Marco Polo Trip Photos

Following is a slideshow of photos taken from the Marco Polo voyage, stretching along the Silk Road from Venice to Beijing. Click on the photos for a larger image.

Marco Polo documentary on German TV

Less than a week now before the German public TV station SWR broadcasts the first of the Marco Polo films. The films follow me as I retrace the route of Marco Polo from Venice to China via Syria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Western China, trying to reinterpret the places and things Marco saw on his trip 700 years ago.

The five films are broadcast every Sunday at 5.15pm. See the schedule, description and some photos on the SWR website and also here. You can even watch the films online (in German) at the SWR website.

If you can't watch the films live, or don't speak German (!), check out www.marcopolo-reloaded.com, our Web-based documentary of the entire trip, including pictures, video clips and commentary not included in the documentaries. It's online in stages from 2 October 2011.

Until then, you can get a taste of the trip on a couple of Youtube videos. Click below or on the videos to the right of the screen:
Marco Polo Reloaded page

Please do let us know what you think of the clips or the films, either here or on the Marco Polo Reloaded Facebook page, where we'll continue to post links and video clips.


Thanks to Along Mekong Productions for putting together the clips and the web-doc.

Backpacking in the Beartooths

Just back from my last Montanan hiking trip of the summer. I'm headed off to Nepal soon for a couple of months so this was one final futile attempt to get into shape. Headed up onto the 10,000ft Beartooth Plateau, a couple of hours' drive from my house. One of my favourite places in Montana.



Hiked along the plateau, above the treeline and past Becker Lake.





Made camp at Albino Lake.




And then persuaded my wife to climb up this peak - Lonesome Mountain




For some awesome views




Heading back home for a pint of Bent Nail Ale in Red Lodge. Very Nice.

Beni to Dolpo Trek

One of the best treks I've ever done was a couple of years back for the Western Nepal chapter of Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. A superb 24-day walk from the Annapurna region, over seven high passes (highest 5318m) across west-central Nepal into lower Dolpo and across the Transhimalaya to Do Tarap and Phoksumdo Lake. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in getting off the beaten trek in Nepal. The pictures below are in order and show the dramatic changes from subtropical rice-growing valleys to high-altitude Tibetan desert. Click on the photos for larger images and a day by day progression. For a trek description see the Lonely Planet Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya guide.

Beni To Dolpo Trek
(click on the photos for a larger slideshow)

Yellowstone National Park

Hi all,
Just back from several weeks in Yellowstone National Park. A great trip and so nice to research in my own backyard instead of flying halfway across the world. Tried out some great new hikes and found some great new places to eat outside the park. Click on the photos to see them in proper size.

Uzbekistan Web Links

For the last couple of weeks I've been busy putting the finishing touches to the new Odyssey Uzbekistan guide (edition 7). I still love printed books but it's hard to keep them up to date, particularly with changable visa and security information. So for one section, the recommended websites, I've decided to keep an updated list here online. You can access the list anytime from the link on the right of the home page (underneath 'About Me') and I'll try to make sure they are updated and current. If you have any favourites or suggestions please leave a comment. Hope this makes researching your Uzbekistan trip a little bit easier!

Back in Uzbekistan

(Registan, Samarkand)


I owe Uzbekistan a debt, I guess. My first ever guidebook was the Odyssey Guide to Uzbekistan, written with a college friend way back in the 1990s. For almost 20 years we've been watching Uzbekistan growing from an orphan of the Soviet Union to a grown-up independent nation. I've been back updating the guidebook for a new edition. It's a very different kind of project from the normal Lonely Planet work - much more nuance and freedom to write exactly the kind of guidebook I would want to read.


(Kalon Minaret, Bukhara)


It was a hard trip (Uzbekistan generally is!). I got flu for a week in Samarkand, was temporarily detained by militsia (police) in the Uzbek metro for swearing at an officer (three passport checks in four minutes pushed me over the edge...). It was also off season so there were no tourists and a lot of the hotels and restaurants were closed. Wandering around Bukhara and Khiva in the dark trying to find anything at all to eat reminded me of me my hard months of research in 1996. Most worrying, a large part of central Bukhara was a construction site as teams of diggers re-landscaped the historic area of the Lyab-i-Hauz.

(Painting of Uzbek man drinking tea)


Still, Uzbekistan really does have some the most amazing architecture in the Islamic world. If you love the Silk Road, Marco Polo and old imperial history, it's a must. For me it was a trip down memory lane, rewalking streets I'd researched as a much younger man, digging up ghosts of the past, good and bad. For better or worse, those early visits to Uzbekistan have determined the direction of my life. And for that, I'm grateful.


(Khiva old town)

Holiday in Vietnam

I've been on holiday in Vietnam for the last couple of weeks, in Hanoi for the Tet new year festival and then travelling down to Saigon via Ha Long Bay and various other spots. It's weird for a travel writer to go on holiday. If I get time off I really would rather spend a week ordering in pizza and watching DVDs than pack my bag and go travelling again. It's actually really useful to simply travel for a while again, using a guidebook as a traveller not a writer and remembering all the little bits of information that you need when you travel.


Vietnam was a tad disapointing for me. I loved riding motorbikes for $5 a day and enjoyed all the war-related sites. Visiting Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum rounded off the holy trinity of communist corpses (I've seen Mao and Lenin). My personal highlight was kayaking around the karst cliffs of Halong Bay. But I was dissapointed by the food and the sense that I was little more than a walking wallet for most locals. It's probably just a sign that I'm getting old - without the focus of research the frustrations of travel seem harder to endure. Still, it was nice to be travelling with my wife. Mostly I'm by myself when I'm travelling so it was a real novelty to be able to share thoughts, and have an excuse to upgrade to a nicer hotel room and order a cocktail. And god it's nice to be missing winter in Montana...

Hi, I'm currently in Laos and Vietnam on holiday so my apologies if I'm slow in replying to emails. Laos is a lovely laid-back place and Luang Prabang is really one of Asia's most beautiful cities, though I was pretty shocked at the sheer number of tourists in the country, since my last visit a decade ago. I'm currently in Hanoi, right in the middle of the Tet new year festival, so things are pretty slow with most businesses and restaurants shut. It's lovely to see everyone visiting their relatives and temples dressed in their Sunday best. More later from the trip. Bradley

Marco Polo links on Arte

***Please note that the Arte broadcasts are now over. For details of the SWR broadcast in October 2011 please click here. ***

Arte now have a dedicated web page for the Marco Polo series - see www.arte.tv/marcopolo and http://marcopolo.arte.tv.

The programme also made it to the cover of the Arte magazine.

For hard-core fanatics there's also a dedicated Marco Polo Reloaded Facebook page, where you can post comments.

Short clips from the films are available by clicking on the country names on the map on this page.

Click on the links above to see the content.

Marco Polo to be Broadcast in January

I finally have a date for broadcast of the Marco Polo films! Tune in to Arte at 7.55pm for five consecutive nights from Monday to Friday Jan 3-7.

The idea of the programe is to try to retrace the route of Marco Polo's 13th-century trip from Venice to Xanadu (Beijing), following as closely as possible Polo's original route while reinterpreting the spirit of his book by seeking out the kinds of things Polo was most interested in.

The film sees me mining for oltu tash stone in Turkey, tracking down an underground rock band in Tehran, on patrol with ISAF troops in Afghanistan, visitng the lapis mines of Badakhshan, flying over the desert oasis of Dunhuang in a microlite and fishing with cormorants in eastern China, all the time hitchhiking on trucks, buses and trains across Asia.




The Arte broadcast is in French, with further broadcasts on German channel SWR and then other German public television channels throughout summer 2010.

Monday's Film
Tuesday's Film
Wednesday's Film
Thursday's Film
Friday's Film

Sikkim & Silk Road Artefacts

October and much of November saw me in India, specifically Darjeeling and Sikkim, for next year's LP India guide. The real challenge on the India guide is not the research (as insane as that can be) but the word count, specifically trying to cram 70 pages of information into 30 pages of text.

After a spring visit to western Bhutan it was interesting to see Sikkim for the first time, itself a independent Buddhist kingdom until 1975. In many ways it was the absorption of Sikkim into India and the role of Nepalese immigrants in the fall of Sikkimese kings that have shaped Bhutan's current political path as it strives to keep its own identity, while dominated economically and culturally by India and China.


(Yumthang Valley, Sikkim)

I have to admit I was a bit disappointed by Sikkim. Like China, the huge rise in domestic tourism has changed the nature of travel in India's wilder areas, with lines of tourist jeeps packed with noisy Bengali tourists taking the edge of the majestic scenery. It's actually quite hard to get near to the big mountains in Sikkim since much of the mountainous areas are off-limits to foreigners.

North Sikkim was pretty spectacular, particularly the Yumthang Valley. Also of note were the huge new Buddhist statues currently under construction in the south, huge 130ft tall images of Buddha and Chenresig, that will rival the new giant Buddha statue in Thimphu.


(Buddha under construction at Ravangla, Sikkim)

On the way back, on a day to kill in Delhi, I popped into the National Museum to see what I could of the huge cache of Central Asian antiquities brought here by Aurel Stein in his three expeditions between 1900 and 1916. Only one of the three Central Asian halls was open but the silk paintings from Dunhuang were fabulous, especially as I'd been there last year shooting for the Marco Polo film. Central Asian nuts will want to see the wall paintings and leather armour from Miran, Sassanian-designed silk paintings from Astana, monkey scultures from Yotkan, combs and examples of Kharoshti script from Niya and carved stucco from Karakhoto.


(Mural from Dunhuang)

Journey to Ngari

Click on the images above to see in larger scale.

The big trip this summer was out to Western Tibet, out to Ali along the northern route and then to Mt Kailash down the southern route back to Lhasa, for a total of 5000km. I've done the route before and and it's perhaps the most beautiful drive in Tibet, if not Asia. Managed to visit a couple of new places for me - Gurugyam Bon monastery and the ruins of the ancient troglodyte city of Shangshung in the Khunglung (Garuda) valley. That was very cool and surprisingly easy to get to.

Big thanks to Andre and Alyson for a great trip.

Back home

Sorry for the silence. Got back a couple of weeks back from a big Himalayan research trip to Bhutan (4 weeks) and Tibet (six weeks) via Kathmandu, Hangzhou and Khotan. A crazy threee-month itinerary of 24 flights! I'm now home working like a madman on Tibet and Bhutan guides for Lonely Planet but as soon as I get a minute I'll throw up some postings on the Druk Path trek in Bhutan, the overland trip to Western Tibet and trek around Mt Kailash, the trip out to the ruins of the Shang Shung kingdom in the Garuda Valley and even some Marco Polo filming in Hangzhou and Kashgar. Phew, it's been a busy summer. Oh, and I moved house.

Sorry, my wife actually moved our house.
Can't really claim credit for that one.

But I did all the rest, I promise.

Just back from a trip to Denver for a New Year's Slim Cessna concert but still managed to find some connections to the Central Asian world. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science was hosting a high profile exhibition on Genghis Khan, with Genghis' portrait plastered all over town. I've been told the exhibition is light on actual artefacts (which is understandable for a nomadic empire) but I can't say for sure because the exhibition was sold out. Who thought the Mongols were so popular... Moral of the story: book your tickets online. If you're headed to Denver the exhibition is on until February 7th 2010. If you can't make it, I recommend the companion book, which is discounted at Amazon.

On the way back home we pulled into Boulder to track down the Tajik teahouse there. Apparently the chaikhana was built 20 years ago by Tajik craftsmen as a gift to Dushanbe's sister city Boulder. It's a perfect replica with lovely carved pillars, alabaster plaques and swirling painted arabesques. They even serve plov and shashlyk if you're feeling mutton withdrawal symptoms, though the prices will shock you if you've ever chowed down a dollar plov in Dushanbe.