Lands of Shed Borders carried me up into a state of openness and enjoyment I haven’t was feeling for years. It’s today’s traditional.’ -Pico Iyer

An excellent, fierce article writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bike along the Silk Road-an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion from the Places in Between, Lab Lady, and Crazy that dares us to problem the limitations we put on ourselves and the natural world.

As an adolescent, Kate Harris realized that the profession she about Lands of Shed Borders: A Journey within the Silk Road craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician-had gone extinct. From what she could describe the globe from small-town Ontario, famous brands Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to become discovered. Looking beyond this world, she decided to turn into a scientist and go to Mars.

In between their studies at Oxford and MIT, Harris triggered by bicycle down the fabled Silk Street with her years as a child friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in a few from the remotest areas on the planet, she realized an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who won’t live between the lines. Ignore charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she journeyed, the closer she came to a global as wild as she experienced within.

Lands of Shed Borders is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we place ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the limitations they place on character and mankind; and a meditation within the existential have to explore-the important longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris gives a travel accounts at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness from the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and idea with the history of research and exploration, Lands of Shed Borders celebrates our connection as human beings to the natural world, and ultimately to each other-a belonging that transcends any fences or tales that may separate us.