About halfway through his 7,000-mile voyage across Central Asia, travel writer Colin Thubron found himself in an ironic situation.
Stranded in the town of Maimana, Afghanistan, he had decided to catch a ride on a plane carrying refugees.
As he boarded the old aircraft, he noticed quizzical looks coming from the other passengers.
"They looked at me as if I was a terrorist and was going to blow up the plane," Thubron said.
He retold the story of his eight-month trip along the Silk Road, an ancient trade route from Europe to China, to a large audience of students and faculty at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology yesterday.
Thubron wrote the book Shadow of the Silk Road based on his experiences traveling from Xian, China, to the Mediterranean Sea with nothing more than a change of clothes, some language manuals and a couple of notebooks.
"Travel allows you to push yourself further and press the borders of possibility," he said. "I was going for the physical, but also the sensuous and intellectual stimulation."
Thubron was the inaugural speaker in this year's Penn Humanities Forum, which brings speakers to campus to discuss different social topics with students.
"Our goal is to bring the University and people of Philadelphia together in the exploration of broad communalistic topics," said Wendy Steiner, director of the forum. "Our topic this year was travel, which has been a central factor in history."
Traveling by truck, airplane and sometimes camel, Thubron encountered many different local customs and cultures.
In Central Asia, shepherds sacrificed a sheep in his honor, and in Uzbekistan, his driver "offered" Thubron his wife for the night as restitution for nearly crashing his car, he said.
The variety of his experiences attests to the diverse nature of the Silk Road, Thubron said.
"Borders are so artificial, and people are hopelessly interfused," he said. "There was probably nothing in the known civilized world that did not cross on this magnificent route. The camel trains went out 1,000 strong with silk, bronze, oranges and even a caged lion or two."
College senior Carter Johns said he attended the presentation to try to experience the Silk Road for himself.
"I wanted to see what he had to say because I was interested in his travels," Johns said. "I thought he would be a good storyteller, and he was."
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