Silk riders : Jo and Gareth Morgan's incredible journey on the trail of Marco Polo / with John McCrystal.

The Silk Rider trip was conceived after three biking trips of shorter duration - two in the Himalayas and one in the Andes. It was very clear that month-long trips are great but there is another level - a number of countries to navigate and borders to negotiate; a trip without any pre-arranged accommodation; a motorcycle journey without support vehicles so each rider is self-contained; and finally a theme to ride bikes by. That theme was "In the footsteps of Marco Polo" and it set a backdrop to this traverse of Eurasia. Marco (1254-1324) was born on Korcula, an island in the Adriatic off Split in Croatia. But he was raised in Venice and in 1271 set out with his two uncles for Cathay. The return journey took 24 years - outbound by land alone taking 3 years, in China for 17 years and then home by sea, dictating his book, "The Travels of Marco Polo", from a Genoa prison cell 3 years later in 1298. As he lay on his deathbed he confessed, "I have not told half of what I saw". Gareth, Jo and friends also started their trip in Venice and ended in Xanadu (Shangtu) - north-west of Beijing - where the summer palace of the Mongol (Tartar) leader Kublai Kan was located and where he met Marco Polo in 1275. Their timeframe (3 months) was a mere 1/12th of Marco?s for the one-way land traverse and while most of it was along the route he took, they had a few diversions to take in points of interest - such as the dried-up Aral Sea.