Silk Road

I thought I would post a map, which I found on the net - thanks, Google - of the actual Silk Road and some of the cities that played a part, both in the ancient trade route and also in my travels this summer. You can also get a sense of where the entire adventure started, Beijing - I spent a week and a half there presenting at a conference before heading out on the actual Silk Road CIEE professional development tour. The old Silk Road started in Xi'an (which used to be called Chang'an, which was the capital of a series of Chinese dynasties), and that's where I flew after leaving Beijing. Then we essentially followed the Silk Road west, passing through some of the major cities along the route - Turfan (or Turpan), Dunhuang, Urumqi and finally all the way west to Kashgar (also known as Kashi) - before heading back and ending up on an off-shoot of the Silk Road in Xining and then Lanzhou where the trip ended. As you follow the route west you can see it split just beyond Dunhuang - this is to get around the Taklamakan Desert, which is supposed to be the world's most inhospitable desert - and it certainly looked like - before coming back together around Kashgar. I would have loved to continue the journey west, moving out of China and through a whole series of countries before ending up at the Mediterranean - maybe someday, insh'allah.