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A Carpet Ride to Khiva - Seven Years on the Silk Road (Paperback)
Loot Price: R284
Discovery Miles 2 840
You Save: R63
(18%)
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A Carpet Ride to Khiva - Seven Years on the Silk Road (Paperback)
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List price R347
Loot Price R284
Discovery Miles 2 840
You Save R63 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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The Silk Road conjures images of the exotic and the unknown. Most
travellers simply pass along it. Brit Chris Alexander chose to live
there. Ostensibly writing a guidebook, Alexander found life at the
heart of the glittering madrassahs, mosques and minarets of the
walled city of Khiva - a remote desert oasis in Uzbekistan -
immensely alluring, and stayed. Immersing himself in the language
and rich cultural traditions Alexander discovers a world torn
between Marx and Mohammed - a place where veils and vodka, pork and
polygamy freely mingle - against a backdrop of forgotten carpet
designs, crumbling but magnificent Islamic architecture and scenes
drawn straight from "The Arabian Nights". Accompanied by a large
green parrot, a ginger cat and his adoptive Uzbek family, Alexander
recounts his efforts to rediscover the lost art of traditional
weaving and dyeing, and the process establishing a self-sufficient
carpet workshop, employing local women and disabled people to train
as apprentices. A Carpet Ride to Khiva sees Alexander being
stripped naked at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through
silkworm droppings in an attempt to record their life-cycle, holed
up in the British Museum discovering carpet designs dormant for
half a millennia, tackling a carpet-thieving mayor, distinguishing
natural dyes from sacks of opium in Northern Afghanistan, bluffing
his way through an impromptu version of "My Heart Will Go On" for
national Uzbek TV and seeking sanctuary as an anti-Western riot
consumed the Kabul carpet bazaar. It is an unforgettable true
travel story of a journey to the heart of the unknown and the
unexpected friendship one man found there.
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