Kate Harris’ Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road is a compelling, suspenseful, insightful and elegant travel memoir ... The book moves seamlessly between the Silk Road adventure and backstory that led up to it ... The book also moves easily between narrative and philosophy ... There are certainly adventures. Dangerous roads around the Black Sea, mistaken imprisonment in a tea house, visa problems, bad weather, bad roads, hunger, illness, lost bicycles, and the seemingly ever-present kindness of strangers keep the book moving along. And there are certainly digressions into discussions of Darwin, Sagan, Polo, ecology and regional history. Every one of them is a thread you can’t undo ... This is one that will have you dreaming.
While much of Harris’ motivation for going somewhere new to expand consciousness and increase a sense of connection to the world—is common in the genre, her work belongs to the subset of writers who go beyond leisure traveler into something more like explorer (an anachronistic profession she longs to join), largely by virtue of the effort it takes to propel herself down this road less traveled, a trek riddled with challenges logistical, physical, and bureaucratic ... Harris...superimposes the books she read and loved onto the landscape she witnesses—and [this] is one of the most compelling things about her style. The narrative is peppered with explorers, poets, artists, and scientists ... Beyond her authoritative ability to incorporate lessons historical and scientific into her narrative, Harris has a knack for lovely turns of phrase and crafting memorable images out of small details ... Passing through some of the planet’s least-forgiving territory, though not without instances of heartwarming generosity from strangers she encounters, Harris pursues wildness rather than wilderness.
Harris does describe an almost year-long cycle trek from Turkey to Nepal and India, but her account unfortunately leaves us little wiser about conditions along her route today. She starts well—their trip through Turkey is pretty well documented—but then Harris seems to have tired of taking notes. Kyrgyzstan gets just two paragraphs ... Harris’s creation is to some extent autobiography masquerading as a travel tale. The trip itself fills about three-quarters of the 290 pages, but Harris’s account of it focuses to a substantial extent on her subjective perceptions. While there is plenty of sweat, fatigue and sunscreen as you would expect, and Harris is particularly interested in the stars and views of distant mountains, most of the text is a set of vignettes describing memorable people she met, but largely in terms of her own reactions to them. Her pursuit of a scientific career led her to study the history of science, so she is remarkably well-read in that field, but also in many others. So her road across Asia takes in many, many detours of the intellectual sort off the subject of the trip itself ... Still, the book is well written. Land of Lost Borders is a fluent treatise on the borders which had previously delimited Harris’ life, but if you’re interested in learning about the borders on today’s Silk Road, try Tim Cope.
...Harris understands the problems of romanticizing the age of exploration, and throughout the book she attempts to reconcile her desire to be the first and only person in uncharted territory with her position as an upper class, educated, White Canadian who benefits from 'explorers' who considered themselves 'discoverers' of the Indigenous people of her own country ... However, because so much of the book describes her intellectual history and weaves in research (all of which is fascinating), the actual narration of the journey sometimes suffers—and her descriptions sometimes portray people she meets as part of the scenery or cast them as milestones on her own journey rather than as people in their own right, an insidious and problematic element of the Euro-American travel writing tradition. Stylistically, while Harris’ poetic writing can sometimes veer close to the edge of 'too much,' overall it is stunning, and there are many passages that require a second reading just for enjoyment of language. The memoir is extremely smart, and she consciously works to make it as vast in scope as travel writing from an earlier age but without the cultural problems of those eras. She makes a valiant and beautifully-written effort without being overly apologetic, which is crucial to keeping the book balanced on the line between culturally sensitive and patronizing.
An immersive and keenly observed debut ... It is as thrilling to read about her ascents with a friend into the 16,000 foot peaks in Central Asia on a bicycle as it is scary to imagine trying such a feat oneself ... The book is packed with insights on why we travel ... Her excursion across the 'Stans' wilderness is much more than that. It is filled with kind people who invited the two women to camp in their yards or sleep in their homes ... Two disappointments: there are no photos in the book. More consequentially, the single map on the title page is inadequate. It is hard to follow their journey. Nevertheless, we are so lucky that this 'freelance explorer' has left us an uncompromising, breathless record of her Eastern excursion.
In Lands of Lost Borders, her luminous, incisive memoir ... covers thousands of miles and hundreds of years: she draws in Marco Polo, Charles Darwin, NASA and many other explorers past and present ... 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 ... 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.
Any traveler will surely find this a hard book to put down. Chances are that those with wanderlust will also wish for the stamina and courage of the author, Kate Harris, and her friend Melissa. ... Harris blends her exploring with a scientific love of nature. And, in today’s world, she is also concerned with the political and economic predicaments of the people in the lands she visits. She continues to be a voracious reader ... So it is that she enlivens her own travel writing with the thoughts and dreams of great naturalists, explorers, poets and travelers of the past.
Like many a twenty-first century travelogue, Lands of Lost Borders is as much about the inner journey of the author as the outer, physical, map-plotted journey that she follows. However, there are no traces of pasta, yoga, or steamy Balinese love affairs here. Kate Harris and her travel companion, a childhood friend named Mel, push themselves far beyond the comfort zones of even the fairly intrepid traveler ... Lands of Lost Borders concludes that it is the journey, rather than the destination, that counts. Harris does not – indeed, cannot – fully map the places she passes through, just as she does not find answers about how to turn the act of exploration into a noble rather than conquering cause. But her apparent drive to name and label gives way to a celebration of human connections with each other, and with the natural world.
Natural history devotee Harris’ debut is an homage to science—a love letter to geology, zoology, astronomy, and everything in between—and a travelogue-memoir in which she traces her academic pursuits, solo travels, and year-long bicycle trek along the storied Silk Road with her dear friend, Mel ... Vivid, pithy descriptions read like indelible poetry, exemplifying Harris’ reverence for the interconnectedness of our world. Lands of Lost Borders is illuminating, heart-warming, and hopeful in its suggestion that we will explore not to conquer but to connect.
This is a tale of beautiful contrasts: broken landscapes and incomparable mountain vistas, repugnant sights and smells and euphoric baklava hangovers, geographic neighbors at war and the moving hospitality of total strangers. Harris explains the grueling and sublime nature of biking through descriptions of impoverished yet beautiful places as well as the fraught history and hopeful future of her kind ... Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking.
Nature writer and adventurer Harris details her bike journey along the Silk Road, in this beautifully rendered if sometimes slow-moving debut ... Harris’s talent is in her prose, as she offers breathtaking descriptions of the Silk Road, shrouded in mystery and wonder.
