An entertaining account of 1.5 pairs of sarcastic British college students retracing Marco Polo's route from Jerusalem to the ruins of Xanadu. It is definitely a story of the type, intrepid white people explore the primitive ways of the rest of mankind, and they do fairly frequently seem to be idiots themselves, but I enjoyed all of it. ( )

The author recreated Marco Polo‘s trek from the Vatican to Xanadu. His own trek through tyrannical Iran and communist China was likely as perilous as Polo‘s. It‘s an interesting travelogue but not as well written as Bernard Ollivier‘s books about walking the Silk Road. The narrator spoke so softly & fast I had to slow the audiobook down & hike the volume. There also were odd musical interludes that just didn‘t work. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2851047.html

I must have been in the same room as the author on occasion when we were Cambridge students in intersecting circles, but don't recall ever meeting him. Since then I've read three of his other books (two hits and a miss) so it was interesting to return to my first encounter with him twenty-five years ago.

We've both grown up a bit since then. Like all travel writers, the 22-year-old Dalrymple was trying to be Patrick Leigh Fermor (who chose this as his book of the year) - it was a brilliant adventure to recreate Marco Polo's journey from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan's Xanadu, with two different girls for each half of the route (the memorable Laura went on to become a top business executive). I think the mature writer must surely groan now at some of his own arrogance and naivety combined, but it's right to let the original record sit.

The first half of the journey was much more fun than the second, and included places that were much safer thirty years ago than they are now - Syria (to put it mildly), south-eastern Turkey, western Pakistan. On the other hand, I would not be surprised to learn that China is now much easier for the casual foreign traveller than it was in the mid-1980s.

Anyway, I enjoyed my return visit to this book, and it certainly stirs one's own eagerness to travel. ( )

Overall I enjoyed this book, especially the context he brings to each stop on his journey from ancient texts that I will never get around to reading. The journey itself is quite an accomplishment in logistics and determination in the face of bureaucracy and in the case of Iran, potential imprisonment. There was a little too much focus on the discomforts and bureaucracy at times which felt repetitive after the 10th stop on the journey. Some of it is hilarious but I preferred his descriptions of the places and their histories. Especially with the war in Syria, the chapters on Aleppo and Armenia were wonderful to read and gain more context for the history of those places. ( )

Probably one of his funniest works. Surprisingly his subsequent works do not follow in the same vein and are somewhat subdued. In any case, a highly recommended read, tracing the author's quest to follow in Marco Polo's footsteps from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty that encompassed the whole of northern china