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Lands of Lost Borders Audiobook Summary

Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven’t felt for years. It’s a modern classic.” –Pico Iyer

A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road–an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved–to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician–had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars.

In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.

Lands of Lost Borders is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore–the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other–a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.

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Lands of Lost Borders Audiobook Narrator

Amy Landon is the narrator of Lands of Lost Borders audiobook that was written by Kate Harris

Kate Harris is a writer and adventurer with a knack for getting lost. Named one of Canada’s top modern-day explorers, her award-winning nature and travel writing has featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic Travel, Sidetracked and The Georgia Review, and cited in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. In 2019, she was awarded the RBC Taylor Prize, one of Canada’s most esteemed literature awards. She has degrees in science from MIT and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the history of science from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar. When she isn’t away on expeditions, or reporting on UN environmental negotiations for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Harris lives off-grid in a log cabin on the border of the Yukon, British Columbia and Alaska. This is her first book.

About the Author(s) of Lands of Lost Borders

Kate Harris is the author of Lands of Lost Borders

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Lands of Lost Borders Full Details

Narrator Amy Landon
Length 10 hours 59 minutes
Author Kate Harris
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date August 21, 2018
ISBN 9780062850805

Subjects

The publisher of the Lands of Lost Borders is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Biography & Autobiography, Literary

Additional info

The publisher of the Lands of Lost Borders is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062850805.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Will

May 04, 2022

The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder. Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides. There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet. Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.comHarris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map. There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative.From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief. Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland. image from NatureNeedsHalf.orgShe fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan. Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see? image from NatureNeedsHalf.orgI would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape. This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all. image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate HarrisIt may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018Publication date – August 21, 2018=============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pagesMelissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site.There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their tripIn case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes.The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the bookWhat’s on it - image from WikiThe Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47Interviews-----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18-----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?Coming home and writing about it. Mel and I spent over a year total biking the Silk Road on two different trips. Writing a book about the journey took me half-a-decade. And while I love the exposure to new places and new people that you get by travelling by bicycle, I find there’s as much (or even more) intensity and thrill and a sense of discovery when I’m sitting back at my desk, trying to put those experiences to words. Words and the world go very much hand-in-hand for me: I traveled vicariously through books long before I had the chance to travel anywhere myself, so I wanted to write something worthy, I hope, of the books that galvanized me out the door in the first place.The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1

Krista

July 11, 2018

Beyond avenging my childhood ideals of explorers, and figuring out how to be one myself, I wanted to bike the Silk Road as a practical extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people's minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides. So there I was, rich in unemployable university degrees, poor in cash, with few possessions to my name beyond a tent, a bicycle, and some books. I felt great about my life decisions, until I felt terrified. Always an overachiever, Kate Harris took a rural Ontario child's dream about going to Mars and endeavored to become an astronaut by obtaining an undergrad degree at UNC, earning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and starting a doctorate at MIT. Along the way, Harris set off on many adventures by bicycle, and when the lab work became too stifling, she enlisted her longtime friend, Mel Yule, to join her in finishing a quest they had started some years before: biking the Silk Road from Istanbul to its terminus in the Himalayas. On Harris' website devoted to this trip, you can watch a highlights video described as “showcasing ten months, ten countries, and ten thousand kilometers of the Silk Road...in roughly ten minutes”. And while the video does capture something of the punishing conditions the women biked through and the lovely people that the pair met along the way, it does nothing to showcase the power of Harris' written word in this book: the narrative is simply a delight to read, filled with personal anecdotes, historical perspectives, and an academically informed tying-together of the disparate bits; all written in the awe-filled voice of someone who has witnessed the ragged ends of the Earth and was changed by that wildness. Lands of Lost Borders is a rare and true pleasure.The root word of the word explorer is ex-plorare, with ex meaning “go out” and plorare meaning “to utter a cry”. Venturing into the unknown, in other words, is only half the job. The other half, and maybe the most crucial half for exploration to matter beyond the narrow margins of the self, is coming home to share the tale.The obstacles that Harris and Yule faced on this trip are fascinating to read about, but not wholly unexpected: the physical challenge of carrying everything you might need – tent and sleeping bag, dry goods and cooking stove, clothes and spare bicycle parts – on the frame of your bike as you pedal down roads of varying stability; the weather that ranged from a month of sleet in a Turkish winter, to the punishing heat of a desert plain, to snow and thin air in the world's highest mountain range; attempting to interact with locals in an everchanging string of languages you don't understand; arranging visas to enter countries legally, or sneaking around the barriers to those areas that are barred to foreigners – as an adventure tale, there is much to inspire the imagination. And while I sometimes found the romanticism of Harris' writing to be a bit indulgent, I decided to submit to it as an honest expression of her own sense of wonder: • We savoured nubs of chocolate all the sweeter for their smallness as the sun sank behind the mountains, and when it was too dark to read birdflight into speech anymore, even the silence was like something winged.• As the sun rose it tugged gold out of the ground and tossed it everywhere, letting the land's innate wealth loose from a disguise of dust.• Just another night on the Silk Road, with silence settling over the fields and the crickets resuming their own strange incantations, spells that conjured beads of dew from blades of grass and lulled us to sleep under a smoke of stars. When Harris was at Oxford, she focussed on the history of science, and in particular, was interested in the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas; a region of Kashmir claimed by both India and Pakistan which is not only the world's highest battleground, but has become the world highest and biggest garbage dump. It was such places of fuzzy and disputed borders along the Silk Road – like the Aksai Chin (Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession), or the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblate (majority Armenian population, claimed by Azerbaijan because of imposed Soviet era borderlines) – that Harris and Yule sought out along the way, and because they had secured some funding for their trip from wilderness conservation groups, they meet up with local experts and guides periodically to discuss those species who choose to ignore mankind's imaginary boundaries. This kind of anti-nationalism becomes the undercurrent of the narrative, and along with other progressive truisms (I don't know about calling out North America and Western Europe as the world's biggest contributors to climate change while on a road that straddles India and China), there's an anti-capitalist bent to Harris' desire to avenge her childhood ideal of explorers (as quoted in the first passage). It was the adventure tales of Charles Darwin and Marco Polo that had first sparked Harris' wanderlust when she was a child, but as an adult, she learned that all her idols had feet of clay: Charles Darwin suffered a pitiable “withdrawal from wonder” as he spent his later years close to home, churning his data in theory; turns out, Marco Polo was never a true explorer, just a greedy capitalist who was looking for trade routes; the Wright Brothers gained the sky but sold their plane to the highest bidding military (a fact Harris had taken in at Oxford “like a knife to the heart”). Even the astronauts who once so inspired Harris were never sent on missions of pure exploration: Astronauts rave about how they can't see any borders from low Earth orbit, yet the whole enterprise of space exploration is fuelled by a rabid nationalism. The same loyalty that sparked the Cold War also launched humans to the moon. How does cynical ambition, the capacity for mutually assured destruction, give rise to something as wondrous as a stroll on the Sea of Tranquility? My natural inclination has been to push back against someone who uses her position within the wealth and stability of western civilisation to attempt to tear down that civilisation, but Harris has studied more and seen more than I ever will and I find myself unwilling to criticise her conclusions too harshly: if Harris can really see a way towards easing deadly border disputes through cooperative conservation efforts, more power to her. Ride far enough and the road becomes strange and unknown to you. Ride a little farther and you become strange and unknown to yourself, not to mention your travelling companion. Ultimately, beyond the political, this journey reads as one of self-discovery for Kate Harris. For anyone who was enchanted by, say, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, I would say read Land of Lost Borders: it's more serious and reflective, better written, and challenging of worldviews. I loved this book, cover to cover.

Heather(Gibby)

January 13, 2018

I received an advance reader's copy fro a Goodreads giveaway. You can't hep but admire the determination of Ms. Harris and her companion Mel to complete the bicycle journey along the Silk Road. This journey took over a year in conditions varying from freezing to scorching temperatures, and very little in the way of creature comforts along the way. I really enjoyed her descriptions of the terrain, and the many of the historical references to the locations she travelled through, especially in the determination of the geographical borders between countries is established and the routes of some of the traders/explorers such as Marco Polo who had traveleld along the route in the past. Ms. Harris also give an overview of her own history, and what ultimately led to her taking this journey. I did feel that there were some unneeded side stories that I skimmed through, especially recounting Darwin's travels and adventures. having actually read Darwin's own accounts, I had no need revisiting them.

MJ

July 04, 2019

I had been craving a good travel memoir for some time now - Kate Harris' Lands of Lost Borders not only hit the spot, it completely exceeded my expectations... Packed with historical, geographic and scientific facts, literary references and philosophical wisdom, this book is an impressive debut and well deserving the recognition. Harris' passion, curiosity, and love for mountainous landscapes and vast spaces are contagious. Though I've never felt particularly drawn to Central Asia as a travel destination, nor compelled to hop on an almost yearlong bike trip, her courage and determination certainly are envious. As is her ability to recount her journey, and share her experiences... The words are put together so perfectly on the pages, I was definitely along for the adventure. And I did not want it to end. I feel as though the magic of the Silk Road, its incredible stories and people met along the way, are now also a part of me... Unexplainably beautiful. Kate Harris is a rockstar explorer, and an extremely gifted writer.

Laurie

November 20, 2018

Disclaimer: I did not receive a free copy of Land of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road; I paid full price for it at the bookstore and I am so glad that I did. Kate Harris really is a wonderful writer and even more than that she is a wonderful thinker. Her ability to make connections between her lived and inner experiences and the wider, wilder, world are what make this book fulfilling. There are so many books out there about journeys alone the Silk Road that it would seem as though one more wouldn't be necessary. Ms. Harris has written a necessary book. Her thoughtfulness about the bigger issues such as wilderness, borders, exploration challenge the reader to think of these concepts in new ways. A great finish to my 2018 reading challenge.

Ron

November 02, 2017

From small town Ontario, Kate Harris went on to study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and earned science degrees from UNC and MIT. The passion driving her was space exploration but once she ended up in a lab she took off to explore the Silk Road by bicycle and reinvented herself as a nature and travel writer. Her writing style, powers of observation and academic background, along with her thirst for exploration, are such that this memoir deserves to sit with authors like Rory Stewart, Pico Iyor and the sort of classics that Harris includes in her select bibliography. And beyond its considerable entertainment value for the armchair traveler, it should be noted that this book very much does what the best of the genre does: it makes you want to get outside and explore.

Christine

November 27, 2017

This book was phenomenal. Filled with imagery that transports you across continents and historical knowledge that flings you through time, Harris' delightful – if saddle sore – journey through Asia's ancient Silk Road will make you swear to take your own trip. And swear off it on the next page. Freezing weather, rain, snow, terrifying traffic, washboard roads (when there were roads at all), an eternity of living on instant noodles, instant coffee, and instant oatmeal. Harris manages to communicate her deep joy and gratitude for this experience, for every bleak vista she cycles by, while not holding back her about exhaustion, aching muscles, illnesses, and fear of detention travelling through countries with restrictive and byzantine tourism policies. In every line her brilliant writing and lyrical imagery shines through, carrying you along with her on the back of her bicycle. I feel truly privileged to have gotten a chance to read this book pre-release, having won it in a draw, and I highly recommend it to any fans of travel writing looking for new lands to explore. Coming to a bookstore near you in January 2018.

Lucy

December 10, 2017

After reading the 4-page prologue I wanted to cancel all of my plans and just keep on reading. After reading 10 more pages I wanted Kate Harris to be my new best friend. Kate and her friend Mel (Melissa) spent almost a year cycling along Marco Polo’s Silk Road from Istanbul to the Himalayas. They didn’t know anyone, didn’t know the languages, and had barely useful maps. They were up for adventure, and adventure is what they got. They snuck past border guards; rode through searing heat, snow, and rain and mud; damaged and temporarily lost their bikes; and Kate even had her only pair of biking shorts stolen by a monkey. They were rewarded by the kindness of strangers who fed them and gave them places to sleep. Most remarkable of all, at the end of it all Kate and Mel were still good friends. Interesting. Well written. It almost makes me want to visit some of those hard to get to places. It definitely makes me want to read whatever Ms. Harris writes next.

Preethi

September 04, 2020

This book will go down as one of the best books I have read, of all times.Through her words, Harris took me along with her on the Silk Road, sneaking into the Tibet, going through the bureaucratic processes in the 'stan' countries, riding in the high lands and the steppes - and through this amazing journey I took from my couch, Harris gave me enough backstories about a few real world problems and how they are affecting us. Though I will never have the stamina, ability and willpower to undertake a trip of this size, and the ability to write so beautifully about it, seeing Harris' views on wildness vs wilderness (one being a type of place, another the state of mind), tourists claiming wanderlust towards the exotic and ignoring the everyday, that one can travel wildly anywhere should one want to, love for nature, mountains and the untouched, freedom, borders, her own privilege which opened up so many roads for her, a viewpoint where we seek risk on our travels whilst the natives go through them everyday etc made me feel on multiple occasions that it could be me writing these - I felt a strange sense of validation in Harris's writing, that most of my opinions are not exclusively mine in a gratifying way - I am glad it is in writing!I think this love for the author, and hence her words and experiences started when I read her implicit views about Tibet and the Chinese oppression there as she refuses to enter Tibet legally; and then it only grew as she spoke about how borders are irrelevant in places like Siachen and yet there they are, soldiers guarding it night and day; continuing on to see her impeccable achievements in school, Oxford and MIT; the fact that she is a fellow Pacific North Westerner; her love for books, referring various authors and the sheer beauty of her words as she is giving you a glimpse into her emotions; the motivation to ride down the Silk Road, which is to see beyond the borders - a job she does really well through that one year. I learnt a lot about the world as I read about Fanny Bullock Workman and her expedition to Siachen; the skirmish at Mt. Ararat (a place that I have always wanted to go because of the Noah mythology ) , the Turks and Armenians; the saints and rules and the rich civilization that came from the 'stans'; the life of Tibetans in Tibet vs in India; the concrete roads by the Black Sea and the ecology destruction there; caviar diplomacy and so many other nuggets of information which have made me more aware.We need more such books to be written - books which talk about the joy of feeling free when one is going about the world; where travel is not glorified as THE ONLY THING that matters but that exploration is important to expand our horizons; where travel is not for Instagram but for the self; which intersperse, lest we forget, memoirs with travel experiences with local life - all said as a matter of fact, and not by taking sides. Need I say more, I LOVED every single word in this book! (And I was so glad to see it was blurb-endorsed by my other favorite author, Pico Iyer)

Wendy

December 07, 2017

In “Lands of Lost Borders”which I won through Goodreads Giveaways Kate Harris combines travel, history and literature in her remembrance of a cycling adventure that took her along the fabled Silk Road. It begins with a young girl in an Ontario town who dreamt of exploration and decided that instead of following in the footsteps of adventurers like Marco Polo and Magellan would become a scientist and tackle space exploration, settling for a shot at being one of the first colonists on Mars. Like all dreams Kate Harris’s got curtailed with her postgraduate studies at Oxford and a Rhodes Scholarship to MIT. Yet her desire to explore never died and instead or working in a lab, Kate along with her friend Mel Yule make a bike trip along the Silk Road that has them sneaking under border check points, suffering visa problems and surviving on noodles, instant coffee and “scrapes of laughter” as exhausted, muscles aching and facing all kinds of nasty weather they experience the freedom of cycling, a clarity of purpose and the ordinary wonders of nature. With a flowing natural writing style and unique observations like a whiskery woman sitting by a wood stove and the Georgia man insulating his barn roof with hay, Kate Harris chronicles an adventure that keeps you engrossed from start to finish. Laced with historical anecdotes, a collection of pictures and reflections on a wealth of people they meet along the way the reader is taken on an entertaining and informative journey not soon forgotten.I thoroughly enjoyed “Land of Lost Borders” hoping that in January 2018 it will stimulate a thirst in others to explore the unique places this world still has to offer.

Angel

April 26, 2018

Quite possibly my favourite travel memoir I've ever read - it almost feels offensive to even classify this as travel lit, because there is so much more to that. Kate is an incredible writer and she seamlessly weaves excerpts from prolific explorers, scientists, and writers, bits of history and present-day context, and past personal experiences into the narrative of her epic bike journey. I was thrilled to read about the mishaps along the road from hiding in ditches to pretending to be married, but I found I was most appreciative to read about Kate's personal journey as she went from aspiring Mars astronaut to passionate (and then perhaps not-so-passionate) graduate student, redefining her relationship with science and exploration.

Marzie

August 27, 2018

"Be present, utterly present. This world deserves your deepest attention... Wake up. Keep your eyes focused on what's bigger than than the sadness directly in front of you..."I'm a great believer in the idea that travel changes a person and I've always loved books (non-fiction or fiction) about long journeys. Not everyone can be fortunate enough to go on life changing expeditions, but armchair travel via a book like this one can still provide plenty of insights. In Lands of Lost Borders Canadian cyclist Kate Harris has written a beautiful book about journeys, both external and internal. I've seen several reviewers compare this book to Cheryl Strayed's Wild and while not wanting to throw shade on Strayed's book, there is simply no comparison for me, other than that they are both about women who go off on a long journey and find themselves. Harris' book is far more contemplative and less self-consumed than Strayed's. She isn't spending time trying to figure out why she's a hot mess. She offers deep thoughts about exploration, the changing nature of scientific inquiry, and about the countries, people and borders of Central Asia. She and her travel partner Mel endure bitter cold, bureaucracy, isolation, yet are buoyed by the warmth and benevolence of people as they cycle through some of the remotest and most inhospitable corners of the world. Through it all, from Darwin to Sagan, Harris contemplates the explorers and scientists who have inspired her and who make her question what a true life of adventure and exploration really looks like. Though she began with yearning for Mars, Harris seems to have made her peace with adventure here on Earth. The evolution of Harris' Silk Road experience is told both in this book and on her original blogging site, Cycling Silk. You can also find a short video of her journey with her friend Mel here. The cyclists were fortunate in the period of time during which they embarked on their Silk Road journey, as many of the regions have since undergone further political and internal struggles. Giving us a sense of the vastness and wonder of the journey itself, rather than her destination, from Istanbul, Turkey to Leh, Ladakh, Harris's account of her wanderlust is sure to become a classic in the genre of travel narratives. I received a Digital Review Copy and a paper review copy, in exchange for an honest review.

Stacey

December 04, 2021

Thank you to Kate Harris and the publisher for sending me a copy of Lands of Lost Borders:Out of Bounds on the Silk Road. I haven't finish it, but she is such a good writer I had to leave a preemptive 5 star review.Finished the book and am still with my original 5 star review! Her writing is thought provoking, insightful and interesting! This is one of the only non-fiction books I've ever read and I am not disappointed! Loved every minute of it (except for maybe the break between the Silk Road trips, which was very short in perspective to the rest of a most enjoyable book).

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