Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  Admittedly, I’d spend more time musing about borders and explorers once back home and better able to breathe. For the time being I was preoccupied with staying upright on my bike. Some days the road was barely there, a faint scar in the sand or a spill of rocks indistinguishable from the rest of a mountain’s rubble. At one point it disappeared entirely beneath a stream. Glacial meltwater sluiced between my toes as I dragged my bike through it, and I couldn’t feel my feet for hours. Also reliably freezing were the headwinds, bitter and constant, as if hidden deep in the Himalaya was the world’s core of wind, sculpting the planet as it streamed off glacial ice.

  It didn’t help that our loaded bikes were effectively bulky sails, heaped as they were with tents, sleeping bags, spare parts, tools, and food—all the instant noodles, peanut butter, and misleadingly packaged snacks we needed to survive, barely. Even if grocery stores and restaurants had been commonplace in western Tibet, Mel and I had no cash left to buy fresh rations, at least none accessible. We’d stashed our last hundred-dollar bill in the hollow metal tubing of my handlebar, making a piggy bank of my bike, but after months on the road the money was stuck inside, effectively welded to the aluminum.

  Caloric relief occasionally arrived in the form of meals shared with us by Tibetans. One moment we’d be alone on the plateau, and the next we’d be surrounded by nomads who materialized from the mountains. A waft of smoke and sheep’s wool on the wind and there they were, men and women and children with burnished copper faces and chapped red cheeks and thick ropes of licorice hair. The men wore fancy if tattered dinner jackets and jaunty felt hats. The women’s necks were slung with bright chunks of amber and turquoise and coral. When we were lucky, they invited us back to their tents for tsampa, a gruel of roasted barley, and yak butter tea, a brew that congealed as we sipped it.

  “Tastes like . . . animal?” mused Mattias, his upper lip shiny with lard. He slurped again at the thickening slurry and nodded. “Tastes like yak.”

  The canvas tent breathed in and out. An elderly man beamed at us as he absently rubbed a string of wooden beads, his calluses like dark coins in his palms. We sat on hard wooden benches and sipped our tea, our eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness and sting of dung smoke. It was a simple home with a thousand gleaming surfaces: porcelain-looking cups and bowls, tins whose Chinese labels I couldn’t decipher, pots and kettles, a clock that didn’t work, its thin hands unsteady in the wind that shook the fabric walls. I had no idea how the family moved all of this from camp to camp, or how often they moved camps in general, or a million other details I longed to learn but lacked the words to ask about, so I just smiled dumbly and scooped buttery clumps of tsampa into my mouth with my fingers.

  Across the tent, tacked to its supportive beams, a glossy poster caught my eye. It featured juicy-looking burgers, golden french fries, bowls of cherries and oranges and ice cream, and foamy milkshakes all spread on a red-and-white picnic blanket in a lush forest next to a waterfall. We’d seen similar posters all across western China, whether in Han restaurants in Kashgar, Muslim mud-brick huts in Xinjiang, or Buddhist camps in Tibet. They fascinated me not just for the torturously improbable feast they portrayed—food that was the stuff of fantasy, unavailable for thousands of miles—but for the odd familiarity of the scene. For all I could tell, the posters showcased woodsy rural Ontario, where my own bedroom walls had been tacked with posters of mountains and deserts, of horizons picked clean by wind. We were longing right past each other.

  After the meal, Mattias brought out his German edition of Seven Years in Tibet, which is about an Austrian mountaineer’s escape into Tibet from a prisoner of war camp in India. He flipped to the middle of the book and showed our hosts a black-and-white photograph of the young, grinning, bare-armed Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent opposition to China’s occupation of Tibet. The Tibetans craned close to catch a glimpse of him.

  Under Chinese rule, it was illegal to possess a photo of the exiled spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet—a place more accurately named “Bod,” as Tibetans have referred to their homeland throughout recorded history. From the seventh to ninth centuries, the glory days of the Tibetan Empire, Bod stretched into parts of modern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China. Roughly six centuries later, when Marco Polo followed the Silk Road onto the plateau, he arrived in the much smaller territory of what he called “Thebeth”—less the name of a coherent nation-state, as the modern concept goes, and more a geographic description from an old Turkic word for “heights.” By then Tibet was under Mongolian rule, though Polo reported that the inhabitants of that “desolated country” refused to use Kublai Khan’s paper money, preferring instead their usual currency of salt.

  Over the next few centuries, Tibet was variously administered by dynastic China, under attack by the British Empire, or enjoying a rare lull of peace and self-rule. The latter ended in 1950, when the People’s Republic of China invaded the Buddhist country and eventually forced the Dalai Lama to sign over Tibet’s sovereignty. Eight years later, when the Chinese violently suppressed an uprising in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama fled for his life into India and tens of thousands of Tibetans followed him. Many hundreds of thousands more have fled since, for the country they once knew was “liberated” by the Chinese in 1959, meaning the former government of Tibet was declared illegal and the once-independent nation was forcibly downgraded to the not-so-autonomous region of Xizang, which in Mandarin means, rather tellingly, “west treasure vault.” Ever since, the plateau’s vast reserves of copper, lithium, gold, and silver have funded China’s economic growth, and Tibet’s borders-turned-regional-boundaries have hosted checkpoints that restrict mobility—not of foreigners, as we experienced firsthand, but of locals. No wonder Tibetans are reputed to be such students of impermanence. As empires flourished and fell at their feet, as their own frontiers expanded and shrank and turned hard against them, daily life on the plateau had proved the illusoriness of any firm place to stand.

  Mattias ripped the photograph out of the book and offered it to the old man, who touched it to his forehead and then folded it into his cloak for safekeeping, taking care not to crease His Holiness’ face. We thanked the family and got up to leave, wiping our buttery hands on our bike shorts. Back on the road, the tent looked so small when I glanced behind me, a tiny white envelope stamped with prayer flags. Yellow, green, red, white, and blue, with each colour signifying an element and state of mind, and each flag inscribed with sutras on desire and suffering, compassion and flux—the kind of writing that goes further the more it fades away.

  Maybe Pangong Tso, a lake that spills across Tibet into northern India, represents the most honest kind of borderland: a frontier defined seasonally by changes of state, solid to liquid to air. The water was so vast and turquoise it looked tropical, like a remnant of the ancient Tethys Ocean, whose warm blue waters were swallowed beneath the Indian subcontinent when it slammed into Eurasia fifty million years ago, crumpling the sea floor into the Tibetan Plateau. At nearly fourteen thousand feet in elevation, the lake’s inviting appearance belied a more frigid reality, but we hadn’t bathed in weeks.

  Mel, the Germans, and I had ditched our bikes and immediately dove in the water. I bobbed on my back, the brisk water soothing my saddle sores. Luckily they weren’t as gory as when Mel and I pedalled across America, only to learn, thousands of miles too late, that wearing underwear beneath padded bike shorts is a major faux pas. Here the water gently made off with all my weight, the pull of earth and sky precisely equal and opposite. I tried to make out Ladakh, the region in northern India known as “Little Tibet,” but the lake was too long to see the far side. What I could see was Ben, still lingering anxiously on the shore. Finally he waded in, frowned at the water around his legs, and stormed out again, claiming he saw an oily film on its surface.

  “Ben, it’s you,” we tried to reason with him. “It’s your filth, your sunscreen.”r />
  But he was already towelling off in a fury. An old collarbone injury of his had flared up again on Tibet’s terrible potholes, and his mood wasn’t improved by the fact that this should’ve been the easiest stretch of the trip—roughly a hundred miles of gentle, flowing downhill, according to the map, but what the topographical contour lines failed to convey was the road’s sandy, half-sunken texture. Adding insult to injury for Ben were the large piles of gravel deposited every few feet along Highway 219, hinting that any day now a maintenance crew would firm up the sand, fill the potholes, and smooth the washboard ruts. But as the weeks went by, so did the road maintenance trucks, one, two, sometimes three a day, crammed full of Chinese workers in yellow safety vests. “Do your job!” Ben raged as they passed. “Fix the road!” But the Chinese workers, confusing his yelling and flailing for a friendly greeting, smiled and waved merrily as they sped off to repair some other stretch of road.

  The plateau, Ben told us in not so many words, was hardly his idea of Shangri-La. This was another label Tibet had unwittingly earned over the years, mostly thanks to James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Hilton’s book and the blockbuster film based on it depicted a lush, paradisiacal Himalayan aerie hidden in Tibet, falsely fixing the place in popular imagination as a kind of pre-lapsarian refuge, a place of mystical innocence and immortality. The real Tibetan Plateau, or at least the western corner we’d biked so far, was, by contrast, “beyond doubt among the world’s bleakest stretches.” At least that’s how Nehru described the Aksai Chin, that so-called wasteland for which he nevertheless waged war.

  Truth be told, the western plateau’s bleakness was so otherworldly, so breathtaking, that I could understand why everyone wanted to claim it for themselves. Tibet is often romantically evoked as the roof of the world, as if the plateau served as some kind of elaborate shelter, but it was raw exposure that I craved and found there. What the plateau truly presents is not refuge, but a new frame of reference: from those dizzying heights, you can glimpse the real roof of our world, that faint swaddling of oxygen and nitrogen that holds us back from the heavens, or the heavens back from us. A thin blue rim, barely sixty miles thick that buffers all life on Earth from the bottomless void of space.

  Sixty miles was also the kind of distance I could bike in a day, if only I could bike straight up into the sky, but pedalling across Tibet was gruelling enough. Which was part of the plateau’s charm to everyone but Ben, who wore headphones much of the time now and biked for hours with the music blaring, wilfully deaf to wind and the clatter of wheels on that gorgeous, gut-shaking road. Mattias had generously loaned Ben his iPod featuring a limited selection of music on repeat, including the Baywatch theme song and Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi.” I could imagine few things more punitive than such a soundtrack, but judging by the distant, blissed-out look in Ben’s eyes, the music succeeded in sweeping him away, elsewhere, home, the late 1990s, anywhere but there and then in Tibet, the only place in the universe I wanted to be.

  A month after crossing the checkpoint in Kudi, the four of us reached the small city of Ali, a relative metropolis for western Tibet and the end of Ben’s Silk Road. He was tired of being perpetually tired, and tired, no doubt, of the fact that the rest of us were loving every torturous minute. With only a week or two left on his Chinese visa anyway, he hitched a transport truck from Ali to Lhasa, boarded a plane to Beijing, and flew home to Manitoba. Mel and I gave him a package of dehydrated yak penis as a departure gift, which Canadian customs, we were sad to learn, immediately confiscated.

  According to other cyclists who’d snuck across western Tibet, it was possible to turn yourself in to the police in Ali and be granted temporary legal status, which would make it easier to navigate the greater density of checkpoints on the way to Lhasa. So Mel and I took deep breaths and surrendered our documents at the police station. After filling out a bunch of forms we couldn’t read and looking suitably repentant, the officers grudgingly returned our passports, now containing slim vouchers titled “Aliens’ Travel Permits.” “Congrats, Kate,” Mel said as we exited the station. “Legally recognized as a Martian at last!”

  I did feel strangely at home on the Tibetan Plateau, a sense of deep arrival that was almost disordering. I don’t mean to claim a cheap affiliation with a culture or complicated history that, at the time, I barely knew, and still am only learning. Instead what I felt was an affinity for the land itself, the stark contours and harsh tectonics of the plateau, this territory of uplift and change. As Mel and I biked out of Ali, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “pale blue dot” photograph taken by Voyager I before the spacecraft sped out of the solar system forever. The image revealed our home as a tiny speck of blue in the darkness of deep space, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” in the words of astronomer Carl Sagan. Although the Voyager’s instruments dutifully recorded the size of particles in Saturn’s rings, among other tasks on their strictly scientific mission, that casual snapshot offered something far more rare and significant than reams of data: a fundamental change in perspective. Wasn’t that the most meaningful outcome of any kind of exploration? To reveal the old world—and ourselves—anew?

  The Tibetan Plateau offered a similarly cosmic reality check. There I was, little more than a mote of dust myself after a month without showering, biking slowly among summits that had once been sea floor. It was like being on the moon or Mars, only better: I could breathe, laugh out loud, feel the wind on my face. I didn’t have to report to Mission Control or speak through radio static. The only time I felt briefly nostalgic for the protective buffer of a spacesuit was when my bike flatted a tire as I was speeding down a hill, throwing me off balance and into the dirt.

  “Nice air, Kato!” Mel said after she made sure I wasn’t hurt. I picked bits of gravel from my bare palms, regretting the fact that I hadn’t been wearing gloves. After absorbing sweat, dust, and sunscreen for months on end they were effectively casts, so I’d opted to go without them despite the high-altitude chill of August. Mel helped me patch the inner tube, already a quilt of other patches, and she steadied the wheel while I inflated the tire with a portable bicycle pump that squeaked with dust. Not until I was back on my bike did I notice collateral damage from the crash: I’d sliced open my down jacket on a rock and now tiny white feathers wafted off me, as though I were moulting.

  Clouds slid down the slopes of the valley, now ambered in a slow, tilting light. The air was cold and spiceless, and the wind moved like something alive. Despite the duct tape I slapped over the tear in my jacket the odd bit of plumage still escaped, but I didn’t mind. The plateau could have my feathers and sweat and even the skin off my palms—whatever it took to be here, to earn this intimacy with immensity. If to be an explorer I must draw a map, I remember thinking, let it be this: How the sky shifted and darkened over the plateau that night, and the sun gave a last golden glance through the clouds. How the mountains shone like bits of fallen moon all around me, glowed for a moment and were gone.

  3.

  Natural History

  England and New England

  A few weeks later Mel and I flew back to Canada, dust sewn in our sleeves like the jewels Polo reportedly smuggled home in the seams of his clothes. I watched China shrink in scale and tucked into a microwaved airline meal, food only marginally more flavourful than instant noodles. After biking four thousand kilometres in four months, it was almost a relief to sit still for a while, to speed along without pushing pedals. That didn’t last long. Approximately one in-flight movie later I felt restless again, and so did Mel. Before the plane touched down in Toronto, we vowed to someday ride the rest of the Silk Road, namely the rather prodigious gap between Europe and Asia.

  I didn’t bother unpacking my bike before checking it onto another plane to England, to begin graduate school at Oxford, where some new friends and I kickstarted our studies with a cycling trip. We figured we had just enough time before classes began to ride to Stratford, the birthplace of Shakespeare, where Patri
ck Stewart, otherwise known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek, was starring as Prospero in The Tempest.

  I kept expecting to see the Tibetan Plateau when I woke up in my ragged sleeping bag and zipped open the tent, only to behold rolling green England instead, terrain more like the pastoral posters I’d seen in China. For two days, Dominique, Kim, Jamie, and I biked past thatched medieval villages and castle-like estates with long prim lawns that doubled as runways, which we knew for certain because we saw a plane land on one of them. We foraged so many blackberries from hedges that our lips and tongues were stained a royal purple by the time we arrived in Stratford, only to learn the play was sold out. In hopes of getting rush tickets the next morning, we pitched our tents at the front of the line on the terrace of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, using the weight of our bikes instead of tent pegs to pull the structures taut. The crucial flourish for our campsite was a hand-scribbled cardboard sign that read “Patrick Stewart’s Biggest Fans.”

  In truth, none of us were hardcore Trekkies. I’d enjoyed reruns of The Next Generation from time to time, but my brothers and I had preferred the Voyager series, in which Captain Kathryn Janeway not only boldly went where none had gone before but found herself stranded there for decades. Shakespeare was the main draw for Dom, a free-spirited literature major from Quebec, and the bike trip itself rather than its destination appealed to Jamie, a lawyer with flaming hair who’d been brought up in Yukon bush camps. As for Kim, an aspiring family doctor from Ontario with a bedside genius for comedy, she was game for anything that made a good story. We’d all won a Rhodes scholarship, and flew to London on the same red-eye flight. When Kim, Dom, and Jamie were game to begin grad school with a bike trip, despite their jet lag, I knew we’d all get along.