Travel writer Kate Harris, with her childhood friend and fellow adventurer Mel Yule took on a tremendous challenge of cycling across the Silk Road. Harris documents their triumphs and pitfalls in her vivid, captivating memoir Lands of Lost Borders.
Just the thought of traveling such treacherous terrain and cold wet conditions as they did on bicycles makes me legs feel weak. But unable to go to Mars, her true goal, Harris chose the Silk Road.
It was wonderful to hear that total strangers treated them like long lost family and took them in for a night.
When they stayed with a Turkish family, they went with them to a tween birthday party. It was interesting how they don't generally say the word no, considering it blunt & dismissive.
Harris contemplated "how we long our whole lives for things we've never known, places we've never been, abstractions that come alive to us in unexpected ways. What does the Silk Road have to do with Mars, except everything? Perhaps the great task of modern explorers is not to conquer, but to connect, to reveal how any given thing leads to another: the red planet to the Silk Road, bicycles to the moon, a modern Georgian highway back in time to the Ujarma Fortress."
There was plenty of humour and confusion on their trip, like the misunderstanding of the meaning of words. A Georgian protected areas official mistook endangered animals with dangerous animals. When Mel explained she meant species at risk, he assured them, no, you aren't at risk! A restaurant owner who gave them tea, also spoke to them at length, but they didn't understand a word of what he told them.
Harris figured a great way to train / bulk up for her one year biking the Silk Road was with baklava.
I particularly enjoyed her detailed description of the Kazakhstan train trip. The friendliness of the Kazakhs was felt, how they shared their meal, which included a goat's head; children happily played in the aisles, and no one went to sleep; and the cramped stifling sleep bunk.
The photographs were lovely, and gave me a useful sense of the vastness of the land they traveled on.
Mountains and lakes and rivers are the oldest kinds of borders, Harris said, and the only she fully respects. "The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn't that they are monstrous, offensive, and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same problem with evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape - at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports - because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else. Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves. But would such fictions continue to stand if most of us didn't agree with them, or at least quietly benefit from the inequalities they bolster? The barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core."
I received Lands of Lost Borders in a GoodReads giveaway.
Until next time,
Kara
