Can you really call someplace “off the beaten path” when it spent over a thousand years being used as the ultimate beaten path?
The Silk Road evokes a certain mystique even in its name. Not really a road at all, but a series of trade routes used for centuries, the Silk Road was used by merchants, traders, envoys and travellers of all sorts for well over a thousand years. Explorers like Marco Polo documented their adventures to distant and foreign lands. Names like Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Kashgar and Xi’an capture our imagination, but it’s hard to imagine them as modern-day places on a globe, let alone as places it’s possible to actually visit.
Well, they are real, and if you’re adventurous enough, you can visit them. Which is precisely what I intend to do.
Yeah, I hear you asking already: You’re going where?
Because, ancient beaten path or not, today in 2015, most of the Silk Road routes are quite firmly off the usual travel grid.
My most ambitious trip yet?
There isn’t just one Silk Road, of course. There are lots of different routes, spanning across pretty much all of Asia. And of course, I don’t have unlimited time or budget. But the section I’ve opted to travel is pretty ambitious.
My travel plans will take me from Beijing, China, via northwestern China, into Kyrgyzstan and ending in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the span of a few weeks, I’ll be crossing over 5,000 kilometers, and more than half of Asia.
I’ll be travelling through hot desert climates in the stifling heat of summer, which is no joke for this cold-weather-adapted Canadian. I’ll be travelling through high mountain passes, spending nights on Chinese overnight trains, and sleeping in yurts.
I’ll be dealing with some pretty messed-up bureaucracy, not to mention serious language barriers. This trip has already involved more planning and paperwork than my last four or five trips put together. Visa applications, letters of invitation, you name it. What’s more, Central Asia is notoriously vegetarian-unfriendly, I won’t be able to drink the water anywhere, and I’m sure I will encounter some truly frightening toilets along the way.
A day at the beach, this ain’t.
Now, it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. For one thing, I’ve booked a tour. Yes, another tour. At this rate, I’m really gonna have to stop thinking of myself as ‘not a tour person’. But given the incredibly complex logistics involved here, it just made sense.
For another, tourism has been growing in Central Asia lately. This may not be Paris or Florida, but it’s not exactly outer space either. One of the fun parts about researching a trip like this one is that even the outlandish ideas often end up being very doable. This started off as a pipe dream, sure. But now that I have my plane tickets, tour bookings, and my visa paperwork underway, it’s starting to seem very real.
It’s about the journey
So, why am I doing this?
Well, there are no shortage of sights and attractions on this trip. From the Great Wall of China to the Terracotta Warriors to the marketplaces of Kashgar to Samarkand’s Registan, there are enough tourist attractions to satisfy any tourist. There are fascinating local cultures to discover, sights and sounds and tastes, countries of strategic importance that are oft-ignored by the west, and places of stunning scenic beauty. I’m really excited about so many of the sights and stops on the itinerary just on their own merits.
But for me, this trip isn’t really about being a tourist. It’s about being a traveller. I happen to think that it’s incredibly cool that this journey is possible again. It hasn’t been for much of our recent history. But today, these incredibly fascinating places with thousands of years of history are once again open for business. Sure, it may require some hoop-jumping to get there, but it’s possible. And by setting out on these roads that have seen so much history, in a small way, I get to be a part of it.
See, maybe the Silk Road is just returning to its natural state as the original beaten path: A series of roads connecting cultures and civilizations to one another. Today, we may travel via planes, trains and automobiles instead of by horse or camel caravans. But I guess what this is really about is the romance and pull of the epic journey.
Maybe that’s what it’s always been about for the travellers across the ages; the slightly crazy people from every era who knew and understood wanderlust. The ones who weren’t happy to just stay home among the comforts of the familiar, but who instead left home and family behind to explore the unknown in the spirit of discovery.
I like to imagine a series of ancient backpackers, setting out to trade goods and in the process, discovering one another’s cultures, indulging in the local food and drink, and maybe playing a few rounds of cards while swapping travel stories that began with those age-old traveller’s conversation starters: “Where are you from? Where are you going? Where have you been?”
After all, we’re not so different, them and I.