Expanding Horizons
Since I can’t really go anywhere at the moment, I’ve been embarking on armchair travelling. Most recently, I finished Lands of Lost Borders; out of bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris. It’s an account of two women who rode their bikes along the Silk Road. My first thought at reading the back of the book was “what kind of foolishness is this?”—then I bought the book and started reading.
A Silk Road documentary I watched as a teenager in the late 1980s instilled a fascination of this route in me. Many years later, I even tried to read Marco Polo’s travel account (I found it dry and didn’t get far—Marco Polo hadn’t made it out of Turkey when I put it down for good). When I travelled in China in 2002, I made a point of going to Xi’an an end of the Silk Road (where the author didn’t go, instead she went through Tibet).
On the surface the book is an interesting a travel account, but there is more to it than that. The theme of connections in both time and space are strong. I enjoyed the juxtaposition between experience and other themes like going to Mars and local history, bits on Darwin and Neil Armstrong.
Perhaps the greatest task of modern explorers is not to conquer but to connect, to reveal how any given thing leads to another: the red planet to the Silk Road, bicycles to the moon, a modern Georgian highway back in time to the Ujarma Fortress.
from pg 137 Lands of Lost Borders; out of bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris
Interesting facts such as how the Wright Brothers used muslin cloth to cover the wings of the Wright flier, a cloth typically used to make women’s undergarments. Then in 1969, Neil Armstrong took some of that fabric to the moon and back. What I wished she mentioned, that would make a nice circle of women’s undergarmets, was how the space suit he wore on the moon was made by bra manufactures because they were used to dealing with complex patterns with multiple layers (I have a whole book on this in my TBR pile—so there’ll be more on this later). Instead, the author ran with a circle of bicycles and how they inspired the construction of that first plane (also good).
The author reminded me of how tame I am—riding a bike along such a route seems like an impossible and unnecessarily dangerous task. But then risky things always seem that way. Maybe I should figure out how to step out of my current tame and risk-less rut—which is what this book left me thinking about.
note - photos were taken by me on my 2002 trip to China