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
