Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Karavansara Challenge 2016


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Tsamba

Stuck in Sinin while the authorities evaluate the opportunity of letting two Europeans go forth west into the wilderness, Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart try to have some kind of social life, visit Kumbum and have their first meeting with tsamba – a travel companion with which they will become well acquainted.At first mistaken for ash, tsamba (or tsampa) is one of the staples of Tibetan and Nepalese cooking, and it is worth a little space here.

TsampaInABowl

At first mistaken for ash, tsamba (or tsampa) is one of the staples of Tibetan and Nepalese cooking, and it is worth a little space here. Continue reading →


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A blog to follow

While I try to recover from a week of extremey bad weather, ill health and computer problems, I suggest you guys point your browsers to our friend Carlos’ new blog Toils and Trouble in Xinjiang Province, which is following our same path together with Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming.

Selezione_001

And again – he is seeking travel companions for a real trip in the Taklamakan.
Think about it.


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Odd man out

A short report today.
We are currently snowed in here where I live, and we are suffering from network and power grid failures1.
Which has caused the planned post to be lost during an aborted blog update.

The idea was to devote some attention to the third bok of the challenge, Stuart Stevens’ Night Train to Turkistan.
Which I am finding it terribly uninspiring.
I’ll try and summarize my views in the following post, planning to do a more in-depth overview in the next few days. Continue reading →


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Shipwrecked in Lanzhou

Lanzhou (Lanchow in News from Tartary) is the provincial capital of Gansu and the place from which Fleming and Maillart expect to take to the road for the adventure proper to start.

lanzhou

Sitting at a crossroads between Tibet, Mongolia and Sichuan, Lanzhou has been a stop along the Silk Road for centuries, also thanks to the local micro-climate caused by the local geomorphology. Lanzhou was founded in a narrow valley, between low hills, and close to the Yellow River, making the weather particularly mild. This contributes to the flourishing fruit and vegetable production and market.
And it was in a very important strategic position – controlling not only the trade routes but also a railway node and the crossing of the Yellow River.
In 1920, the city was taken by Feng Yuxiang, a Christian warlord. Continue reading →


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A collector’s moment of happiness

high tartaryMaybe because it’s not raining (yet) the postman delivered this morning a pristine (but used nonetheless) copy of Owen Lattimore’s High Tartary, in the gorgeous Kodansha International/Kodansha Globe Edition from 1994. No water damage, no other visible problems.

And I am as happy as a kid on Christmas Morning.
First, because I love Owen Lattimore’s work, and he is one of the most observant of the travelers and explorers in China and Central Asia from the last century. And getting his books in my country is not exactly easy1. Continue reading →


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Stepan & Nina Smigunov

The Smigunovs, or Smigs as Ella Maillart called them, traveled with Fleming and Maillart from Peking to Lanzhou, where they were stopped by the Chinese authorities, and turned back – thus disappearing from our story.
We do not have a photograph of them, and biographical informations are sketchy at best.

erik norinStepan Ivanovich Smigunov was a former commanding officer of a Russian poison gas squad during the Great War, and had come to the Chinese-Mongolian border with a group of other disbanded Russian soldiers fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. Together with his wife Nina – apparently, the brains of the outfit – he started running a business in Tsaidan.
Both Stepan and Nina spoke Mongolian, Turkish and Chinese, and knew the area inside out.
They were therefore hired by geologist Erik Norin, a member of the Sven Hedin expedition that had been stopped by General Ma Zhongying (we’ll talk about him, one of these nights).
Norin was set on getting out of the Xinjian area, and together with the Smigunovs they traveled south, to India but, the road been blocked, they turned east, and finally ended in Tientsin. Continue reading →


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Little Mysteries

Peter Fleming Ella Maillart AsiaWe have been on the road for less than a week and already we have met some interesting mysteries.

The little Cantonese man in spats is the most obvious.
While both Maillart and Fleming worry that he might be a spy, the British is quick in dismissing him as a poser. With the change of lorry, he will be soon forgotten.

But two other interesting bits come from Fleming – bringing up two facts about Maillart that she does not include in her memoir. Continue reading →