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Explore the Silk Roads (intofarlands.com)
115 points by intofarlands on Feb 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



Over the past six years my wife and I have made it our quest to explore as much of the Silk Roads as possible, with more than 60 outposts charted. We have found the journey so fascinating, we would like to recreate the feeling of an explorer charting and experiencing these places for the first time. Therefore I’ve been investing my time to create an interactive journey where one can experience the Silk Roads without leaving your front door.

The journey starts in Constantinople and from there branches out where you can choose where to travel, with all roads leading to the end in Eastern China. Hope you find it interesting and would love any input or suggestions for the project, as there are plenty more places to chart.


Nice site! Two small suggestions: when hovering over the icons, the mouse cursor should change to indicate that they are clickable. And, without being very familiar with the Silk Road, I imagine Tehran, Esfahan, Baghdad, Basrah etc. were also significant stations, although it's currently not easy (or advisable) to visit them as a tourist - but I think they should still get icons...


Since you have Zhangye, you might also want to include Dunhuang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunhuang)?

And there's Mogao Caves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogao_Caves) which can't be missed.


Absolutely, Dunhuang is such a crucial component of the Silk Roads. However I am only including the places we have traveled through ourselves, and we were not able to fit in Dunhuang when we were passing through the area.

This Silk Road experience is a project I anticipate working on over the next few years.


Nice project! For other people interested in the history of the Silk Roads, I loved the book by Peter Frankopan.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25812847-the-silk-roads


Great site and pictures, but having every page fade out after a few seconds and "Give us your email address" gets annoying quick. That needs a "Close and don't show again", which probably needs a cookies/local storage (hello cookie-banner).


Oh,I thought it was a one-time pop-up. I will look into it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention and taking a look through the site.


Or maybe they should just never ever do that and put it in a footer somewhere instead?

We dislike sites that only annoy us once, we'd prefer they annoy us zero times.

We used to browse the web with NoScript until we learned that the extension itself actually makes the browser much slower than JavaScript does.

-Emily


This is really wonderful. I’ve been considering a trip along the Silk Roads via Pakistan for some time so this site was a perfect way to spend an afternoon. Thank you so much for this beautiful experience.


This is the best online travel journal I have seen in a long time. Loving it!


Many thanks! A lot of time and thought have been put into it to make it a unique experience. Really makes me excited you enjoy it!


Beautiful site! Bookmarked it as I'm interested in exploring parts of the silk road in the near future.


Oh... somehow I expected this to be about darknet drug market places.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Cool Journal.


Very nice, thanks for sharing!


Glad to share it and thanks for taking a look at it!


Try increasing the font size to 14px. 12px is quite hard to read.


The font in the My Journal section is even smaller and when you increase the font size, the text flows out of the box.




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