I hiked the Chilkoot Trail in 2000. When I was writing about it for Alaska magazine, somehow I stumbled across the information that women in that time, 1898-1899, wore on average forty pounds of clothes. Can you imagine hiking up that in forty pounds of clothes? That’s, what, like eight 5-pound chickens, or one three-year…
What do you want? Need? Make? Sell? Buy? Whatever your answer is, the Silk Road’s oasis towns have a market with your name on it. The guy below? He’s making rivets out of tiny pieces of metal he has cut into triangles. He pushes one corner of the triangle into a hole in the mold…
So, okay, Dana Stabenow, BA, MFA, NATS* here. Google Templars and you get 1,290,000 hits. On the day I wrote this post, the sixth hit down was this story. It says something about the enduring mythology of the Knights Templar that today, 700 years after the last Templar Grand Master was burned at the stake…
In the Kashgar livestock market. The guy in the tall hat is the broker, the guys on either side the seller and buyer. The tallest guy is always the broker, we were told. And evidently, if they aren’t tall enough the hat can make up the difference. Which I will be signing at 2pm on…
Those are silk cocoons, spun by silk worms who have fed long and well on mulberry leaves. There is a fire beneath the caldron, and this lady is boiling them in water to make the very end of the strands loosen, all the while stirring the water so that the strand ends will adhere to…
The Taklamakan Desert. Some sources claim it means “Place of No Return”, more commonly interpreted as “once you get in, you’ll never get out.” And you can see why. Which I will be signing at 2pm on December 2nd at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. Click here to pre-order.
Coal and stovepipes in the Kuche market. Hey, buy one, gotta buy the other. Which I will be signing at 2pm on December 2nd at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. Click here to pre-order.
Read more It’s all about product placement on the Silk Road.
That would be this shown here with samurai for scale, whose weapon it was A naginata could be over twelve feet in length, butt to blade tip. Other than the obvious uses — stabbing, slicing, hooking, clubbing, kneecapping charging horses, disemboweling and/or beheading their riders — the naginata user’s advantage was by how far it…
So you can get your mule shoed… …and ten feet to your left see this sign… …so while you’re waiting on your mule you can go in and get that pesky cavity in your second lower left molar filled. I sent this photo to my dentist and he reported that that that dentist had…
Read more Shoe a mule or fill a cavity–your choice at the Kuche market.
Me in the spice market at Yarkent. Markets are where you see what people are making and buying and selling. People are talking and laughing and shouting out prices and exchanging sotto voce comments with each other on how much they got for that carpet and those chairs and commiserating over the fluctuating price of…
