'The initial trip Mel and I did on the Silk Road was just in China and Tibet for four months. We were just wonderstruck the whole time.

Why Kate Harris was attracted to the Silk Road

Harley Rustad's favourite Canadian book of 2018: Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris.

Kate Harris travelled 10,000 km through 10 countries across the Silk Road, then wrote a book about it.

The CBC Books spring reading list: 12 books you should read this season.

10 Canadian memoirs to check out this summer.

Lands of Lost Borders won the $30,000 RBC Taylor Prize for nonfiction and the $10,000 Kobo Emerging Writer Award for nonfiction. ( From Knopf Canada) This is a book that changes how one thinks about the world and the human compulsion to define it. So Harris quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Yule, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end. And where she'd felt that most intensely was on a bicycle, on a bygone trading route. Forget charting maps, naming peaks, leaving footprints on another planet: What she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. But somewhere in between sneaking illegally across Tibet, studying the history of science and exploration at Oxford and staring down a microscope for a doctorate at MIT, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines.

This trip was just a simulacrum of exploration, she thought, not the thing itself - a little adventure to pass the time until she could launch for outer space. Well along this path, Harris set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule. So she looked beyond this planet, vowing to become a scientist and go to Mars. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth. As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved - that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician, with a flair for basic science and endless slogging - had gone extinct.

Land of lost borders kate harris