[Paperback, read aloud to Adelle]
Eastern Horizons, Hitchhiking the Silk Road by Levison Wood (also available at archive.org).
A history graduate sets out to hitchhike the Silk Road on a shoestring budget, and shares his adventures. After a false start getting as far as the Russian border with a friend he returns alone to make the whole journey.
He starts out sleeping rough in some terrible choices of location, then gains confidence and gets in his stride for the adventure.
Along the way he meets many local people who show him their culture, they welcome him and share what they can. It is a little uncomfortable at points, where he seems like he is taking advantage of some people who really do not have a lot but give what they do have so freely. A couple of times this gets him in trouble, like when he is accidentally taken in by the local drug lords son. That aside, most of the stories he tells of those he meets reflect the joy he must have experienced being able to see into their lives and cultures, even briefly.
He stops by at historic places along the way too, taking detours to visit temples and sites of confrontations. The Golden Temple at Amritsar stood out to me as sounding like an absolutely amazing place to visit.
Transitions between areas of different religions showed a couple of things, the border regions amplified the differences between them so he could feel the difference as he moved from Christian to Muslim to Sikh to Hindu areas, but also how little difference there is between the peoples who live in each of these areas, they are all just people getting on with their lives, all people who welcome him.
His writing style takes a little getting used to, laden with adjectives as a recent history graduate – he makes a point in the introduction to say that he purposefully didn’t rewrite it for publication, because he didn’t want to lose the raw spirit of his adventure.
Books describing journeys like this always bring me joy, I want to see all those places, meet those people, but I cannot muster the commitment needed to pursue a journey like this, there is no option to do it in a weekend or piecemeal. You have to live it. For months. The next best thing is to read about someone else doing it.