Customer Reviews

Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road (Traveler)

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People who have read Mark Salzman's "Iron and Silk"will find this book interesting because its author travelled withSalzman on another journey through China. The author's honesty about the horrors of travel through China in mid-1989 is refreshing. Stevens somehow manages to avoid the mindless chipper attitude seen too frequently in travelogues without falling into Paul Theroux style cynicism. Although I enjoyed this light read, I nevertheless finished the book feeling that I had gained little in the way of new insights. Stevens doesn't seem to like China much or to come to any conclusions other than that the Cultural Revolution was bad (hardly a revelation) as are Chinese architecture and manners. Eight years later, this book has the feel of a period piece -- China's capitalist revolution is far more advanced now.

Stevens provides a humorous recounting of a romp through Western China attempting to follow the trail of 1936 travelers Fleming an Maillart along the ancient Silk Road. Night Train to Turkistan is entertaining for its quirky characters including infuriating bureaucrats, reluctant Chinese interpretor (Mark Salzman, author of Lying Awake and Iron and Silk), a six foot female athlete who draws a crowd of suitors and gawkers everywhere she goes, and proprietors of various roadside establishments.

The four travelers are just outrageous and creative enough to actually make their way from Beijing to Kashgar and back, despite a multitude of bureaucrats that seems hellbent on prohibiting them from doing just that. The book starts out with the quartet delivering skis to a national ski team in a country with no ski areas, in the hopes of obtaining a vaguely official-looking reference letter that might unlock some door somewhere. It goes on from there.

This was a fairly quick read, and, as other reviewers have noted, it's not heavy on anthropological or historical insights. But I don't think the intent of the book was to provide these insights. This is a case where getting there is all the fun. The book is all about the journey, and those who have attempted to journey through bureaucratic developing nations are likely to recognize the types of frustrations and seemingly inexplicable events and policies recounted here. The book is all about crammed unheated buses and trains and low-flying planes and various other conveyances. It's about imperfectly built Russian hotels and incomprehensible bus stations and greasy roadside noodle stands and scheduled group pit stops and increasingly implausible explanations from government workers, desk clerks, and pencil pushers. This all sounds like an incredible bore, but Stevens' entertaining descriptions take you there and hold your attention to the end. If you are looking for an anthropological or historical treatise on Western China, you will be happier looking elsewhere. But as a humorous recounting of a journey through Western China, this one fills the bill. It is primarily from the perspective of a traveler, and the insights are limited, but the observations of a traveler are well worth the price of the book.

As an aside, several of the other reviewers suggest that this book was set in 1989 or around the time of the protests in Tiananmen Square. In fact the book was published in 1988, and the journey occurred in 1986, both prior to the protests in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. It is unfair to suggest that the author was minimizing the events of that spring, as they had not yet occurred.

I really enjoyed this book. The author's basic premise is interesting. The four unlikely companions who depart on the journey are outrageous and funny. Especially the description of the Uighur "minorities" was touching. A little more history would have been welcome... But, very readable, enjoyable and funny. Definitely recommended.

A travel memoir from an abrasive guy who convinces three friends to go with him to China in the mid-1980s to re-trace the fabled Silk Road route across the high Chinese desert to India. The friends are David, a fitness nut who looks like a special forces recruit; Mark Saltzman, the acclaimed author of his own memoir of China, Iron And Silk, who is along to translate for them; and Fran, a six-foot tall athlete whose statuesque looks ensure that she is mobbed by amazed, admiring crowds wherever they go.

The Han Chinese especially, and China in general, come off in a very negative light: a backward country filled with lying, slothful officials who despise Westerners. This is no Iron And Silk though I did shoot through it briskly due to its clean-cut writing and unrelenting tension (as they struggle with the nightmarish Chinese bureaucracy that blocks their every step).

There's all sorts of tension in the memoir: building within David, who most cannot stand the pitfalls of bureaucracy; and rising between aggressive Stuart who likes to ask former members of the Red Guard how many grandmothers they slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution, and gentle Mark who seeks a way to translate while saving everyone's face. Stuart comes off as a jerk. The memoir is centered so firmly on him that the others barely come across. I think Fran or Mark would have had way more interesting viewpoints than Stuart does.

Throughout his journey, he enjoys asking probing questions of almost every faltering-English-speaking Chinese he meets: questions that put them on the spot in regards to China's troubled past and current government (neither of which is these individuals' faults). That's fine and well when he's attempting to make some smug Communist party official uncomfortable, but not when he's badgering ordinary little people who are afraid to comment or who are stuck living under bad circumstances and don't need their faces rubbed in it by some arrogant tourist. On the other hand, Stuart's travel difficulties had several laugh-out-loud funny moments, and their airline trip near the end of their journey has to be read to be believed.

Travellers come in many flavors, just like ice cream. Some try to "get in" with the natives of the places they go in order to learn more about foreign ways and perceptions. Others prefer to challenge themselves with tests of strength and endurance, paddling up jungle rivers or scaling giant peaks. There are innumerable variations. However, there is one type of traveller whose tales tire me very quickly. That is the type who likes to regale their readers (or listeners) with the total awfulness of everything, to impress (?) people with what they had to put up with, and to tell how ___________ the people were. (choose from among....greedy, stupid, venal, tricky, persistent, dirty, lying, impossible) Occasionally they meet one or two different individuals who only prove the point about the rest.

Stuart Stevens did not know anything about China. His attitude seems to hover most of the time around the level of "frat boy goes China". He managed to recruit two other babes in the woods, plus Mark Salzman, who did know Chinese, had spent a couple years in China already and had written a decent book about it. It would be interesting to hear Mark's opinion of this trip. That travelling rough in Third World countries tends to be difficult is hardly news. Of course, it all might not have been nearly as bad as Stevens says because he is so securely fastened into the "vomit, spit, and urine everywhere" school of travel writing. Stevens had the idea to contact a famous solo traveller from the 1930s, Ella Maillart, a Swiss lady, who had journeyed with a British man along the southern edge of the Takla Makan desert in Xinjiang province (once known as Chinese Turkestan). He tries to retrace their steps, but fails totally and completely. He is forced by Chinese bureaucracy to take the usual tourist route around the north of the desert, winding up in Kashgar, almost to Pakistan. This is an interesting part of the world, and when Stevens can get away from his lightweight moaning about the primitive conditions, the cold (who told him to go in December ?), the bad food, and duplicitous, intransigent Chinese, he writes a nice description. In fact, I would say that this is a well-written travel book with nice flashes of humor, but focussed mostly on the negative. The author takes a leaf from Carlos Castaneda in his "Conversations with Don Juan". He just repeatedly fails to get the message. If he had only decided early on that Chinese hate to tell others "NO" directly, but prefer to give some excuse which may sound lame to Westerners, but which indirectly tells the recipient that "what you are asking is not possible", we could have been spared all the incredulous, open-mouthed astonishment at the Chinese bureaucrats' "lying ways". What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm sure this is all part of a non-organized trip to Turkestan, but it is not the major part, nor is it a very interesting part. If you are into the Yuck School of Travel Writing, this work is just up your alley. If you would like some sort of perspective on Xinjiang, its people, history and problems, give this book a miss.

Stevens and three friends (including author Mark Salzman) follow the route of Fleming and Maillart, a 1930s adventure couple from Beijing to Kashgar, the capital of Chinese Turkistan. This is a fun little book, at times truly hilarious, as Stevens blithely recounts the squalid horrors of traveling in a Third World country, or is challenged again and again by mendacious, obstinate bureaucracy who will say anything to prevent them from traveling. But there's not much history or anthropology to speak of, other than a few comments about the Tibetans or Uighurs, or passages from Fleming's book. Nor does Stevens come to any novel or shrewd insights about China, other than the Cultural Revolution must have sucked, although no one will talk to him about it, and its bureaucracy is like an army in its cold homogeneity. It even dismisses the Tienanmen Square riots at the end! A lightweight, amusing travel piece; it could have bean more meaningful, such as Salzman's books or Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy.

Fewer travel subjects come complete with greater promise
of adventure, intrigue, local color and mystery than the
Great Silk Route, extending from China to Turkey. Ideally, a contemporary travel book should offer a wealth of description combined with a profound historical knowledge which is communicated in an entertaining fasion; e.g., Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts or The Ends of the Earth, or several of the Paul Theroux books. Unfortunately, Stevens focuses almost exclusively on the discomforts of public transit in a developing country. Although the book is entertaining, humorous at times, even grisly in its unwashed detail of life on board dirty buses and trains, it seems the author could be talking about travel anywhere in the third world. Stevens' vision doesn't extend far enough beyond the bus or train window, past the ugliness of contemporary Chinese politics and architecture. The book left me convinced, rightly or wrongly, that there is little or nothing left of the original mystique of the Great Silk Road.

This book was nothing more than an incessant rant about Chinese bureaucracy and Chinese people. I'd strongly advise you to give it a miss, because in a little over 50 pages, it will start getting on your nerves. It is very hard for me to believe that someone could travel this long, yet not find one good word to say about the people or the place. The gist of the book is the paragraph where he compared China to an army-every thing else is essentially elaborating this theme.

If you want to know how one can be funny without being offensive, read Douglas Adams's account of his visit to China in "Last Chance to See".

Especially if you are *not* travelling in a metal tube at thirty thousand feet, rebreathing used air and eating microwaved pap. If you travel by the same means as the local people, you will not only meet normal people, you will experience actual life. Remember the anecdote "Solipsism? I refute it thus!" (kicking a stone). In a bus bouncing along a chinese road you will have reality pressed upon you for hours, and you'll notice and remember. Train travel is far more comfortable but not always possible. I had read the book, and arrived at Golmud remembering what he said about the pit toilet (confirmed at a similar site, though no dead rats seen), and the Golmud hotel (hot water available and friendly staff for me) as was the confusion when trying to extract clear statements. His descriptions are accurate, and although seeming a little intemperate from the armchair viewpoint, they are the common currency of those who have actually struggled with the reality of being there. Yet the area is worth the journey, fascinating to anyone hopelessly romantic enough to go there. Those who have to live at Golmud have other views, very understandable ones.

A quick and entertaining read, this book is woth buying. The descriptions of the transportation woes do drag on a bit, as another reviewer noted, but not so much that I wanted to put the book down. This work certainly leaves you with no illusions about what it's like to travel in the remote parts of China. Witty and poignant in places.