After the implosion of the Soviet Union, independent states arose in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. Remote, mysterious, wild and still pure. Full of difficulties but also wonders such as Samarkand, a mythical city located as a strategic point on the Silk Road, ancient and magnificent capital of the Great Tamerlane, Mongolian emperor of the fifteenth century. A man from Madrid arrived there in 1403: Ruy González de Clavijo.
The journey there takes you through some of the most beautiful, exotic and complex landscapes in the world. The Balkans with its diversity; Albanian surrealism; Greece and the chaotic sense of existence; Türkiye and its contradictions; the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia; Azerbaijan oil; the Caspian, that lake that wants to be the sea; Kazakhstan, the desert from which the Soyuz spacecraft take off; or Uzbekistan, the cradle of the jewel cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.
Nomad in Samarkanda is the story of a great motorcycle adventure lived on the Silk Road by one of the best-known writers on the Spanish travel scene. But Nomad in Samarkand is also the sentimental chronicle of a return.
Miquel Silvestre recounts here the experiences, reflections, joys and disappointments that he experiences upon returning to the wild and wild scenery that he explored in 2009 as an anonymous inexperienced adventurer. It is already a return as a famous traveler with thousands of followers there where he underwent a profound personal transformation whose memory accompanies him constantly in this new expedition.
Miquel Silvestre (Dénia, 1968) approved the oppositions to property registrar with the number 1 of his promotion. He lasted a short time behind the desk of an office. In 2008 he took leave to write a novel but ended up traveling around the world and becoming one of those privileged people who has made his dream come true: living by writing and traveling. The conscious decision to become a professional adventurer and squat for a living was made in 2009, during a drunken night in Samarkand. Since then he has published five travel books, hundreds of reports and has directed and produced several seasons of the Spanish television series Diario de un Nómada. This book consists of a return several years later to the city where he made that decision to ask himself if he took the right path.
A talk with the son of a Nazi, a lonely Orthodox monastery, desolate wastelands like those in a comic book, a planetary ecological disaster caused by man, a museum in the middle of nowhere testifying to freedom and another dedicated to a mass murderer. The scenarios in this book are so extreme that they would seem fictionalized if we didn't already know that reality always surpasses imagination.
What has changed the most in these years? The landscape or the traveler? What remains of those pure emotions of the first adventures? Miquel Silvestre finds answers to these questions as he crosses deserts, chats with truckers, argues with the police or marvels at the magnificence of the blue cities of the Silk Road. Oh, and there's also a love story.
Book in Spanish.
Softcover: 240 pages.