After You, Marco Polo (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Franc and Jean Shor, a young American couple, set out in the mid-twentieth century to follow the seven century old trail of Marco Polo from Venice to Peiping. Polo's route lies in a no-man's land along the boundaries of Turkey, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. Only a handful of Westerners have crossed these high passes and unexplored valleys since Polo's time. Border skirmishes are frequent, strangers are automatically assumed to be enemies.

The Shors' adventures matched in fascination and variety those of Marco Polo. They picnicked with the Shah of Iran. The King of Afghanistan personally gave them permission to cross the forbidden and forbidding Wakhan Corridor. They trekked across the Gobi Desert where they found Genghis Khan's grave. They crossed deserts and mountain ranges, were entertained by the great and the savage.

Jean was kidnapped by the Chinese Communists. Franc contracted a deadly fever in the snowbound High Pamirs. One of their "trusted" guides turned out to be a bandit and murderer. They drove off wolves at night with flash bulbs; they slept in their clothes during the sand and snowstorms; they traveled by ancient bus, horse, yak, and on foot. Ultimately tribal warfare blocked their route across the high passes of the Wakhan Corridor in wildest Afghanistan. Unable to cross the Chinese border, ill and hungry, they literally staggered into the fabled peace and beauty of the Hunza Valley, the Shangri-La in northern Pakistan.

Jean Bowie Shor writes with humor, warmth, and sensitivity of these strange lands and exotic peoples. Set in the context of Marco Polo's travels and spiced with apt quotations from his Travels, this is at once a stirring adventure and a superior travelogue crammed with vivid detail and dramatic contrasts.