why we travel

EXPERIENCES THAT CHANGE THE WAY WE SEE THE WORLD

A Train Through Time

Riding the storied Golden Eagle, Maggie Shipstead finds the legacy of the Silk Road in the plains and valleys of Central Asia

TAJIKISTAN WAS A CHANGE IN PLANS. My rail tour through Central Asia—Jewels of the Silk Road, offered by Golden Eagle Luxury Trains—was supposed to start in the country next door, closed, elusive Turkmenistan, but at the last minute the Turkmen government declined our group’s visa applications. So instead I found myself descending into Dushanbe at 2 a.m. on a flight full of track-suited European teenagers on their way to the World Judo Juniors Championships.

Waiting at customs amid international clusters of chatting judokas, I considered the idea of the Silk Road and its bearing on Central Asia. The term was coined by 19th-century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen and belongs in the all-time branding hall of fame because it reduces something almost inconceivably complex into a memorable, evocative, and wildly reductive phrase. Rather than a single pathway for a single commodity, the Silk Road was a sprawling, ever-changing web of informal trading routes across the vast Eurasian landmass that evolved over more than a millennium of empire and invasion, destruction and rebuilding. I was curious if I would be able to sense the Silk Road’s legacy in the region or if the passage of time had eroded the visible markers of this once magnificent grid of connectivity.

From top: Samarkand's Shah-i Zinda complex; a Soviet-era Lada in Tashkent

I met my train in the late afternoon the next day. As the other passengers disembarked, I hovered on the periphery like the new kid in school until the trip leader, Anna Kochetkova (who joined Golden Eagle in the late 1990s, first as a local Lake Baikal guide), found me. “You are Maggie?” she said, radiating warmth and a brisk satisfaction at logistics working out. “Good. Let’s go.”