This is the ship that brought our shopping bags from China (where they were made) to the UK (where we are located, and from where we send them to you!) in 2011.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia. Click for original source.

As part of our mission series on Mission:Explore (where you can earn a ‘champion shopper’ badge), we’re asking people to check where it is on this ship tracking website.

The idea is that ‘shoppers’ do this over a period of weeks or months and send us the location (if you want to do this now, just paste its latitude and longitude into a comment on this post). We then pin – with a followthethings.com ladybird – each spotting on the map below and add your name as the spotter. Ian has started this off with a ladybird that shows the ship leaving the southern end of the Suez Canal.

Together, we can map it’s travels. What route does it use to get from here to there and back? Please check back…

Update:

You will notice that we have added an extra icon to the map: a ghostly sunken ladybird. These mark the locations of some container ships that have caught fire or sunk during the course of this followthethings.com project. Click these icons, see the wrecks and find out more about the dangers of container shipping.