Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (HarperCollins Publishers)

Kate Harris, like many of us, was struck by wanderlust at an early age. Marco Polo became her role model and even after she realized his explorations were prompted by commercialism and not adventure, she still longed to imitate his journey. However she became terrified that the world had become too settled to satisfy her desire for wild travel and at seventeen sent letters to every leading political figure of the time, pleading her case for a human mission to Mars. She of course planned to be in that spacecraft. 

Nowhere on earth meets her stern criteria for untouched wilderness until she stands on an Alaskan glacier in the Juneau Icefield. Going back to the trail set by Marco Polo, she discovers Fanny Bullock Workman, an early 20th Century traveler who reached the Siachen Glacier, once part of Tibet and now claimed by Kashmir. Still an unvisited piece of the world, due to the military dispute between India and Pakistan, this glacier claims Harris’s imagination. It becomes the subject of her master’s thesis and eventually sends her off on a bicycle in the company of a childhood friend, following Marco Polo along the Silk Road. Her goal is the Siachen Glacier, along a route that will take her from Turkey through the Middle East and into China, Tibet, Nepal, and India.

There’s something about bicycle travel that lends itself to travel literature. The boozy old Irishwoman Dervla Murphy wrote a whole library shelf full of books about her cycling around the undeveloped world. Andrew Pham launched his writing career with Catfish and Mandala, his emotional rediscovery of his native Vietnam on a bicycle. Barbara Savage’s Miles from Nowhere has become a travel classic, telling how she and her husband spent two years traveling around the world on their bikes. Lands of Lost Borders is different from any of its predecessors, however. Although Harris disdains Henry Thoreau, her book is much like one he would have written, had he ever pulled himself out of Concord.

Anyone who travels across countries by bicycle is an athlete. Harris takes that part of herself for granted. Instead she gives voice to her wide-ranging intellect. She’s a scientist, a historian, and a poet which makes this book a constant source of surprise. She’s a risk-taker, who happily crawls under a border fence into another country when she lacks the appropriate papers for a conventional entry. She’s also a very young woman with a tinge of bitchiness, an occasional lapse into whining, and a generous helping of humor. One of her heroes, Alexandra David Neel, would have loved her. 

“Fat grey birds scattered,,,like a toss of ball bearings…Clouds pinched the sky.” Harris says of the first moments of her journey. In Georgia, she looks at Mount Ararat and sees it as “less an upheaval of rock than a cold clump of stars.” She finds a vital link between  environmental protection and trophy hunting--”Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off.” And the farther she rides, the more she agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “Nationalism is babyishness for the most part.”

Linking the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk to bicycling over the Caucasus Mountains isn’t far-fetched. Wilbur and Orville were avid cyclists before they developed their first plane and icy slopes occasionally send Harris and her companion into short flights that end in crashes. As they cycle into spring, the theme of her journey becomes clear to Harris:”No road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.” She learns to be tolerant of Polo’s unadventurous pragmatism since she is “so privileged, so assiduously comfortable that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.” Even so, as she crosses Uzbekistan’s desert, sleeping during the day and traveling after dark, she understands why “the Uzbek language has no word for fun.”

In Tibet they meet two elderly pilgrims who are crawling down a highway to reach Lhasa, their knees and arms protected with thick cloth but their foreheads sporting a thick callus “like a third eye.” In Nepal, the Buddha becomes an omnipresent entity after the cyclists pass through Lumbini. Any mystical connection is broken when Harris sees Siddhartha everywhere on shop signs and wonders what he would think of the Siddhartha Internet Cafe. 

She’s too much a scientist to dabble in mysticism but her observations of the natural world come close to that in the “absolute unmixed attention” that Simone Weil called prayer. And in the end, Harris concludes that her goal was never “a place to reach to reach, but a reason to go.” She now lives near the Canadian-Alaskan border, not too far from the Juneau Icefield that had first satisfied her hunger for wilderness. With any luck, someday she’ll write about that--an adventure in which she stays in one place.~Janet Brown