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    The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan
    Unavailable
    The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan
    Unavailable
    The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan
    Ebook357 pages4 hours

    The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan

    By Bill Porter

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From an acclaimed travel writer comes a contemporary journey of historic riches from China to Pakistan along the northern route of the Silk Road.
     
    Millennia older than California’s Camino Real, and perhaps even a few years older than the roads of the Roman Empire, the Silk Road is a network of routes stretching from delta towns of China all the way to the Mediterranean Sea—a cultural highway essential to the development of some of the world’s oldest civilizations.
     
    In 1992, celebrated translator, writer, and scholar Bill Porter left his home in Hong Kong to travel from China to Pakistan by way of this storied, often treacherous path. With an old friend and a plastic bottle of whiskey, Porter chose to embark on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s liberation from the Japanese after World War II. He completed the journey in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, at the end of the monsoon season.
     
    Weaving travel anecdotes with the mythology of China and its surrounding regions, Porter exposes a world of card-sharks, unheard-of ethnic minorities, terracotta soldiers, nuclear experiments in the desert, love-struck emperors, monks with miracle tongues, and a giant Buddha relaxing to music played by an invisible band. Thanks to Porter’s keen eye for cultural idiosyncrasies and vast knowledge of history, The Silk Road is an enlightening work from an expert travel writer.
     
    “Fans of Owen Lattimore, The Road to Oxiana, Aurel Stein, and other like-minded ventures and adventurers will find Porter’s latest a pleasure and an inspiration.” —Kirkus Reviews
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 1, 2016
    ISBN9781619027510
    Unavailable
    The Silk Road: Taking the Bus to Pakistan
    Author

    Bill Porter

    Bill Porter was born in Russellville, Alabama, and grew up 20 miles north, in Sheffield. He went to the University of the South, and while he did graduate eventually, it took a while because he liked to travel in the spring. He also spent some time in the Marines to avoid the draft, after which he got married and finished his last few credits at Columbia in New York. It was there in the summer of 1964 that he read Vermont was losing population, so he and his wife Ruth headed to the green mountain state and drove all over, delivering his resumé to newspapers. The Rutland Herald hired him at $50 a week as a beginning reporter, and three years later he was the assistant managing editor. In 1973 he moved to Barre as the managing editor of the Herald's sister paper, the Times-Argus, and in 1985 he went out on his own as a writer. He prepared the annual report for Green Mountain Power for twelve years and won a prize for every one. While he was freelancing he also built up his farm, learned to be a pretty good mechanic, wrote a novel, and started Bar Nothing Books with Ruth. Bill had Alzheimer's for five years before he died in 2022, but he never stopped working on the farm.

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