Published by Dey Street Books, 2018, 320 pages

If things had worked out differently this book might have been about Mars instead of the Silk Road. Kate Harris is a true explorer at heart, always seeking new places and new worlds. She contemplated signing up to go to Mars but realized during the simulation that she would be seeing it through a large suit and gloves and so decided to opt for more earthly places that she could touch.

She persuades a friend to cycle with her along the old Silk Road, initially through China. Sneaking into Tibet under cover of darkness (they don’t have the requisite papers), an official car pulls up while they are filling their water bottles. Heart sinking, Kate watches as the Chinese official kicks her tyres and tries to lift her bike. Then he walks back to the car and instead of returning with handcuffs, he hands her three crisp cucumbers.

Their second foray is more substantial and longer, from Turkey to Ladakh in northern India. They only take trains if it is unavoidable but manage to brave it through freezing cold and constant rain, searing heat, landslides and Central Asian bureaucracy. Their trip takes them to Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, then to China and Nepal.

The book is filled with the warmth and hospitality of ordinary people, the people who pass them on to friends and families in other villages, the ones who take them in and feed them and let them set up their tent in their gardens, the woman restauranteur in Uzbekistan who offers to wash their hair for them, and the Turkish gas attendant who scrapes out the frozen oatmeal from their mugs. “[I]n these simple gestures it seemed possible to rebuild the world.”

But this is more than a book about the road. Harris is fascinated by the nature of exploration: what drives people, and how it affects the landscape. She also writes about borders and their shifting nature, about cross-national conservation efforts that fly in the fact of political conflict. 

Harris writes beautifully and her passion for discovery and appreciation for beauty runs through the book. You follow the women on their often grueling journey and then, like an oasis, you get prose like this, and the ‘why’ makes sense. “If to be an explorer I must draw a map…let it be this: How the sky shifted and darkened over the plateau that night, and the sun gave a last golden glance through the clouds. How the mountains shone like bits of fallen moon all around me, glowed for a moment and were gone.”

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.