The Last Secrets of the Silk Road – Four girls follow Marco Polo across 5,000 miles –

“For two thousand years the Silk Road across Central Asia was the great trade route between East and West. Four girls, friends from university, made a unique eight-month, 5,000-mile journey by horse and camel along it, through some of the least-known and most beautiful regions of the world, still largely untouched. This book by one of that intrepid team of riders tells the story of their memorable journey.

The road they took echoes with mighty names – Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Marco Polo and the nineteenth-century players of the Great Game of Empire between Britain and Russia. No other travellers have completed this w hole route on horse and camel since the Middle Ages – one that took them through the dusty Turkmen plains, by the orchards of Bukhara and the mosques of Samarkand, the remote passes of Kygyzstan and the windswept expanses of the Taklamakan Desert, ending up in the Silk Road terminus city of Xian in China.

Alexandra Tolstoy’s absorbing book records the extremes of landscape and climate (and cuisine), the people they met, the guides who helped (or hindered) them, friendships and tensions, camaraderie and adventures, and not least, the trusting and wilful animals who made it all possible.”