I'm hoping to do the Silk Route by bike in the next couple of years. TAD Global Cycling puts together yearly runs, and it looks amazing: https://tdaglobalcycling.com/silk-route
The nice thing about going with a group is that it comes with a support vehicle and water/food/bag carrying. Doing it on my own would be about 10x more intense in terms of prep, I think. I've watched a few biking videos where they started getting close to the edge on water and had to ask random houses they finally found.
It also makes my butt hurt just to think about.
Yeah, sore bum, ouchies. That can be bypassed if you don't mind walking, don't mind camels, and don't mind being thought a bit girly:
* https://www.sidetracked.com/fieldjournal/crossing-australia-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson
Our family doesn't mind a long jolly, one of my favourites (that someone else did) was into the more restricted bits of Papua: Cannibals & Crampons (2001)
In 2001, two British ex army officers set out to climb the unscaled face of Mandela--a remote mountain rising 15,400 ft. above the jungles of New Guinea. This is the extraordinary story of their trek through some of the world's most unexplored terrain.
I have done Central Asia from Europe to China by bike twice, most recently 2024. Absolutely no problem with resupplying food and water daily. There are food stops and railway-worker infrastructure in the Kazakh and Uzbek deserts. And while Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have a lot of wild mountain beauty, they are still inhabited. Indeed, local families earn some money by catering to cyclists.
Did you do it solo or with someone or a group?
> Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue
I'm still waiting for a proper "inclusion" of their contents in the "main" historical discourse, it's a pity that there aren't much many historians going through them and using their contents. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:
> The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled the Cairo Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000[1] Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. (...) comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.