Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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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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Guilty Pleasures: Trailers from Hell

One of my guilty pleasures (and not so guilty, aftert all) is Trailers from Hell!, a video-blog of sorts in which famous genre directors, screenwriters and producers present the trailers of their favorite movies, providing an off-beat commentary in voiceover.

TRAILERS-FROM-HELL1

The brainchild of director Joe Dante, and with regular contributions by the likes of John Landis, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Guillermo Del Toro and many other personal idols of mine, this is one of the best programs about movies on the internet, and it is highly recommended. It’s one of the most refreshing, funny and intelligent ways to spend five minutes watching a video on Youtube. 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 →


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On a lorry out of Xi’an

The people are idolaters and subject to the Great Khan and use paper money. They live by trade and industry. They have plenty of silk and make cloth of gold and silk of many varieties. There are merchants here of wealth and consequence. There is no lack of game, both beast and bird, and abundance of grain and foodstuffs. There are two churches here of Nestorian Christians.
(Marco Polo)

Sian is a big city
(Peter Fleming)

xian walls

Continue reading →