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Across Asia on a bicycle

Chapter 11: Transcriber’s Note
By Thomas Gaskell Allen
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Travel Writing

About This Book

Two recent graduates undertake a bicycle journey across Asia, narrating an episodic travelogue that blends route descriptions with cultural observation. The account follows their daily progress through mountain passes, caravan towns, deserts, and border checkpoints, noting practical challenges of long-distance cycling, interactions with local officials and residents, and efforts to learn regional languages. Chapters present vivid sketches of landscapes, markets, religious sites, and domestic life, supplemented by photographs and illustrations, and culminate in their crossing of western China and approach to the Chinese capital after traversing the Gobi and the Great Wall's western gateways.

Footnote

1.
Eight years before the first recorded ascent of Ararat by Dr. Parrot (1829), there appeared the following from “Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, and Ancient Babylonia,” by Sir Robert Ker Porter, who, in his time, was an authority on southwestern Asia: “These inaccessible heights [of Mount Ararat] have never been trod by the foot of man since the days of Noah, if even then; for my idea is that the Ark rested in the space between the two heads (Great and Little Ararat), and not on the top of either. Various attempts have been made in different ages to ascend these tremendous mountain pyramids, but in vain. Their forms, snows, and glaciers are insurmountable obstacles: the distance being so great from the commencement of the icy region to the highest points, cold alone would be the destruction of any one who had the hardihood to persevere.”

Transcriber’s Note

The list of illustrations has been added in the electronic text.

The illustrations have been placed between paragraphs in the electronic text. The page they are printed on in the original edition can be seen in the list of illustrations.

Pages only containing images have been left out in the pagination on the margin.

The following typographical errors have been corrected:

page 82, period changed to comma (after “was”)
page 140, “Siberan” changed to “Siberian”

Inconsistent hyphenation (e. g. “footsteps” and “foot-steps”, “innkeeper” and “inn-keeper”, “moonlight” and “moon-light”, “pigtails” and “pig-tails”, “wickerwork” and “wicker-work”), punctuation or italicizing has not been changed. The authors use both “Yengiz” and “Yenghiz”, “bakshish” and “baksheesh”, “pilaff” and “pillao”.