The journey West in On the trail of Marco Polo
Polo did not himself visit Japan but he digresses to give a fairly detailed account of "Chipangu" and of Kublai Khan's unsuccessful invasion attempt.
They stopped in Champa, a kingdom in Indochina paying tribute to the Khan. It is not entirely clear where this was, probably somewhere in modern Vietnam. Polo decribes Java, but it is not clear if he actually visited it. They did stop in a city Polo calls Malaiur. This was in the area of modern Singapore and Malacca, but it does not seem to have been either of those.
After that, they spent several months in Sumatra, probably waiting out the monsoon season. Polo calls this "Lesser Java" and gives much detail of various kingdoms, commerce, religion and culture. They also visited the Andaman and Nicobar islands and Sri Lanka en route to India.
In India, he visited several places on the East coast including the tomb of Saint Thomas near Madras. On the West coast, the first stop was naturally Calicut on the Malabar coast, now Kerala, then along the coast to Thane near Bombay, to Gujarat, and to Khambhat. He describes Sindh but does not seem to have stopped there. He also describes several inland provinces of South India.
He describes the Indian Ocean island of Socotra reasonably well, then goes on to talk of Madagascar and Zanzibar which he gets quite wrong. Presumably he was repeating travelers' tales for these. He also describes Abyssinia, now Somalia and Eritrea, but it is not clear if he went there. He may have picked up that information when he stopped in Aden, a city in Yemen which was then the capital of an empire that included them.
This Aden is the port to which many of the ships of India come with their cargoes; and from this haven the merchants carry the goods a distance of seven days further in small vessels. At the end of those seven days they land the goods and load them on camels, and so carry them a land journey of 30 days. This brings them to the river of ALEXANDRIA, and by it they descend to the latter city. It is by this way through Aden that the Saracens of Alexandria receive all their stores of pepper and other spicery; and there is no other route equally good and convenient by which these goods could reach that place.
Eventually they reached Hormuz and continued overland to Tabriz to deliver the bride. The planned bridegroom having died in the meanwhile, she married his son.
The Polos then returned home, sailing from Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea to Constantinople (Istanbul) and on to Venice which they reached in 1295.
This is a usable itinerary. It explains how to get there and touches on all the major points along the way. An adventurous person could use this article, but please plunge forward and help it grow!
|
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about On the trail of Marco Polo