Kate Harris

After cycling (illegally) across the Tibetan plateau in the university summer vacation, Kate Harris and her primary school friend Melissa come back a few years later to spend a year cycling the entire Silk Road from Istanbul to India. But it turns out that this isn't (just) another of those entertaining stories of punctures, visa problems, goat's-head soup, horrible weather and unwisely-chosen campsites, written to justify the year off from normal life. Harris is a science graduate whose aim since early childhood has been to become an astronaut and go to Mars, and she's also spent part of the time in between the two trips as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford working on the unintended political impact of scientific exploration, so she spends a lot of time digressing from the day-to-day descriptions of travel into reflections on the meaning and purpose of travel and exploration and her own motives in travelling. She also talks a lot about borders, where they come from and what they mean, in the context of the many borders they have to cross in Central Asia. It's a bit of a mixed bag: there are some very obvious observations and some quite profound ones, and she cites interesting, obscure travellers with the same gusto as she pulls out ubiquitous bits of the quotations dictionary. But overall, I found it a thoughtful, stimulating kind of a travel book, certainly a writer to watch out for in the future.… (altro)

Starting 2020 off with a non-fiction. I enjoyed a lot of it but was totally put off by the science in the second part. The ride through the silk road was wonderful and the descriptive writing was enchanting and astonishing. But at times, maybe because there was little to see, it seemed like a rush to go nowhere...which I think she mentioned towards the end.

Yet, I liked it. She quoted my favorite lines from a great movie, Contact"They should have sent a poet"

I also felt that she included a lot of her Oxford thesis about the history of science.… (altro)

No real introspection, perhaps because she's always with friends. Though we learn next to nothing about them, either. I think that solo travel gives more interesting stories.

Instead, in the personal parts, she throws in random pieces of science history. But only utterly mundane trivia that we all already know. She says that she blew off her degree in science history, and it shows.

The writing is always flowery and self-indulgent. Sometimes, it works. But you can only compare yourself to Neil Armstrong so many times before I start to worry about your ego.

Maybe I have just read too many of these stories lately, but I also get tired of privileged Western travelers who plop themselves down in random towns, without any plans or any money, unprepared.

> I didn't know, despite my best intentions to learn, how to fix a flat tire.

> Before we left, the family in Rize scribbled another family's name and phone number on a piece of paper, and in this manner Mel and I were passed like batons between generous friends all across Turkey. The challenge was locating our would-be hosts in the next town, for typically they didn’t speak English. We stumbled on a fail-safe tactic: upon arriving we'd head to a busy sidewalk and call the host family's number. As soon as someone picked up, we'd hand the cellphone to a random (and now very confused) Turkish person.

Here are some of the worst and best pieces of writing. You can decide which is which.

> The British Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard claimed that "polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." Winter bike trips in Turkey might be a close second.

> When I woke the next morning the tent ceiling was constellated with frost. All the stars seemed alien, ungathered, and for a moment I felt unsure what planet I was on, the sky above suspiciously crimson. Then I spotted an earthly landmark in the tent’s laundry line, where two pairs of wool socks and my watch drooped stiffly. I sat up to check the time and accidentally brushed the tent wall, sending the visible universe into supernova. Frost flaked off the ceiling, the fabric of space-time buckled and creased, frozen socks drop-kicked my lap. It was eight in the morning.

> In restricting the range of directions you can travel, in charging ordinary movement with momentum, a bike trip offers that rarest, most elusive of things in our frenetic world: clarity of purpose. Your sole responsibility on Earth, as long as your legs last each day, is to breathe, pedal, breathe—and look around. … Every day on a bike trip is like the one before—but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile. If anything, the world grew more inscrutable the longer I looked at it, and the less focused I was on the brute mechanics of pedaling—aching legs and lungs, kilometers covered and kilometers to come—the more awake I could be to the world around me, its ordinary wonders.

> After all, the term metaphor comes from the Greek meta (above) and pherein (to carry)—to be carried above, a flight into connection, so that after traveling long and far enough every mountain reminds you of another mountain, every river summons another river, and you learn enough landmarks by which to love the whole world

> The flock poured over the land like light, at once particle and wave, moving up the mountain with a liquid grace that left me stunned.… (altro)