Silk Road Obsessed

There is an aura of mystery and intrigue about the Silk Road that still lingers centuries after the trade routes fell into disuse. I have long been fascinated by the lands ranging from China through Central Asia to the Middle East, and I think it must have started in my childhood, as so much does. Not only did we have a beautifully illustrated book called “Tales from the Arabian Nights”, my mother had also given us a children’s record featuring a man with a very scary voice telling those famous stories, with Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade playing at suitable intervals in the background. I can recall cowering as the voice thundered from the record player: “GIVE ME THE LAMP!” Now I think about it, why was a man telling those stories when Scheherazade was a woman? What can I say – it was the 60s.

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The combination of Islamic architecture, deserts, camels and exotic clothes proved irresistible and the soundtrack from the musical The Desert Song floating through the house added to the overall effect. “♪♫ Over the ground there comes a sound, it is the drum, drum, drum of hoof beats in the sand ♫ ♪” sang Gordon MacRae, although a less convincing Moroccan I can’t imagine. Still, it was intoxicating for a small child and if I have learned one thing (and I think it might well be just the one thing) it’s that you cannot shake off those intense feelings from your childhood. You can move to another country, reject your religion, become vegan and have therapy to deal with the whole sorry mess, but the intensity of those early feelings persists. You just have to give in. What could I do?

Naturally I had to visit Uzbekistan, where the ancient cities of Khiva and Bukhara still look as though they could easily harbour genies and flying carpets, and also to travel to Xi’an in China, the unofficial start of the many different silk roads that transported goods (and people) from east to west and back again. However, visits to anywhere more exotic than Scotland are off the cards at the moment, so instead I have registered to take part in a workshop on the Silk Roads, I’m watching lots of webinars produced by the Wild Frontiers travel company and reading books like The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk.

This book, although quite long and fairly dense, is an intriguing account of how the British and the Russians were jockeying for position in Central Asia during the 19^th century. I have completely lost track of the many daring young British officers and Russian counts who embarked on life-threatening journeys through the dangerous terrains and hostile tribes of Persia, Afghanistan and the Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand (run by wily and brutal Khans), but I have been left with the overall impression that these two arrogant superpowers felt fully entitled to pursue their imperial goals (sometimes with diplomacy, often with violence) wherever they liked. I felt myself increasingly on the side of those ruthless Khans.

I have just looked it up and it was Blaise Pascal who said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” and he was definitely on to something. This is what I tell myself when wanderlust overtakes me: stay quietly at home watching webinars, reading books and venture out only occasionally for a Silk Roads workshop.