'Lands of Lost Borders' by Kate Harris

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- A Journey on the Silk Road -

This book should have a far wider audience than those who look at this thread but here seemed like the best place to put this 'review'.

This is more than just a chronicle of the bike trip she made with her childhood friend Mel. It is about exploration - not just places she rides through, also ourselves and our place in the world. This is not meant to put you off.

This briefly describes it far better than I taken from a bike magazine:
'Kate Harris’s luminous prose traces her voyage from suburban Toronto to the Tibetan Plateau, as she follows in the footsteps of explorers like Marco Polo and Alexandra David-Néel, deploring the borders that frustrate and bisect her journey and seeking the sublime.

What could have been yet another self-absorbed bike-touring chronicle is redeemed by the quality of Harris’s writing, the acuity of her observations, and the intellectual heft borne of her years in academia.

To read
Lands of Lost Borders is to fall in love all over again with wildness, wide open spaces, and the endless lure of a distant horizon. I daresay Dervla Murphy would be impressed.'

I have yet to succumb to the delights of Touring or Adventure cycling yet I would highly recommend this book.
 
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Flicking thru one of the broadsheet's last weekend's travel section I stumbled across an article of books to read, if one's travel plans have been altered by the corona pandemic. This is how this book was described:

Harris, an academic high-flyer from Canada, had ambitious plans to be an astronaut, then decided there was exploring enough to be done on planet Earth. Cycling the Silk Road with a childhood friend, she pedals to places where authorities don't want her to go, including Tibet. On the page, she flits easily across supposed boundaries between travelogue and memoir, science and poetry. The result is a marvellous debut by a wanderer and wonderer, an author with boundless curiosity and zest for life that enthuses every page.


I should have mentioned in the first post I have no affiliation with the author in any way.
 
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