Omschrijving

The silk road. s01e01.

Giant dogs, eagle hunters and vodka were all in a day’s work when comedian David Baddiel was filming his new TV series about the historic trade route

There’s a famous bit in Blade Runner when the android, Roy, dies and says: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” I like to think that’s something I could say about my Silk Road journey. I was on parts of the Earth that felt like the moon.
The Silk Road was the first international trade route. Travellers exchanged ideas on scientific invention, religion, culture, music – everything, really. Globalisation has been the wellspring of most ideas.
There’s an old Georgian saying that wine should be good enough to make a pheasant cry. Wine is meant to have begun there. In Sighnaghi there’s a vineyard called Pheasant’s Tears, where we had a traditional feast of about 27 courses, with a speech between each one, and drank an incredible amount.
We had to track down these enormous, human-sized dogs. Silk Road traders bred them for catching bears. They still exist in Georgia, but they’re really hard to find. We drove out into the mountains and eventually we found a farm that had one. It was terrifying.
I had to run away from dogs in China, too. We were trying to find the old Great Wall – what we think of as the Great Wall was rebuilt by Mao. The old one is very hard to find because it has fallen into disuse and was made of mud. We thought we’d found a bit of it but it was surrounded by wild dogs. There’s footage of me running away.
In Xi’an, I was grabbed by a middle-aged woman and pulled into her noodle shop.I thought I was being arrested, but she’d just thought, OK, he’s on TV somewhere so I’ll advertise my noodles. I had one of the best meals I’ve ever had. There are thousands of these places in Xi’an market.