Lands of Lost Borders

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. New York: Knopf 2018. Print

First Sentences:

The end of the road was always just out of sight. 

 

Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by a blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I even reach the end, I remember thinking, I'll fly off the rim of the world.


Description:

Thus begins Kate Harris's Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. It depicts one of the author's many dangerous efforts to elude unfriendly border guards in China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries in retracing the ancient route of Marco Polo on a bicycle.

Author Harris is a confirmed explorer. From her earliest age, she had a restlessness to her dreams. Although a gifted student in biological sciences at Oxford and MIT, her ongoing goal was to take a one-way trip to help establish a colony on Mars. She even participated in a Mars simulation experience complete with desert living in regulation space suits.

Harris, a voracious reader and researcher throughout her life, always was fascinated to read about into the personalities and adventures of early explorers like Marco Polo, Magellan, Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman, and Alexandra David-Neel. She eventually quit her research job in a windowless lab (staring at "planktonic fecal pellets" through a microscope and recording minute changes). Then, she charted a cross-continent route using ancient maps and out-of-date atlases, grabbed her childhood girlfriend Mel, loaded up their bicycles, and set off to pedal on a year-long trip from Turkey to India, following the route of Marco Polo. 

Along the way, they live on dried noodles, stale water, and the often unusual food and shelter offered from the locals who could neither speak English (and Harris does not speak their language) nor understand what the women are doing on bicycles on these high ranges. The cyclists are continually stopped by police (who mostly want to pose with the women and try out their bicycles), pushed off pot-holed highways by monstrous trucks, and even chased by wild yaks.

As we sped down the pass, every little bump and divot and pebble on the road blurred together into a pavement of pure concussion. Such is the price you pay to reach forbidden Tibet; pain in the legs, in the butt, and in the brain, which can't conceive a coherent thought because all it knows is the jackhammer jolting of the body and bike to which it is connected.  

But through all the adventures and challenges thrown at them, the women kept up their spirits, recording their daily feelings and trials with a camera and a notebook that eventually was turned into this book. They had plenty of time to consider the world around them as well as their place and purpose in the world. And oh, the descriptions of their observations and musings are wonderous, philosophical, emotional, colorful, and truly insightful.

The night air was cool for July and laced with the sweet breath of poplars and willows that grew in slender wands beside the river. No clean divisions between earth and sky, light and dark, just a lush and total blackness. I couldn't see the mountains but I could sense them around me, sharp curses of rock. The kind of country that consists entirely of edges.

And the places they bicycled. They pedaled and groaned and camped on such locales as:

[the] Tibetan Plateau, that upheaval of rock and ice and sky, but also the Pamir Mountains, where herds of sheep with improbably huge horns dodged avalanches and snow leopards with elegance close to flight. And the Taklamakan, a shifting sands desert dwarfed only by the Gobi and Sahara whose name, according to legend in not literal translation, means 'he who goes in never comes out'....Even more compelling than far-flung mountains and deserts were the stars above and beyond them, distant suns lighting who knows what other worlds.'

I always wonder when reading books such as this which depict exploration, survival, perseverance, and challenges, just how well I might do if faced with the same situations. In the case of Lands of Lost Borders, it is clear I would have given up on the first 15,000-foot climb up a mountain of potholed switchbacks. All the more reason to admire Harris and Mel's fortitude, but only from my cozy chair.

What is the point of exploring if not to reveal our place in the wild scheme of things, or to send a vision of who we are into the universe? A self-portrait and a message in a bottle; maybe no other maps matter....After all, the Latin root of the word explorer is "ex-plorare," with "ex" meaning "go out" and "plorare" meaning "to utter a cry."

Happy reading.

Fred

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In 1965, two men decide to ride small motor scooters from New York to California (don't ask why). En route, author Beagle describes the people, environment, and culture in a witty, detailed, friendly manner that makes you want to hear every observation he is willing to share.