In the Footsteps of Marco Polo

My kids are learning about Marco Polo and I was looking for "supplementary" educational materials, and stumbled on this film.#1. This movie is about a massive, crazy global travel adventure. It's not really about Marco Polo. However, my kids now have a much better appreciation of the actual route Polo traveled, the distance involved, the hardships, climates, and peoples on the way.#2. This movie shows a lot about the peoples and on-the-ground life & politics of some very remote places in the Middle East and Central Asia. Watch this and get an appreciation for what it's like in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iran, etc. though note that this journey occured in the early 1990s, long before 9/11, before the Taliban took over, and before the US invasion of Afghanistan.#3. This movie is about two young men bitten by a travel bug the size of Manhattan. Many of us enjoy travel, even travel to exotic places with some hardship involved. These guys are off-scale in their fascination with the hardest travel to the hardest places. Makes me think of that book  Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition .#4. These guys must have accumulated tons of footage from their 2 year journey. Only 90 minutes made it into this film. I expected to be more impressed with the imagery and storytelling/editing. It's done competently and was enough to keep me engaged for 90 minutes but it wasn't stupendous.Overall recommend, and I was satisfied with my purpose of enriching kids' understanding of Polo's journey and also modern geography.

Two best friends re-live their incredible 25,000 mile journey followingMarco Polo's fabled routes through the east.They had no crew, no support team, just two guys from Queens, New YorkCity with a bunch of cameras and video equipment in their backpacksslogging alone through unbelievably difficult territory, risking theirlives by crossing into hostile countries without visas, or enteringstrictly forbidden areas. Sometimes they would get stuck in a locationfor weeks before being able to find a way to go on.But these are two tough, as well as endearing dudes. They seemed tomanage to make friends wherever they went, but also to stare downChinese army officers with nothing but a bluff.It's interesting and effective to see these guys, now ten years older,reliving the journey in an interview setting, inter-cut with theirvideo footage and still photographs of the journey. You get both theimmediacy of the events, and the benefit of hindsight and memory.Even though the film is only 90 minutes, it somehow doesn't feelrushed, although I could have happily watched hours more. In fact, myonly complaint is that I wish it was longer so we could have seen evenmore details. Quite unique, and a lot of educational fun.

An amazing journey. If you pickup one pearl of wisdom from this film it has to be: the world is mostly made up of good people. Expect people to be good, and reciprocate at every opportunity. Not everyone can travel and experience what these two fellows did, but if you are kind, accepting and able to be courteous towards other cultures and customs, you can have similar results from any international trip.I would enjoy seeing a few of the countries they encountered on their journey, especially Iran and Mongolia. It would be fun to visit India, as well.When the journey was taken from 1993 - 1995, the dangers of traveling in some countries was at a high level. However, today, those dangers continue to exist and are even worse in some areas, while in other countries acceptance of westerners (especially Americans) is more common and less hazardous.Enjoy this film. History is fun and travel is a way to live for the moment, remembering the past while anticipating the future.

This is a bit different than I had expected but a good way. Two NY buds take on the difficult task of retracing Marco Polo's travels over the course of two years.Armed only with money, books of Polo's accounts and sponsors, Fran and Denis start from Venice and make the seemingly impossible journey retracing the travels along the Silk Road through forbidden countries.Since the title stated Episode I, Season I, I expected a series. Instead, we receive this awesome travelogue of nearly two years of "flying by the seat of their pants" without flying. Trains, cars, Jeeps, camel, ponies, and foot, these guys made a journey of a lifetime... and today are still friends.

My church group is planning a large party with a Marco Polo/Silk Road theme so I picked up this video. It is follows the gutsy adventures of two men trying to retrace Marco Polo on the Silk Road - very interesting and loaded with exciting cultural information and a great ending.

This is by far the best video about the travels of Marco Polo and the Silk Road. Unlike the other videos, this is a real adventure story where they interact with "real" people and in the process show us how customs officials work in other countries, especially Afghanistan and Iran. Most importantly, however, is that they show us how kind and generous all the people in those far away lands are; and, how difficult their lives are.This video definitely​ is a 5-star one.

I do not recommend this DVD. More than half of it is devoted to a shallow retrospective by the two travelers and what they choose to talk about often had little to do with the countries they visited or the various cultures and customs (like, most wouldn't care a whit about one of the men's Indonesian tattoo experience). More, it looked like many of the video clips were grabs from other photographers. Given this, it's pretty hard to believe that they did all that they claimed to do, like ride Bactrian camels through the desert. The treatment was so superficial that no more than 3-4 minutes were spent on China when Polo spent years living there. Please don't waste your money! This DVD was a real disappointment. Surely there are better ones out there.

I liked this DVD trip well enough, but I wasn't thrilled by it. You follow a pair of hitchhikers on their trip following, as best they could, the same route Marco Polo did on his trade routes into and out of China. There is a nice touch of seeing places you can't see everyday, war torn spaces and areas the outside traveller usually isn't allowed into for various reasons. They harp on the question of whether or not Marco Polo really did his trips or not a little too much for my liking, and there are way too many dramatic pauses to build up suspense; still, it's not a bad DVD purchase. The reason I only give it three stars is that it's not spectacular. It's okay, but it's not that memorable.

The DVD cover says, "The Emmy nominated film, In the Footsteps of Marco Polo, captures the remarkable two-year, 25,000 mile journey to retrace Marco Polo's legendary trek from Venice, Italy to China." Both my husband and I found this part travelogue, part adventure story and part history trek to be quite fascinating and informative. Denis Belliveau, a photographer and Francis O'Donnell, a visual artist and ex-marine take us on an unforgettable endurance trail through several countries while confirming the stories Marco Polo wrote about in his book many centuries earlier.We consider this account of Marco Polo's journeys to be much more interesting and certainly more accurate than the movie "Marco Polo". We're glad we bought this wonderfully photographed documentary/story and recommend it for viewing for preteens to adults.

The interest of this video lies in the fact the two gutsy guys who traveled along the Silk Road on Marco Polo's footsteps would be riddled with bullets if they tried to cross Afghanistan now. They were lucky enough to perform their epic journey in the short interval between the exit of the Russians and the arrival of the Talebans. For this reason alone, it is an invaluable document. I enjoyed every minute of it...

Visually rich overview of some amazing & ambitious traveling. Would have liked more from and about the peoples visited and their struggles.