Our itinerary
On this trip,we have taken up the ambitious—some might say crazy—goal of following the silk road from the Middle East to China. We will be traveling mostly overland—by train, bus, boat, truck, or whatever comes along—but we are not twenty anymore and might get tired and fly some of the more arduous legs of the trip.
We initially considered following the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing, until we discovered that it was possible to take the the southern, "silk road" railway. (I had heard rumours of this route through former-soviet Central Asia in 1993, but at the time the amount of red tape made it impractical for westerners.) But we soon found out that, apart from Samarkand, which can be visited as a spur off the main line, the railway doesn't actually pass through any of the major silk road cities, despite its name. But we dug further. In the end, it was Paul Wilson's excellent guidebook, "The Silk Roads: A Route and Planning Guide" that really clinched it for us: the prospect of traveling the entire silk route from the Middle East to China seemed plausible. It suddenly made sense: Chris had long been intrigued by the Middle East, and my fascination with Central Asia began in the early 90s with the film "Close to Eden", shot in Mongolia. To top it off, I'd spent three years studying Mandarin and never managed to get to China (apart from a business trip to Shanghai).
One could follow many different routes and be considered to be traveling "the silk road." At various times over the few thousand years of its history, different routes came into or fell out of favour, as cities vied for trade and as regions descended into conflict or came under the control of tribes that raided the caravans. The more southerly routes ran through modern-day Pakistan to India (from which goods were shipped to the Middle East) or through Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq to Syria, Turkey and, eventually, Europe.
Our route avoids the most obvious conflicts of today. After brief stops in Rome (the Westernmost source of demand for silk), Venice (Marco Polo's home town), and Portugal, we begin in Egypt, not technically part of the silk road, but certainly connected to Rome and the Middle East. From there, we will head north through Jordan and Syria, which together, as ancient Syria, formed an important terminus of the silk road. We then skirt around Iraq and Iran, traveling a more obscure portion of the silk road through Eastern Turkey and the Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan). From there we'll sail or fly across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, from where the Central Asian portion of the journey begins. This leads us through Uzbekistan and the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and the mountains of Kyrgyzstan (and possibly Tajikistan). From Kyrgyzstan, we intend to cross the mountains into Xinjiang province in China. Here the silk road divides into northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan desert, and our ability to plan breaks down. Our goal is to continue on one branch or the other of the silk road as far as Xian, which can be considered the Eastern terminus of the silk road. From there, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces could be on the agenda before we head for Taiwan to visit old friends. The winter is open, but we're thinking of Southeast Asia.
We will periodically update this map, tracing our route as it materializes.