“The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves,” she writes, “the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag, all in the dubious name of nationalism.” This is a tale of beautiful contrasts: broken landscapes and incomparable mountain vistas, repugnant sights and smells and euphoric baklava hangovers, geographic neighbors at war and the moving hospitality of total strangers.
Along the way, the author provides insightful discussions of national borderlines, for which she clearly has little use. With humor, deep sentiment, and often poetic prose, Harris takes the reader not only through “the stans” (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, etc.) of Asia, but also through the history and current state of adventure travel.
Due to a chance encounter with a children’s book, the author became particularly intrigued by Marco Polo, and she “decided to be just like him when I grew up.” Though she studied at such prestigious institutions as Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and MIT, school was merely “a venue…for exploration.” While the narrative is peppered with brief, entertaining vignettes about some of the author’s early travels, the meat of her story is the nearly yearlong bike ride following the Silk Road with her pal Mel. “Born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live,” Harris cultivated an early love affair with wilderness, exploration, and the unknown.
A debut travelogue chronicling a modern explorer's bicycle ride along the ancient Silk Road, a journey that beautifully reveals much about the history and nature of exploration itself.
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