Lands Of Lost Borders: A Journey On The Silk Road, by Kate Harris

How can an author get so much so wrong when she is writing what amounts to a whiny travelogue? It is easy to sympathize–even empathize–with the author’s struggle against the borders that she finds in her way as she seeks to bicycle the silk road from Turkey to China. The author finds herself looking at other explorers with cynicism because of their nationalism or their concern for their own bottom line, and their own flawed behavior and views. Like most progressives, she seems a clueless, whinging, and unreflective sort of person who does not consider how she herself does not make for an appealing figure as a world traveler, so why would we be expected to put up with her follies any more than she puts up with the follies of others. What saves this book from being a total chore is the fact that the travel itself is compelling enough, even if the writer is far from enjoyable in the way she goes about explaining herself and more often trying to justify herself while she continually gripes about the difficulties of biking through Central Asia and dealing with the borders there.

A great deal of this book, as one might guess from the title, is the author’s inability to come to grips with the state. While the author protests the craziness and lack of efficiency in terms of being able to cross borders in Central Asia and the terrible quality of roads as well as tourist accommodations and the like, the author characteristically misunderstands the nature of the problem. The intense concern with borders and making sure that people cross them in ways that are properly documented is not a sign that the state is too powerful but that it is too insecure, and the lack of infrastructure for bicyclists demonstrates that weak states with isolated people do not tend to have the resources or the reasons to spend expensive investments on roads through nowhere. The sort of trade that led Marco Polo to be able to travel throughout Asia on behalf of the Mongol Khan was the result of a period of strong central power that was still unable to keep the roads of the area free of bandits; most modern governments are even less effective at making roads safe and pleasant for the few travelers brave or foolish enough to travel along them. In a world of badly run nations with terrible borders and intense insecurity, it is little wonder that the travails of a whiny Canadian bicyclist would not be high on a list of priorities for governments in the region.

In terms of its contents, this book is almost 300 pages, divided into three parts and 11 chapters. The book begins with a prologue that talks about an early troop the author made with a friend into Tibet, which was a bit of a misadventure but one which sets the tone for what follows. This is followed by three chapters that discuss the period before the author’s return trip to Central Asia to bicycle the rest of the silk road, including a discussion of her early fascination with exploration (1), her previous visit to Tibet (2), and a history of her experiences as a university student, including a desultory failed relationship (3). This is followed by four chapters which discuss the first part of the trip, including the author’s travels near the Black Sea in Turkey (4), the cold she felt in Georgia and Armenia (5), the experiences she had in Azerbaijan (6), and her experiences in the borderlands of the Caspian Sea (7). After this the author discusses the wilderness near the Aral Sea (8), her travels into Pamir (9), her cycling through the Tarim Basin and Tibet again in China (10), as well as the ends of her trip in Nepal and India (11). After this there is an epilogue, acknowledgments, permissions, and a selected bibliography.