So I'm looking at this map of the routes, and there are a bajillion tiny names of places and snaky rivers and marvelously detailed miniature mountains. And I'm getting out my List of Places and Scenery, to mark everything off with some kind of awesome colour code (because what else does one do with new hi-liters?), and I'm realizing that there's no way that ALL of these Silky Tourist Attractions can be on the map.
It also turns out that you can't just GoogleMaps the Gobi Desert.
Anyways: risk. After finishing my finicky labeling and hi-lite-ing, I just sat there, staring at this brightly coloured map that's now pinned to my bulletin board, and I thought, "There were no hi-liters in the early centuries of the Common Era". Which is beside the point, because there were other ways to mark key spots and I sincerely doubt that the traders had to know the location of, say, Lhasa. I Googled around until I found a map that showed me where the Gobi Desert (and a bunch of other places that I had to write in) was, and, let's face it, the early-CE equivalent of Google was wandering around the traders' haunts and inquiring very carefully and with liberal donations to drinking funds. And even then, how do you trust your sources?
I'm fairly certain that Google and its affiliates have not lied to me and I am safely assured that my map is accurate enough for my purposes, so the beginning of my journey rests on a firm foundation. But if I were a would-be trader -- I would of course first have to be reincarnated as a man, but I digress -- and I were setting out for the first time, I would have absolutely no certainty as to my foundations. Granted, I'm sure I would've had people I DID trust, but who would give away the secrets to this incredibly lucrative and already well-traveled trade route?
AND THEN. Just looking at all the deserts and the mountain passes and the distances between cities where BANDITS and ROCKSLIDES and ANIMALS and CARRIER DEATH and LOSS OF TRADE GOODS and LOSS OF SANITY and DEHYDRATION and STARVATION and I-DID-NOT-KNOW-THEY-TRADED-HERE-TOO and all the other traumatic possibilities of such an extended travel (getting swindled, running out of tea, losing one's second-best desert wear so that, upon meeting tribal cheiftans, one is ridiculously under-dressed and therefore subject to all sorts of terrible treatments)...
Major disincentive to going anywhere NEAR there.
And what happens if you get lost? If you stray so far off-track that you end up in Kathmandu and have no way of communicating your way out because you didn't MEAN to go to Nepal in the first place? What if you lose your maps? Carrying this one in my head is starting to look like a better and better plan.
Step One: start a travelogue
Step Two: get some maps
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