is rich not only because of the adventures it recounts, but in the telling of them. Getting to ride alongside Kate on her Silk Road journey is the literary adventure of a lifetime.' -Leigh Stein, author of Land of Enchantment 'This fascinating book, about an unbridled desire for exploration, completely thrilled me. 'This is a hymn to the pure love of travel: a brave and astonishing journey.' -Colin Thubron The honesty behind her self-doubt, her championing of simple human friendship, and her sheer determination to explore what she does not know, compel you to travel happily alongside her in Lands of Lost Borders.' -Barry Lopez 'Kate Harris arrives among us like a meteor-a hurtling intelligence, inquiring into the nature of political borders and the meaning of crossing over. Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years. Whether writing of Pony Club or remotest Tibet, her longing for Mars or her days at Oxford, she braids heart, mind and spirit with a wide-awake vitality that inspires wonder. 'Kate Harris packs more exuberant spirit, intrepid charm, wit, poetry and beauty into her every paragraph than most of us can manage in a lifetime. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous, about the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the stars and like our selves, can never be fully mapped. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle.

Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole Earth.

'Every day on a bike trip is like the one before-but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile.'Īs a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved-that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher-had gone extinct.

Lands of lost borders by kate harris