During lunch-break, my friend Emanuele came visiting – we are planning a vegetable garden, and we surveyed the area and made a few plans, throwing around a few ideas.
Then my brother made coffee, and Emanuele explored the shelves of my library, and he asked a question…
Why are you so fascinated by the Silk Road?
And the answer was, of course,
Because it’s cool!
And really, I stand by this definition. But let me expand a little.
Continue reading
Two nights ago I read in a single sitting a book that’s been on my to-read list for over 20 years, and that for various reasons I always left behind when going to the bookstore. It is called Il Cammello Battriano (The Bactrian Camel), and was written by Italian journalist Stefano Malatesta.
It is the chronicle of a fascination for the Silk Road, and of a trip along the road in the company of old books by and about explorers and adventurers and what not. I guess you can see why I liked it.
It is a very thin book (160 pages) which explains why it became a bestseller – and by this I do not mean to shortcharge mister Malatesta, who is a fine writer that spins an excellent yarn, but for a fact the Italian Top Ten book list used to host books under the 200-pages (names like Baricco or Tamaro come to mind).
Continue readingHere at Karavansara we love camels, and we are surprised of the fact that they are sometimes considered indolent animals.
A camel can run at 70 km/h on the desert floor.
And here is a beautiful photo, from the IPA Awards 2018.
I started playing Go because of a novel1.
I read Trevanian’s Shibumi when I was in high school, and I liked it a lot. I knew the man that had translated the novel, and we both were chess players (he was quite good, I sucked pretty bad).
I played a lot of chess in high school – I used to carry a small magnetic chessboard in my bag, and we’d play games during break with some of my schoolmates. We played fast, and it was good training, but I still sucked.
After reading Shibumi (that is an excellent spy story novel) I started looking for a handbook for the game of Go, but in those pre-internet days the going was tough.
The friendly gaming store where I used to buy my roleplaying games had Go boards for sale, at a crazy price, and no handbooks. Continue reading
Last night, I dug out the only Owen Lattimore book I own – 1928 The Desert Road to Turkestan.
Of all the adventurers on the Silk Road I discovered during my researches, Lattimore is probably the one I have more dear.
Maybe it’s because he was subject to much injustice, or because he was a keen observer and a charming storyteller.
Owen Lattimore was born in the USA in 1900. He was raised in China and educated in Switzerland and England. Unable to afford a university education, he got back in China, studied Chinese and was employed by a British commercial firm as jack of all trades and troubleshooter.
A load of wool blocked somewhere in the wild at the whim of a warlord? Send in Lattimore.
He actually liked it. Continue reading
OK, so I decided to complicate my life some more.
And this time I’m complicating my life for you, dear Karavansara readers.
I hope you are moved by this.
As I mentioned, one of the “minor” (but not minor at all) gifts I got for Christmas is Stuart Stevens‘ Night Train to Turkestan.
That is an attempt at retracing the road followed by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in their famous China-to-India (by way of Afghanistan) journey, in 1935.
Now, the interesting bit is – both Fleming and Maillart wrote about their experiences on the road.
Karavansara 