Lands of Lost Borders

April 9, 2018
Nature writer and adventurer Harris details her bike journey along the Silk Road, in this beautifully rendered if sometimes slow-moving debut. Growing up, Harris wanted to be an explorer; when she got older, however, she went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and later to MIT where she found the drudgery of the laboratory unbearable. As an escape, she and her best friend, Mel, planned their bike adventure and were soon pedaling along the Silk Road, starting on the pungent banks of the Black Sea (“The bottom waters are poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulphide, a colourless, poisonous gas that reeks of rotten eggs”). They biked across often treacherous landscapes (and took planes or trains along routes inaccessible by bike) through Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Nepal, and China; they ascended mountains and traversed river valleys. The trip concluded at the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas at the edge of the Tibetan plateau, where “the wind was more alive than the branches it moved, and so big it could only be the mountains breathing.” Harris’s talent is in her prose, as she offers breathtaking descriptions of the Silk Road, shrouded in mystery and wonder.