Beginning with two middle-of-the-night, almost-caught clandestine checkpoint crossings into forbidden Tibet, the book heads back to Harris’ youth and her early love for science and exploration. The book moves seamlessly between the Silk Road adventure and backstory that led up to it. Speaking of her own desire a few pages later, Harris continues: “Places like the Tibetan Plateau or the Taklamakan Desert seemed to promise not answers, exactly, but a way of life equal to the wildness of existing at all.”

Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within.” Nor was she jolted from a routine, domestic existence by some kind of emotional crisis, as though only grief or loss or a search for love could justify a woman seeking risk and adventure on the open road.

Her inspiration, in part, came from Alexandra David-Néel, who traveled in Tibet in 1924 and wrote “My Journey to Lhasa.” Harris writes: “David-Néel wasn’t trying to ‘find herself’ through travel. It’s not a straight path, though, and destination really has very little to do with why she’s there. The basic story follows her adventures as she bicycles with her friend Melissa, “Mel,” and others along the Silk Road, the ancient path already well established when Marco Polo followed it, from Turkey into China and Nepal. Kate Harris’ “Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road,” is a compelling, suspenseful, insightful and elegant travel memoir. Instead, they are maddening because from that opening paragraph you know this one is going to be good - very good - and no matter what else is going on your world, the next several hours are going to be spent happily lost in a new story. Not because they are badly written or obtuse, or because they’re not what you thought they would be. Some books are maddening from the opening paragraph.

Lands of the lost borders