Animals and plants that can no longer be found to the north or south, at least not to any large degree, thrive in the DMZ. On traveling to South Korea (a trip that pre-dated the cycling adventure of this book), she visited the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the Koreas and was amazed to find that this 160-mile long, 2.5-mile wide strip of land without human touch has returned to wilderness. She writes: “Unlike political frontiers, so crisp and martial – precisely here is Tajikistan, exactly there is Afghanistan – ecological borders are more often murky, a mosaic of give-and-take: the thinning of greenery above the treeline at Zorkul, say, or the interlude of dusk that drew marmots from their dens.”īut, as Harris finds, however artificial the lines on a map may be, they do contain potent meaning and have tangible effects on peoples and ecosystems.
Human-drawn borders disrupt but cannot entirely eliminate the natural flow of rivers, glaciers, forests, and even nomadic people, who continue to defy them. But, as Harris sets out to demonstrate, the borders we are used to seeing on maps are artificial.
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road recounts Harris and Mel’s cycle adventure from Istanbul, Turkey to Ladakh, India, passing through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Tibet, and Nepal on the way. Kate Harris and her travel companion, a childhood friend named Mel, push themselves far beyond the comfort zones of even the fairly intrepid traveler, including this reviewer, whose adventures bussing from Kathmandu, Nepal to Leh, India pale in comparison to Harris’s experience cycling this same route. However, there are no traces of pasta, yoga, or steamy Balinese love affairs here. Like many a twenty-first century travelogue, Lands of Lost Borders is as much about the inner journey of the author as the outer, physical, map-plotted journey that she follows.
0 kommentar(er)
