AFTER YOU, MARCO POLO by Jean Bowi Shor

Hardcover
1955
Good condition. Some small tears and chips in dust jacket.

Just after WW II when the world's inhabitants were still resting from their efforts and the Chinese Civil War was in a lull and westerners, especially Americans were welcome almost anywhere, a couple set out to see the remote areas of High Asia where few westerners had ever gone. They managed to travel in a time of relative safety compared with now.
I remember the days of hippies in the sixties riding local buses across Turkey, Iran snd Afghanistan on their way from Europe to Nepal. And the rivalry between the US and USSR for influence with the Afghan government and people. We and the USSR were competing with aid projects including modern mapping, road building, dams and other infrstrucure projects. There were even guidebooks detailing routes to and ancient monuments at Herat, Balkh, Kandahar, and elsewhere.
Whst makes these remarka relevent today was the relative safety of travel on the besten paths in the fifties and sixties.Then the world's interest in the "Roof of Asia" was inspired by the msny articles in the National Geographic in the forties and fifties. I followed the adventures of Franc and Jean and was saddened by their subsequent splittng up. I had even hoped to go there some day, especially to Tibet, but by the time I graduated from university, the Chinese Reds had long since closed the area east of the Wakhan to westerners. I had eagerly read Lowell Thomas's Tibet articles in the SEP as well.
I first read those articles in "real time" as a young lad in the forties and have retained an interest in the area ever since. I was never fortunate enough to travel to high Asia on mapping expeditions when the Army Map Service was working in Iran. I came to work at AMS too late to go to the field. In a few years oue field men had either been expelled or finished the work in most of the countries involved.
This book is not a scientific study but an impressionistic account of one couple's journey during a window of opportunity which will never come again, at least in the relative safety of the late forties.
The book is based on the articles that originally appeared in the Geographic magazine.