Product Description

In 1997, Brady Fotheringham set out to retrace part of this historic trail on a mountain bike. Three months, 3000 miles, and numerous arrests later, he arrived in New Delhi with a multitude of unforgettable experiences that travel readers and biking enthusiasts will delight in sharing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #874571 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 273 pages

Customer Reviews

Let's get real
This review I found on the web gets it about right:

Once it seemed that every arts graduate believed him- or herself pregnant with a great novel, only the need to make a living preventing it from coming to term. Most never found time to discover just how difficult even the first paragraph would be, luckily allowing them to keep intact their image of themselves as Hemingways manqu¨¦.

Then, extended trips around Asia were still alternative. Now it¡¯s those who haven¡¯t pogoed across the Gobi who are the unconventional ones, and the travelogue has replaced the novel as the daydream magnum opus-that-might-have-been. The banana pancake paradises of Asia are full of the footsore catching up with their diaries. Brady Fotheringham¡¯s On the Trail of Marco Polo seems to be one of these.

The title, at once populist and meaningless, sets the tone for the whole book. Polo has been dead since 1324 which makes him a little hard to pursue, and Fotheringham doesn¡¯t follow any route usually attributed to the merchant, although he travels by air, bus, and bicycle from Beijing to Islamabad, and briefly into Afghanistan.

The cover ill-prepares you for the contents. Fotheringham was ¡°determined to cycle the desolate Chinese desert¡±, but not determined enough, apparently¡ªhe skirted most of it by bus. He ¡°cycled over the world¡¯s highest pass.¡± The Khunjerab is in fact merely the world¡¯s highest paved-road border crossing.

But getting through the book is itself a dangerous journey, as it swerves from clich¨¦ (¡°The journey is the destination¡±) to tautology (¡°who navel-gaze at themselves¡±), and from freewheeling grammar (The Romans ¡°wondered where this ¡®wool of the forests¡¯ was arriving¡±) to the completely incomprehensible (The Silk Road¡¯s ¡°brutal history is an indelible stamp on the annals of Central Asia¡±). Much of the historical material is inaccurate filler between thin narrative, and even simple place names are misspelled.

Fotheringham knows no Mandarin, and can narrate little but his own bewilderment in China, even failing to record accurately what he sees, placing the Great Hall of the People inside the Forbidden City (built centuries earlier), and failing to notice that the common ¡°dog-lion¡± of his photo-caption is a completely different and rarer beast, the Chinese unicorn. He makes unwise detours into other foreign languages, getting both the German name of the Silk Road and the Kyrgyz word for their white hats wrong.

He plans to survive by using his ¡°street smarts¡±, but apparently has none. On arrival he is immediately cheated by a taxi driver, and then loses his credit card. He grossly overloads his bike but takes inadequate provisions, photographs border installations and has his film forcibly exposed, and suffers a series of thefts through his own carelessness. He spends anxious hours detained in police stations. Regrettably, they let him go.

In amongst sanctimonious pro-traveller, anti-tourist bleating (from a man who makes straight for McDonald¡¯s and the Hard Rock Caf¨¦, and plays rock music through handlebar-mounted speakers) there are enough howlers to confirm Fotheringham as the William McGonagall of travel writing.

The Chinese were ¡°no different from us than we were from them.¡± ¡°Canada is big, but you never get close enough to see it except from an airplane.¡± ¡°If you¡¯ve never seen a camel in person, you¡¯ll never forget one.¡± ¡°It would be about as inconceivable for Tibet and Xinjiang to secede...as it would be for Liechtenstein to successfully invade Europe.¡±

The book does raise one interesting question, however. How on earth did it get into print?

Fascinating Account of a Wildly Adventurous Bike Ride
Having always had a fascination with the Silk Road, this book immediatly caught my eye while wandering the bookshelves.

It was very much a travelogue in it's style - and was written very well. A clear chronological narrative combined with history and a snapshot of all that he was seeing and feeling. I could imagine myself sitting on the bike encountering one adventure after another.

He definately has high standards as to who constitutes a real traveller! He had a very condescending attitude towards the 'tourists' that were experiencing this harshly beautiful region via the luxury of air-conditioned buses.

Others may think he's absolutely mad for embarking on this adventure... He's lucky that he came back in one piece from this trip- especially through Afghanistan. Fate obviously on his side.

Highly recommend this to anyone desiring an introduction to the modern day Silk route.

Interesting look at the Silk Road
Anyone interested in a good travel essay and a firsthand look at the geography and culture of the silk road will enjoy this book. Brady writes of interesting people, governments, and cultures as he rides his mountain bike in the footsteps of Marco Polo and other Silk Road traders.

The book is a fast read, and as a teacher I enjoyed his descriptive passages about the specific geography of the Silk Road.

Though the main focus of the book seems to be the Chinese portions of the Silk Road, readers will find his descriptions of the Taliban in Afganistan back in around 1998 quite chilling. I hope he will write a new afterward about his experience with the Taliban an Afganistan after 9-11. He was there just as they were taking power.

This is a good little adventure book with a good mix of history, politics, and geography.

If you liked books like Iron and Silk you will like this book.

I look forward to reading about his next bike trip.

Also you can e-mail the author about the book which I think is a great thing to do. I really enjoy when authors make it easy to contact them and discuss their books