DesoLIT: Tearing up the Silk Road

Tearing up the Silk Road: A modern journey from China to Istanbul, through Central Asia, Iran, and the Caucasus was written by Tom Coote, who provided an excerpt from his book as a guest blog post on this site. His book can be purchased through Amazon by clicking here (here for Kindle) or on the image below. Tom can be reached at tom@tomcoote.net, and his website is www.tomcoote.net. The review below is by Desolation Travel's Jane Keeler. 

Author Tom Coote had 9 weeks of freedom left before returning to the UK and the daily humdrum of working life. He was returning to the UK from East Asia, and decided to make the trip home by land along the route of the old Silk Road, taking only public transportation. As anyone who has traveled in that part of the world knows, doing something like that in nine weeks is a daunting task - especially if one wants to see something of the countries one is passing through. Coote did an admirable job of it, making it to China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey during his whirlwind trip. As someone who used to live in Kyrgyzstan, I was disappointed that he didn't make it to my favorite 'stan due to his arrival at the border during the time of the 2010 Kyrgyz revolution - although surely had he offered the border guard a large enough bribe he could have gotten in!

As Coote only has a short amount of time to spend in each location, he is only able to give the reader a superficial glance into the cities, towns, peoples, and cultures he encounters along the way. That being said he does give a good description of the realities facing travelers along the Silk Road, from difficulties arranging transportation or finding adequate lodging, to the lack of hygienic toilet facilities. (I will say he goes into a lot more detail about toilets and bathrooms than we perhaps needed - although when I lived over there these were often topics of conversation among my expat friends, so I definitely understand his desire to discuss such things. Coote also makes it to the main tourist attractions (some of them delightfully desolate and iffy) along his route. This book would make an excellent guide of things to do - and, perhaps, not to do - for anyone planning to attempt to follow the route of the Silk Road in our modern era.

DesoLIT: The writings of Daniel Kalder

Reviewed by Jane

Part One: Lost Cosmonaut


I really wanted to love this book. I wanted to be inspired. I wanted to fall so totally in love with Daniel Kalder that I would beg him to please, please, please join the DT team and become our living god. Why was I initially so infatuated? Just check out the back-cover blurb:
Daniel Kalder belongs to a unique group: the anti-tourists. Sworn to uphold the mysterious tenets of The Shymkent Declarations, the anti-tourist seeks out the dark, lost zones of our planet, eschewing comfort, embracing hunger and hallucinations, and always traveling at the wrong time of year. In Lost Cosmonaut, Kalder visits locations that most of us don’t even know exist – Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. He loves these places because no one else does, because everyone else passes them by.
Obviously I couldn’t resist. How could I? Unfortunately, I found the book incredibly annoying. Had it not been about a topic which I love, I probably would've thrown it across the room and left it there. It seemed very much like Kalder was, in fact, a 13 year old boy who had just hit puberty: he mentions cocks and blowjobs way too often, and seemingly for no reason other than to be able to say cock and/or blowjob. He mentions men's genitalia almost as much as Saffia Farr mentioned her boobs and with even less point. It just seemed incredibly crass. I'm not prudish, but I much prefer something witty (such as when the stuttering Felix Steadiman in Rates of Exchange accidentally offers someone "a nice cock" because his stutter prevents him from uttering "cocktail") to Kalder's frequent and trashy references.

Lost Cosmonaut is… okay. If you get past the crass, juvenile nonsense, he does go to some interesting places of the sort that DT would travel to in a heartbeat; still, it was far from what I’d hoped for. When DT visits Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia, we will totally do it better.

Part Two: Strange Telescopes

I almost didn’t read Strange Telescopes. I’d ordered Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes together, but after reading Lost Cosmonaut I had no desire whatsoever to so much as touch Strange Telescopes. But, as I’m currently living in a country where English language books (outside of ESL textbooks) aren’t exactly easy to come by, I eventually gave in – not so much ‘to temptation’ as ‘out of boredom.’

It was as if Strange Telescopes has been written by someone completely different – or perhaps the puerile author of Lost Cosmonaut simply grew up. I absolutely loved Strange Telescopes.

Unlike Lost Cosmonaut, where Kalder goes in search of desolation itself, in Strange Telescopes, he goes in search of brilliant-but-crazy folks who happen to inhabit bizarre and desolate places. His first subject is Vadim Mikhailov, a man of dubious sanity, whose life is dedicated to the bizarre world located beneath Moscow. Mostly this consists of sewers, although rumors abound of underground chambers, secret metros, and more. I have rather an obsession with the undersides of cities myself, and I inhaled every bit of this tale with glee. I laughed a lot. And not only did I love Kalder's first tale, but I thoroughly enjoyed the entire book (Kalder’s other insane geniuses included a Russian fellow obsessed with tracking down Orthodox exorcisms in Ukraine, a self-proclaimed Messiah gathering followers in Siberia, and a former 90s-era New Russian who built a ramshackle wooden skyscraper near the Arctic Circle and imprisoned one of his enemies in its basement.) You should read it. Now.