Showing posts with label Marco Polo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marco Polo. Show all posts

Monday, January 14, 2013

Great Travelers, Great Stories



Traveling through space is geography.  Traveling through time is history.  I just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo and Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux simultaneously; okay, actually I was alternating between them.  As fate would have it, they’re traveling somewhat the same route, at least part of the way.  No I didn’t plan it that way.  If I had, then it wouldn’t be serendipity.  I like that word, and I like the meaning behind it, the happy accident; the brilliant mistake.  It’s not a race, because I already know who’d win.  Slow as they are, trains are fast compared to caravan travel on the Silk Road, or even the open seas, which was the only option in Marco Polo’s time.  But as long as every picture tells a story, then overland travel is eminently worthwhile.  Once they’re known and renowned, then even the most impressive trail among them can become boring.

The strangest thing is not that Polo’s observations seem so dated, though, as you would expect from travels that occurred some 750 years ago.  No, the strange thing is how dated Theroux’s observations seem.  Those observations are barely forty years old, and occurred in an era that I know well, the same one that gave birth to my own significant travels.  In fact if I had to place them within a historical continuum between Polo’s era and this date of January 2012, then I’d place them about half-way, which is to say that almost as much has happened within the last forty years as in the seven hundred which preceded it.  If that s

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