TravelArk 2.0

The Silk Road - London to Beijing Overland, 2006

There are certain great and classic journeys in the world that qualify as "once in a lifetime" experiences, even for a person who has a full life of travel experiences. One of the most exotic is the fabled Silk Road, the trip from Europe to China through the vast expanse of Central Asia along trading routes that flourished over 1,000 years ago, a trip through a multitude of cultures, barren deserts, towering mountain ranges, endless steppes, and cities of the imagination like Chang'an (Xian), Khiva, Bukhara, Kashgar, and Samarkand. When I was younger I recall seeing TV documentaries and later purchasing coffee table types books on the Silk Road. I believe tracing Marco Polo's voyage was one in a weekly series of documentaries tracing the great voyages of exploration that so fascinated me. But that was when most of the Silk Road was "behind the Iron Curtain" in closed China and the Soviet Union. I never dreamed those were places I'd ever get to see. I believe it was only in the early 2000s after a decade of decline and chaos in the countries of formerly Soviet Central Asia that I started to hear about trips to places like Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and western China. And then when I was on a Dragoman overland truck tour in Patagonia in southern South America in early 2003 I saw the company advertising a new "Silk Road" route across Central Asia. I have to do that next!" I thought. After that I applied for jobs as a trip leader with adventure travel companies and worked in Egypt and Jordan for most of 2004 for a British company named Imaginative Traveler but found the work not to be all I had hoped for. Over 2005 I did some shorter trips between doing some part-time teaching gigs and started planning for the Silk Road with Dragoman in 2006. The Silk Road, of course, was not a single road but a series of trading routes through Central Asia that connected East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. So there's no specific route for modern day Silk Road tours, but Dragoman's itinerary takes in most of the highlights typically included on such tours with a route through Turkey, the Caucasus, three of the Central Asian -stans, and a traverse of China from the westernmost city of Kashgar all the way to Beijing, a monumental voyage of nearly four months. I decided to tack on the quick transit across Europe to Istanbul the company offered, so my trip began in England - London to Beijing in approximately 110 days. Wow! This Silk Road trip was my first attempt at blogging about my travels. I started on a different blog site that folded about a year later. Although I didn't lose anything I wrote, I decided to rewrite the blog more in the style of the others I've been writing over the years. Thus, this blog involves a mix of what I wrote originally with much more detail from my notes (and far more uploaded pictures) than wasn't possible to complete at Internet cafes along the route as I was traveling. I still consider the Silk Road trip to be one of my all-time best travel experiences so it is with great delight and wonderful recollections that I'm reblogging it.
Planned Dates
Mar 16, 2006 to Jul 08, 2006
Countries
11
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