What a lousy week for reading! I’ve been behind nearly every day, and some of those days I haven’t even hit 50 pages. Progress is progress, though.
In Xanadu has given me the travel bug, although you might say that I always have the travel bug and reading about backpacking just reignites my fervor. I don’t know much about the places along the Silk Road; it’s a part of the world I’ve never been to, save for a few bits in China, but I love all the travel-related stuff. Fun facts about finding places to sleep, getting on buses and trains, meeting exciting people while being exhausted and stinking. There’s something magical about it.
There are a lot of people — my dad included — who think of travel as something relaxing, something comfortable and easy and filled with tour packages and guides and car rentals and complimentary blankets. (“Martinis on the poop deck!”) It’s one way of looking at travel, certainly, and not an invalid one, but it’s never been the way I approach it. I think travel should be decidedly uncomfortable. It needn’t be a life-or-death struggle, cutting deals with smugglers to sneak you through Laos, but if you’re traveling first class all the time, then you’re not seeing the good parts of where you’re going.
The few times that I’ve been backpacking (mostly in southeast Asia), I’ve tried to do it on a shoestring budget, staying in hostels, getting rides on sketchy buses with little Asian guys who crawl into the luggage compartment to look through backpacks for iPhones, going to places that not-so-many people go to where the food will probably give you diarrhea and the water is brown. All of this hinged upon the belief that “the road less traveled” is somehow better; that it’s possible for someone to grow as a person by experiencing new cultures, and that you can only experience a new culture when you (in some form or another) leave your own culture behind.
In other words, go where the locals go, eat where they eat, do the things they’re doing.
In Xanadu is definitely in that wheelhouse. In 1986, William Dalrymple made an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Marco Polo, even though it technically wasn’t possible and possibly wasn’t technical. (That makes sense, right? No? Ah, hell with it.) He was going through parts of the world that you can only really get to when you’re riding on the back of a coal truck, and he was doing it while it was illegal to do so.
I feel like, similar to taking the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Silk Road is one of those backpacker holy grails. Everybody dreams of it, even if it’s one of the most difficult trips you could take on planet Earth. (Even if I had the money or the time, I’m not sure I’d be able to hack it at my age.)
But it’s fun to read about, and Dalrymple’s writing style is tremendous.
I’ll be a little sad when I finish this one.