Lands if Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

This book is by a Canadian, who lives in Atlin BC.  She is a Rhodes Scholar and has other academic awards as well.

The book is primarily the tail of her two bicycle trips on the silk road in Asia.  As a child the author became enamoured with stories of adventurers like Marco Polo, Darwin, Shackleton, etc.  She has a serious adventure streak in her, one of her adventures is being part of a camp to simulate life on Mars.  She attends a University that pays for her do to junkets into far flung places of the world.  She takes a degree in the history of science at Oxford and then goes to MIT to work on her PhD.  However she becomes disillusioned when her faculty advisor steers her into boring lab work rather than field work so she quits.

The starts with her and a friend riding west from China on the silk road, sometimes sneaking across borders because they feared getting stopped.  The riding is very tough and dangerous.  Then a decade or so later the two women decide to complete their ride starting in Istanbul and working east.  She features some of the kindness shown to them by strangers, feeding and housing them at times.  They did not have much money so the help of strangers really was a blessing.  Their main diet was boiled ramen noodles and instant coffee.  She does not really share the really bad things that happened to them.  People in these largely muslim countries wonder why women are cycling alone.  They wear fake wedding rings and tell people their spouses are in trucks accompanying them.  At times they run into very bad weather, freezing cold or suffocatingly hot but they keep going.

The author does talk a bit about the history of science, the arbitrariness of borders, she does find the desserts starkly beautiful and enjoys being away from civilization.   They do meet with some officials along the way to discuss conservancy issues but you really feel they were just doing this for themselves. You have to admire their tenacity, I certainly wouldn't have the stamina to do it.  But I somehow expected something a bit more insightful from the book not just a log of their hardships.  Perhaps people who are really into extreme sports would appreciate this book more than I did.  I have read several books about the Camino and found them a lot more engaging and memorable.