Since childhood, Kate Harris has wanted to be an explorer: to test the boundaries of the known world, to go where few others have gone before. Reading Marco Polo's account of his journey on the fabled Silk Road, Harris was determined to make her own way there. But, like the Venetian explorer, her travels took a winding course. In Lands of Lost Borders, her luminous, incisive memoir, Harris chronicles her permanent wanderlust, her twisting career path and the months she spent cycling the Silk Road with her best friend.Raised in Canada, Harris dreamed of exploring not only this planet, but others: for years, her goal was to become an astronaut. She yearned to go to Mars, simultaneously to probe the borders of explored space and the deep questions of human existence. But Harris's journey took her first to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, then to the laboratories of MIT, where she began work on a Ph.D. But hours in the lab or the library never proved as fulfilling as exploring the byways and back streets of wherever she happened to be. Disillusioned and hungry for adventure, Harris and her friend Mel decided to go for it: to fly to Istanbul and bike as far as they could, through countries and checkpoints with unpronounceable names. The goal, in a sense, was the remote Tibetan Plateau, inaccessible to many of the world's citizens. But the greater aim, as for any explorer, was simply to go, to see: to "learn enough landmarks by which to love the whole world."
Harris's account covers thousands of miles and hundreds of years: she draws in Marco Polo, Charles Darwin, NASA and many other explorers past and present. Between anecdotes of kind strangers who offered food, shelter and friendship on her journey, Harris muses on artificial borders, the human impulse to wander, the power dynamics of nation-states and the ways we create our world. Her capacious intellect takes in poetry, politics, environmental writing and the strange rhythms of English spoken by her new friends. She doesn't spare the gritty details of the trip: stern checkpoint guards, exhausting traffic, much sweat and countless flat tires. But she is also awed repeatedly by the world as seen from a bicycle: a far-off river glittering "like an artery of light," the vast icy sweep of the Siachen glacier, "this territory of uplift and change." All travelers, she points out, risk "disappointment and transformation." Harris's journey includes both in spades--but the letdowns are far outweighed by wonder and joy.
Lyrical, brilliant and sharply observed, Lands of Lost Borders is a paean to wanderlust and a call for readers to launch their own explorations. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
Shelf Talker: Kate Harris's gritty, luminous memoir of cycling the Silk Road explores wanderlust and boundaries.