost 800 years. The oldest document about the moral decay of the Venetians dates back to the time of the Doge's Doge. Especially during the Carnival - at that time still the "festival of egg throwing" - it was particularly lewd on both sides of the Canale Grande. The libertines hidden behind masks even penetrated nunneries and went to the virgins' laundry. The wearing of masks was forbidden without further ado. For several centuries the game "Mask up - Mask down" was played through the Republic of Venetia, depending on the sentiments of the parliament. The film mixes into the colourful carnival hustle and bustle of the old Dogenstadt. We look around in the studio of "Nicolao", the most famous costume tailor of Venice and take part in a carnival dinner of the "Upper Ten Thousand". A view behind the facade of the probably most frivolous carnival of the world.

For almost 300 years it was THE pirate base in the South Pacific, considered the "island of the infamous". No one dared even go near the island without a middleman, he ran the risk of being robbed, sunk and quartered. We are on Sulawesi, old Celebes, an island somewhere between Borneo and the Moluccas. Until the 1950s the Makassar coastline in the south of the island was the place to go for western drop-outs, adventurers and civilization tired people. On this coast the Bugi and the Makassar still live today, sea gypsies, fishermen and world-famous boat builders, direct descendants of the buccaneers of that time. The Bugi have developed a special method of fishing. With self-made junks they usually catch prey at night, throw out their nets, jump into the water and whip under loud shouting on the water surface until the fish flee into the net. The waters are regarded as quite dangerous because of sharks, many families lose their sons year after year. Echo-sounder and trawl net are unknown, the fishermen continue to jump into the water. The film accompanies a crew of a fishing trawler on the high seas. A story between the Middle Ages and modern times about the hard job of the South Sea fishermen.

Countless trucks, mobile homes and tractors block all access roads to the small holiday resort of Saintes Mairies de la Mèr in South of France. A few kilometres before the small village campfires illuminate the night scenery and the sound of guitars and fiddles indicates that the Camargue is in an exceptional situation. It is the time of the gypsies. For centuries, thousands of them from all over Europe have moved to Saintes Mairies de la Mèr in summer to celebrate the feast of their patron saint Sarah, their tradition and of course themselves. Like every year, Saintes Mairies de la Mèr is the navel of the gypsy world. When the Reinhardt clan was still filling the most famous concert halls in Europe, they played here for free and to the delight of thousands of jazz freaks who had travelled here, simply under the open sky on the beach of the village. Still today it is part of the good tone and tradition of the descendants of the great Jango to make a pilgrimage to Saintes Mairies at least once a year, including a band, and to have a session with all the musicians who have travelled there. Whether it's Birelli Lagrene or the Gypsy-Kings, nobody is too good to put their caravan in the caravan castle at the edge of Saint Mairie for a few days.

Their origins lie in the dark. They can only be found in the Bairro Alto, in the Alfama or the Mouraira, in the old districts of Lisbon or in Coimbra in northern Portugal. We are talking about the orally handed down, strangely melancholic sounding city music of the Portuguese: the Fado. In the narrow alleys of Lisbon's old town, one involuntarily encounters the traces of Amália Rodrigues, the "superstar" of Fado. For most Portuguese people, the sound of their voice symbolises national pride and melancholy at the same time. When "the queen of FADO" died in 1999, according to the opinion of the "fadista", "our country lost a piece of its soul". Fado, the word alone triggers similar feelings in Portuguese people as the samba does in Brazilians. The film looks behind the scenes of Fado. We visit the two most famous Fado establishments in Lisbon, are guests of Teresa Siqueira, the young star of the Fado scene and see Gilberto Gracío, the master of guitar making, in his small workshop over his shoulder. The film is a journey through the narrow streets of Lisbon on the trail of the legendary "city music of the poor".

"Zayn za'l barr" - "Beautiful is this country", Arab seafarers are said to have proclaimed once, when they discovered the Zanzibar. It seems a story from "1001 Nights" and "Sindbad, the Seafarer" still anchors today at the pier in front of Stone Town, the legendary old town of Zanzibar. But the Omani sultans, for a long time the rulers on the largest island off the East African coast, also wrote one of the darkest chapters of the fairytale island. They owed their immense wealth to the world's largest slave market of the 19th century. Nearly 3 million people lost their freedom until the British banned the last Sultan from driving people. Travellers, traders and adventurers from all over the world put their feet on Zanzibar's main islands Unguja and Pemba. Still today many of these traces are preserved: the "Shirazi" who immigrated from Persia, the Portuguese merchants, the Sultans from Oman and the colonial adventurers from Burton to Livingston. Today "Stone Town", the old town of Zanzibar, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Karibu Unguja - Welcome to Zanzibar .

Kars means snow or ice. Hardly any other place in the world corresponds as closely to its name as the region around this ancient city high in the Anatolian north on the border with Armenia. Backed by the legendary biblical mountain Ararat, the winter temperatures here often reach minus 50 degrees Celsius. Most of the inhabitants are fishermen and go to the nearby Cildir lake to catch prey. In the cold season, the people here survive only thanks to a unique method of fishing, which could be borrowed from the Eskimos in the far north of Alaska. They chop circular holes in the frozen lake, pull their nets under the ice from hole to hole and thus fetch up to 3 quintals of fish per haul from the icy waters on good days. The film gives some insights in the life of the "Eskimos of Anatolia" (the neighbouring Armenians call the North Anatolian mountain Turks). A story from an icy chamber of Anatolia.

Kerala sounds like palm trees, lagoons and lots of sun. But these are only the paradisiacal boundary conditions of India's most southwestern province. Here - and few travellers to India suspect this - lies the crib of dance theatre and martial arts, also of the western world. In the oldest fighting - better - meditation school of India, the masters of the "Kaleribaid" still cultivate today a sport, which looks like a hermaphrodite between Kung Fu, meditation, Japanese sword fighting and Persian club art. The basis is the imitation of the movements of the tiger, the snake, the monkey and other animal species. According to the master, the secret lies in the art of self-sinking. We tried it and got a pitiful smile. Years are needed, say the disciples, some a whole life to "walk the path of enlightenment". The dance art of "Kathakali" also imitates animals, less their body movements than their facial expressions. Here, too, the dancer, wearing bright make-up, attains the highest level only after years of training: perfect nothingness, no movement, no feeling, "peace prevails", laughs the master.

Rio de Janeiro is the headquarters of one of South America's largest gemstone traders: H. Stern, once a poor scoundrel who made his fortune in the Amazon. Today Stern controls a gemstone empire with 150 branches worldwide. Most of his stones come from the Amazon Basin, Brazil's raw materials chamber. The systematic exploitation of the jungle began with the rubber boom in the 19th century. Gold, oil, wood, ore and precious stones followed. Today, the world's largest forest area is facing a catastrophe. It still drives the "insane" from the hands of a Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald into the mud castles of the north and to the bottom of the Amazon. The "Campo Formosa" an emerald - claim in the state of Mato Grosso resembles a crater landscape, dotted with countless molehills. For almost 20 years, adventurers have been rummaging the earth in the hope of the "Bonanza" of their lives. The vernacular calls them "garimpeiros": former farm workers, uprooted people and gamblers, men who live like driftwood.

Cold and scurvy were often the only companions. Shootings and impenetrable wilderness did the rest. More than 30,000 knights of fortune fought their way through the wilderness of British Columbia in the middle of the 19th century. Many failed long before their destination - the fairy tale goldfields of the Cariboo Mountains in northern Canada. Even today, fortune seekers are still searching for the "Bonanza", the fabulously rich gold vein, in the mountains of British Columbia. Around the legendary gold digger towns of Barkerville, Cache Creek and Lillooet, some of the dropouts have settled down and are digging for nuggets with rusty shovel excavators in the overburden. Most, however, lose their entire fortune, return to their homelands destitute or remain in the wilderness as modern trappers. The film visits some of the gold seekers and tells the story of their hope for fast wealth in the far north of Canada.

The dragon is the oldest sign of Chinese imperial dynasties. The conquerors Yandi and Huang made the dragon their sign of power. Since then, the Chinese have been regarded as sons of the dragon, China as the land of the dragon. So what could be more natural than to start the Chinese New Year with a "festival in honour of the dragon"? The Hong Kong Chinese began the New Year celebrations already under the British flag with the legendary "dragon boat race". We mingle with the audience in Aberdeen, the old port of the metropolis of millions, search in Buddhist and Taoist temples for the coveted fortune horoscopes for the New Year and let us predict the future in the quarter of the fortune tellers. The film is an insight into a bizarre Far Eastern way of celebrating the New Year.

Disused Royal Air Force fighter jets thunder across the evening sky outside Capetown towards Table Mountains. They are Lightnings, Hunter and Buccaneer planes, names that only airforce pilots and a few flight madmen have said so far. But this community is getting bigger and bigger. For five years Mike Beachy Head, a former test pilot of the South African Air Force, has dedicated himself to this expensive and dangerous hobby and founded "Thundercity", a quite noisy company. Mike and his crew buy decommissioned fighter jets, completely refit them and offer solvent air tourists supersonic flights in the sky above the South African cape. "There are people looking for the last kick," says Mike, "people from Hollywood or rich Russians. Sometimes it's just normal people who scratch the last cent together just to have a good outbreak of sweat. Many get out and think bungee jumping is kid stuff." The film tries to get to the bottom of this - admittedly charming - madness.

"It was an old man fishing alone in a small boat in the Gulf Stream, and he had now gone out eighty-four days in a row without catching a fish - " The Cuban fishing nest Cojima once served Ernest Hemingway as the scene of his fable about the old man and the fish of his life. The old man still exists today, Capitan Gregorio Fuentes, now 103 years old and stone old. He still remembers the "wild times with Senior Hemingway, as if it had been yesterday". Much on the Caribbean island reminds of the great narrator: his room in the old town hotel "Ambos Mundos" on Havana's Calle Obispo, today a museum; the "Bodeguita Del Medio", where Hemingway is still supposed to hold the "Daiquiri" record today (a hot brew of rum, lime juice, sugar and ice), his finca "San Francisco de Paula" south of Havana and and and and - Meanwhile the Cuban tourism authorities have opened the island in front of the Gulf of Mexico for travellers and praise their picturesque national parks, but above all the legendary capital like warm rolls: "Havana - let the word melt like the aroma of a good cigar on your tongue, treat yourself to the pleasure of the dream - " The film is a ramble through these "dreams", through the picturesque idyll of the "Hemingway'schen" fishing villages and ends with four older gentlemen earning their "pocket money" on the street: Musicians who have never heard the name Wim Wenders before and can only wonder about the hype about Cuban rhythms in the West: "We've had this all day and we've had it since we can think.

They pray in the glow of fire, live according to the laws of Avesta, an ancient scripture and worship a god named Mazda. Their prophet died more than 2500 years ago and even today they claim that our entire world view is based on his teachings. Their religious founder, the ancient Persian scholar and priest Zoroaster, better known in the West as Zarathustra, will return as soon as mankind is ready for it. Most of the nearly 100,000 followers of this doctrine live in the third largest city of today's Iran, in Kerman near Tehran. For the first time since the "Islamic Revolution" of 1979, police and guardians of morals tolerated the celebrations of the Zoroastrian fires in Kerman and the Armenians in Tehran in 2000 and permitted recordings of the bizarre celebrations.