Customer Reviews

On The Trail of Marco Polo: Along the Silk Road By Bicycle

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I applaud the author's pluck but unfortunately that is the only thing this book has going for it.

First off, cycling the route taken by the author is not nearly an achievement or a rarity as the author makes it seem and his actual time on the bike is only a few weeks. I've met people who cycled all the way from Germany to Beijing. Also the author seems to be a rather unseasoned traveller, such as packing way too much and carrying around too much cash.

The writing in this books is truely awful, so bad it makes you wonder if there was even an editor, so bad that it gives me hope that I too can publish a travel book. My respect for Canada has been dented ever so slightly by the fact that some Toronto newspaper named this book as one of its "Notable Books".

It is obvious that the author knew very little about the history/culture of the areas he was visiting when he was visiting them. It seems that after the trip he read a few books to obtain this knowledge but the historical/cultural background in this book is just a weak cut and paste job.

In the short Afghanistan section the author crosses the tenuous line between adventurous and lunatic which is what made it the most interesting section.

The only reason I am giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is because I travelled the same route (minus Afghanistan) so the book's descriptions of the various places jogged some pleasant memories for me and it was mildly interesting for me to read another person's point of view.

This was a bad book. No one should read this book, I shouldn't even have bothered finishing it. I did in part because I wanted to bitch about it and in part because it should have been a good story. Journalist travels by mountain bike from Xinjiang, China to India, detouring into Afghanistan on the way. The problem was it was like hearing some boring, arrogant, idiot tell you about a life experience you can't imagine he's cool enough to have experienced. Plus, the book is riddled with factual errors. I noticed them in the area I had some knowledge about, China, but that made me wary of the rest of the text. For example, the author falls into the trap of identifying China as a stagnant country that's history was immobile until the West intervened, at which point it put up defensive barriers. Take this line that I had to read to everyone of my housemates: "The Chinese were convinced they lived in the hippest coolest, most riteous place on dear Mother Earth." Such bad writing. He also misnames the common term for a government job an "iron rice bowl" and calls it instead "iron rice." An iron rice bowl is a bowl you can use your entire life, "iron rice" is just hard to eat. Finally he is irritated when he is kicked out of a Chinese only hotel because he believes there is no such thing and that what he is facing is merely corruption. I don't know how one could visit China and miss the fact that you can only stay in half the hotels. I'd agree the policy is funky, but it is a policy.

He writes China off as a bureaucratic hellhole after only a few weeks there and much prefers Pakistan, in part because it is very cheap. Although he talks about the country's poverty he seems not to connect his financial good fortune of traveling in a cheap country with the country's economic woes.

In the end, even without the above faults, the book was boring in comparison to the trip's promise. He spends little time on any one subject and you really don't get a sense of his travels. He mostly seems to list off events and gloat about stupid deeds he got away with like photographing Afghan women in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, photographing military compounds and riding bikes through "lawless Kohistan," despite warnings from all sides.

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?

This is the worst book about Central Asia I've ever read. There are annoying factual errors on every other page. Even the title of the book is erroneous. The author travels north from China south into India and simply cuts across the east-west routes of Marco Polo/Silk Road. This is an annoying, useless book by a clueless author.

Being an adventure mountain biker myself (Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia; See http://www.geocities.com/chris_goulet ), I could relate to Fotheringham's travels so well that I could not put this book down! All I did for two days was read this book. It is a very detailed account of his travels in 1997 along a route that is rarely attempted by travellers (as opposed to tourists): the Silk "Road" in western China, the Karakoram "Highway"in northern Pakistan, and the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. These are areas of the most massive mountain ranges on Earth, the desolate Takla Makan Desert, and peoples far from Western culture. Fotheringham recounts his experiences in the context of impressive social, political, and historical background information in this thoroughly researched book. And no wonder; after returning from an intense journey, real travellers are obsessed with researching material relating to the area where they experienced intense emotions. No details are spared, from the toilets suffering from years of neglect, to the inevitable frictions with his travelling partners. The endless descriptions of strange foods become tedious, but I'd be obsessed with food too, if I had to survive on bread for days on end while my calorific requirements would be far above my intake!

From the perspective of my experience, the author's outdoor skills, bicycle maintenance skills, and exotic country travel skills seem a little weak for the extreme demands of this journey. He lugs around and uses up nine inner tubes without succeeding to patch any of them. Granted that the "necessity is the mother of invention" effect kicks in, and he lines his inner tube with another one. He carries around but never uses iodine to purify water. Ever heard of sprinkling vitamin C powder to neutralize the taste if it's that bad? His careless or overtrusting nature results in constantly getting robbed: walkman, Canadian flag, credit card, money, and tools are stolen one by one. There's no mention of using hidden pockets.

Fotheringham's behaviour comes across as brash or reckless on several occasions: He tears down the mountain to Tashkurghan, China covering 68 km in 45 minutes--that's 91 KPH (56MPH) average speed without a helmet on a fully loaded bike! He manages to put tire tracks over a young girl in Kashgar. He repeatedly gets in trouble for photographing military installations and is quite trigger happy. But it is perhaps the authors' very tendency to get in trouble that brings him closer to the cultures with which he is so fascinated.

The eight pages of colour photos enrich this book, and many of them can be seen in higher resolution on a web site that also sells the prints.

I'd think twice about adventure biking with this fellow, but I'd recommend this book to any serious traveller or armchair explorer.

Contact me: chris_goulet at yahoo dot ca

"On the Trail of Marco Polo" recounts Brady Fotherington's 1997 bike trip along the Silk Road from China into Pakistan and India with a side trip into Afghanistan. Fotheringham also recounts some of the history of the Road and of Marco Polo's adventures.

Fotheringham gives the reader some fascinating details about the people and places he encountered on his trip. However, his writing is at times annoyingly bad, with misused words, repetitions, and paragraphs of narrative that seem to have sentences out of place. A good editor could have improved this book.

Fotheringham at times seems like the Ugly American, Canadian bicylist version. He says that, above all, the people he met made his trip memorable. At times he describes these people with sensitivity and at other times with condescension. He careens around recklessly, once running over a child. He does things he knows are prohibited,like taking pictures of military personnel and installations, and then is annoyed when trouble follows. He often seems surprised at the natural results of his own actions, displaying a sense of privilege and entitilement.

I'd recommend the book if you're planning to travel this route and want information about it. Also, the chapter on Afghanistan provided rare descriptions of that time and place. All in all, though, if you like to read about bicycle adventure travel, I recommend Dervla Murphy.

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.

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