“Trip Tips: Perception Versus Reality on the Reconstructed Silk Road”

via “Indian Express“

“I had a smile on my face as I strode across the tarmac of Samarkand airport, for I had arrived at last in the city I had toiled for four years to recreate as a novelist.

My expectations of seeing everything I had researched about one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world – it was founded in 700 B.C. by the greatest traders of the old Silk Road, the Sogdians – could hardly have been higher. . . .”