Marco Polo, the film that was never made

If you want to be remembered, write it down. Marco Polo was not the only merchant who traded and travelled from the Venetian empire to the mysterious orient of Kublai Khan in 13th century China, but he was the only one to record it for posterity.

Marco tagged along with his father and uncle on the epic journey, making such an impression on the Mongol rulers that they kept him in court as an exotic oddity. Only after 24 years was he able to make his way home to Venice in 1296, bringing with him treasures, gemstones and noodles, allegedly introducing pasta for which Italy is famed.

Imprisoned during a skirmish with the republic of Genoa, it was by a quirk of fate that Marco Polo’s literate cellmate, Rustichello da Pisa, wrote down his stories to while away their jail time. Ridiculed as a web of unlikely and fanciful fibs by his contemporaries, Marco’s bizarre, fantastic and romantic stories were dismissed as ‘Il Milione’, his nickname as the teller of a million tales.

But the Travels of Marco Polo became a best-seller, giving Europeans their first glimpse of the marvels of Asia and the splendours of the Mongol court.

The Silk Road travelled by Marco Polo did not bring him to Nepal. He would have passed way north, through the flourishing centre of Kashgar, across the forbidding Takla Makan desert to Dadu, the ancient Beijing.

Nepal was then a Malla stronghold guarded by the great barriers of the high Himalaya to the north, and fevered Tarai wetlands to the south. Exquisite stone carvings of the golden Licchavi era would have littered the Valley, as they still do today – temple statues, inscribed steles, waterspouts fed by a complicated network of underground channels, and the massive black Budhanilkantha Vishnu, reclining on his bed of snakes, dragged by villagers across the width of the Valley from mysterious origins in the lost quarry to the south.

Long before I came to Nepal, in one of those chance encounters overhearing a conversation in a Dublin bar, I accosted the strangers, contacted the organiser, and soon found myself the only female member of a British film team driving overland from Venice to Central Asia, researching a film about Marco Polo.

Outside, it was a bright spring morning, but the fug of cigarette smoke in the Kensington basement flat clouded the air without dimming our excitement. Maps were strewn across the floor, a white board was scrawled with routes and timeframes, and the plastic green telephone on the mahogany side table shrilled incessantly with its old-fashioned ring. Amongst the overflowing ashtrays and empty crisp packets, our leaders planned and postured.

It was 1973 and I sat enthralled in a carpeted corner at this planning session for a Marco Polo movie that was never made. The project was destined to run out of funding, but not before our exploratory team had completed our own epic journey. Infected by the project’s glamour, publisher Alexander Macmillan paid for the recce, race driver Graham Hill procured us Landrovers, and writer Jan Morris helped us with details of medieval Venice – she who as James Morris, The Times’ correspondent embedded with the 1953 British Everest expedition, had telegraphed the glorious news of Tenzing and Hillary’s success.

Shaking off the worst of the expedition egos, I lucked out by having Iran and Turkey as our patch, and oarsman Daniel Topolski as my Landrover companion – almost as under-qualified as me but with an African saga under his belt, Daniel was a writer, photographer and rowing champion who coached the Oxford blues to multiple victories. With black curls,  and irresistible Polish charm, his girlfriend Victoria became one of my best friends -- and without whom I would never have got to Nepal.

Behind the wheel in the upright seats with camera and notebooks in hand, together Daniel and I ventured through the haunting ruins of Persepolis, cooling towers of Yazd, haze of Mount Ararat and hanging monasteries of Trabzon. We slept on floors, lived off kebabs and yoghurt, passed through the Valley of the Assassins and Elburz mountains, and followed the caravan trade routes as far as Mashhad on the Soviet Afghanistan border.

Sickness hit us crossing the rutted tracks of the Dasht-e-Lut salt desert, and euphoria when one richly glowing afternoon we were welcomed into a colourful Kurdish encampment – Daniel nearly killed me when he realised I had failed to properly load the film into the cameras, so no photos. We discovered the sleepy, forgotten Mediterranean village of Yumurtalik, once a thriving port where Marco Polo disembarked to begin his trip to China in 1271, noting ‘all spices, silk, gold and wool from inland were carried to this … city good for trade’.

And strangest of all, whilst seeking film permits in Tehran, we were invited to the inauguration of the Shah’s sister Princess Shams’ latest extravagance, a conch-shaped palace on a bend in the river designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, glittering with curved mosaics, fountains and crystal. Scrubbing up and finding something to wear from the back of our dust-encrusted vehicle, we mingled with the royal bejewelled crowd, gloated over the indulgent interiors and incomparable Persian carpets, tucked into the caviar and champagne, admired the shimmering skill of the celebrity belly dancer, and bowed low when presented to the King-of-Kings himself.

Succumbing to such arbitrary extremes is the essence of travel, and Daniel and I had the best of times with that Marco Polo project. Due to the vagaries of political boundaries, journeys in the footsteps of Marco Polo have been impossible to re-enact since the days when he travelled under the safe passage of Kublai Khan’s engraved tablets, through the enormous expanse of the Mongol empire. Inspired by Marco’s travels and exploration, several films have been made before and since, but ours was not one of them.