Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead — Oxford, MIT, a plan to work on Mars. Then she rode a bicycle from Turkey to India along the Silk Road with her oldest friend, ten months, including a stretch smuggled into Tibet without permits, and changed her mind about what’s left to explore. The riding is superb — passes, headwinds, checkpoints, hospitality from people with nothing — and running under it is a real argument about borders as inventions and about why Marco Polo is the wrong model.
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road