Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  “So where are you two getting off?” Jeremy asked. When Mel told him “Beynou,” he looked concerned. “Uh, didn’t we just pass that place?”

  We sheepishly walked our bikes down the plank to Anadolu Kavagi, the final stop on the ferry, a small village barnacled on the ragged bank of Asia Minor. In a dockside restaurant we shared a greasy seafood lunch with Jeremy and Kerri, then lingered awkwardly, hoping the two of them would leave: we didn’t want to reveal that our hastily printed-out Google maps only showed the route from Beynou. Although we also carried a foldable map of the Silk Road, it was so large-scale as to be useless for actual navigation. Instead of saying goodbye, though, Jeremy kindly offered to film us setting off on our journey. Unable to muster further reasons for delay, we mounted our bikes and started pedalling to Siachen.

  A few seconds later we split ways. Mel veered right while I turned left at the first intersection, a parting beautifully timed and choreographed but for the minor detail that it wasn’t planned. We hadn’t conferred on which way to turn, though it was anyone’s guess given we were already off our map. A fitting start to the ride, I suppose, for the Silk Road is as knotted and intricate as the Turkish carpets I’d ogled in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar before deciding it was too early in the trip to buy souvenirs. Instead I bought baklava.

  “Just a warm-up lap!” I hollered to Jeremy as I circled back to meet Mel, trying to look nonchalant and fit despite the betraying plumes of mist exiting my mouth. The only way to prepare for biking the Silk Road every day, all day, for nearly a year—or so I’d lazily reasoned before the trip—was to bike every day, all day, for nearly a year. Given this hadn’t exactly been feasible, my training regimen had mostly consisted of last-minute bulking up on Turkish sweets.

  I only remember fragments from that longed-for return to the Silk Road. Scenes like jump-cuts in a film, edited in a way that conceals the connecting story, perhaps because we really did record that first day and many that followed with a camcorder, hoping to make a documentary film about the expedition. Straight out of town we wheezed up a cobbled road, set up the tripod, hit the record button, biked down again, and wheezed back up all over again to capture us doing so on camera. The rest is a bit of a blur. At one point I briefly napped on a couch mouldering on a sidewalk, and at another the laptop Mel carried for video editing purposes flew off her rear rack on a descent and somehow outpaced the bike, so that she nearly ran over it. The leafless trees and bare fields lining the road looked pale and wrinkled, and the earth gave off the fresh aroma that follows rain. As dusk approached, we stopped at a roadside restaurant because we hadn’t yet found a gas station where we could fill our cookstove fuel bottles, meaning the ludicrous quantities of noodles we were lugging were for the moment useless ballast.

  The restaurant was closed, but the owner invited us to camp on his lawn and offered us tea—or çay—prepared from a double-decker kettle that we soon learned was universal on wood stoves across Turkey. The bottom kettle contained boiling water and the top had tea steeped to the point of sludge. He poured an inch of the latter into two tiny, slender glasses, then diluted this with hot water from the lower kettle, which he poured in a long, perfectly aimed rope. With a final ceremonial flourish, he plunked two sugar cubes into each glass. As we sipped this supersaturated liquid on an empty stomach, the owner engaged us in a deep, soulful conversation, or so I guessed from his earnest demeanour and emphatic hand gestures. I stared at him dumbly while Mel nodded and murmured “ahh” at sympathetic intervals. As we walked away, I asked her what he’d said. “No clue!” she answered.

  Some dogs nearby barked at a passing car, then one shuffled over to our shiny new tunnel tent and peed on the door before we could stop him. We gingerly zipped open the Glow-worm, as we’d nicknamed our bright red abode, and crawled through the vestibule to the main compartment. “Please remove your high heels,” Mel intoned with an Italian accent as she pulled off her sweaty boots, mimicking the Air Italia in-flight announcement on our connecting flight from Rome to Istanbul. The airline was clearly accustomed to a different, less adventurous clientele, judging from that announcement, as well as the fact that they misplaced Mel’s bike. We’d felt lost in transit ourselves as we waited nearly a week for it to show up in Istanbul, our days dizzy with errands, emails, and shopping excursions to procure last-minute supplies with our fast-diminishing pool of money. By pitching this expedition to sponsors and granting agencies as a journey to explore wilderness conservation across borders, we’d managed to rally some funding and gear for the Silk Road, but even so we were thousands of dollars short of what we needed to get to India.

  Not that it mattered now, in the sense that Mel and I had committed to this road and couldn’t change anything. But I had trouble sleeping that first night on the Silk Road. Or maybe the sugar and caffeine somersaulting in my veins was to blame. Either way, math obsessed me in a way it never had at MIT. I did some quick mental calculations as headlights from a passing car glanced over the tent, making the interior glow as though it were sunrise or sunset. We’d biked for three hours and covered a measly six miles, in part because we’d doubled back so often for filming. At this pace, I realized with a sinking feeling, we’d reach Siachen in approximately three years.

  Mel and I had set off to finish the Silk Road from Istanbul because we figured winter in Asia Minor would be less daunting than in the Himalaya. But the Turkish businessman was right. Freezing rain on the Black Sea coast wasn’t just passing weather; it was a regime.

  For the next month our whole world conspired to water. The sky was fathoms deep with it, abyssal as the sea below. The sun slouched low on the horizon while I hunched on my bike in much the same way. According to Strabo, an Anatolian geographer born in 63 BCE, the Black Sea was formerly known as Axenos, meaning “inhospitable,” named for its fierce tribes and wintry storms. The sea represented the fringe of the known world to the ancient Greeks, beyond which lay the realm of fire-breathing bulls, guardian serpents, and dragons whose teeth, when planted like seeds, were rumoured to grow fully-formed giants. Later the Black Sea was renamed Euxinos, or “friendly to strangers,” a baptism as quaint and absurd as Fanny dubbing Siachen “the Rose.” But if weather on the Black Sea wasn’t hospitable, the people who lived there were, and night after night Mel and I found ourselves invited to stay with families.

  Inside one home near Sinop, the wood stove threw heat like a small sun. In an armchair near it a little boy cuddled on his grandpa’s lap, the tiny ship of his body harboured in a cove of wool and wisdom. His grandma lumbered over to the couch where Mel and I sat, and grinned with her whole face but only two teeth, matching ingots of spit-shined gold. On the wall was a portrait of Ataturk, “father of the Turkish nation,” who in the wake of the Ottoman Empire established the separation of religion and state in Turkey, and now adorned household walls like a god himself.

  After a hearty dinner of lentil soup, bread, and salad, Mel and I yawned and rubbed our eyes, hinting at our tiredness, hoping we’d all go to bed soon. Instead, we squashed into cars and drove into town. It was cousin Hande’s tenth birthday party, a teenage boy explained, and we were going to her family’s house to celebrate. Upon arrival the men dispersed to the local tea salon, leaving the women and children to laugh, talk, and eat in a very cramped living room. Soon the air was smoggy with heat and our trapped exhalations; the thermostat read twenty-nine degrees Celsius. Mel and I sat dripping in our thermal underwear and fleece pants, clothing more suited to weathering a blizzard than a Turkish birthday party.

  Second dinner was served. Though first dinner had delivered more calories than a week’s worth of instant noodles, I tucked into a plate of baklava like it was my job. The party swirled incomprehensibly around us, a chaos of balloons and Turks and jokes we didn’t get but giggled at anyway. Techno music videos blared from a television, furnishing the party with a clubbish atmosphere even the gold-mouthed grandmother seemed to enjoy, for she nodded her shawled head to its hip, rhythmic pulse
. The temperature kept rising. Someone on a Skype call aimed the video camera in our direction, so Mel and I gamely waved at the smiling, pixelated strangers on the screen and saw ourselves mirrored back with a slight but telling delay: two sweaty-faced foreigners lost in translation at a Turkish party.

  Hande took advantage of my distraction on Skype by painting my fingertips with hot pink nail polish. It wasn’t my style, but who could say no to a birthday girl? More accurately, who could say no in Turkish? I didn’t dare. People here rarely said no at all, deeming it too blunt and dismissive a term. Instead, they said yok, meaning none, not existing, not here. A word as thick and satisfying on the tongue as baklava, though its implications for us were far less sweet. How far to India? Yok. Would the rain ever stop? Yok. In the name of all that is good in the world, where was the sun? Most emphatically yok.

  The next morning I woke up with a baklava hangover and ate some more at breakfast in hopes of a cure. We dawdled in the house, reluctant to get back on the bikes. I sat near the wood stove, jotting notes in my journal, while Mel sat with the little girl and worked through grammar exercises in a Turkish-English textbook. The prompts were so bizarre that I was sure Mel was making them up. “You don’t know Michael Jackson. Do you?” she read. “No,” the little girl answered solemnly.

  My friend finally sighed in a way that signalled it was time to go. As we slowly packed up, our host father protested that it was too cold and rainy, the road ahead far too dangerous. “Not just a road, a highway!” he warned, shaking his head. He said he would never let his daughter do such a trip, never.

  Mel, all charm with her red curls, reasoned that if she wasn’t travelling by bike across Turkey, she wouldn’t have the chance to meet lovely people like him and his family.

  At this he melted. “You are right, okay,” he agreed warmly. “Yes, this is true!”

  I silently cursed her for convincing him so easily. At the moment I wanted nothing more from life than to revel in the warmth and dryness of this cozy home, read books next to the fireplace, let my hot pink nails fade to a more modest tint, and never go back out there again.

  What I craved was wilderness, and the Black Sea wasn’t it. Every day people asked us what we thought of Turkey. “Your country is chok güzel, very beautiful,” we told them, adding that we’d love to come back someday—in the summertime. But even warmth and sunshine probably couldn’t redeem stretches of the Black Sea, particularly once the steep and winding country roads we’d started on morphed, as our host father had warned, into a heavily trafficked highway. The road plundered the seashore of any charm or elegance it once claimed. Most days we felt like we were biking through the scum on the rim of a giant bathtub.

  The analogy is apt. Edged by six countries, and fed by rivers from twenty more, the Black Sea drains nearly a third of continental Europe. Since the sea’s only outlet is the strangulated upper current of the Bosporus, as Marsigli showed, its deepest layers lie relatively still and stagnant. These bottom waters are poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulphide, a colourless, poisonous gas that reeks of rotten eggs. Except for a few hardy microbial reefs, which subsist on methane seeps on the sea floor, little survives down there.

  The road that edged it was similarly bleak. We pedalled a four-lane highway where nothing lived but speed and grief. We passed ditches floating with soda cans and dead dogs, torsos inflated like furred balloons. We passed a woman in a bus shelter with a face like a perpetual wince. We rode by a freshly splattered cat, then watched a second cat slink through the traffic to check on his mashed companion. We narrowly skirted a pile of dead anchovies on the road shoulder, and the smell of rotting fish stayed with us for miles. I thought about how caviar was once so plentiful, in fourteenth-century Byzantium, that it was considered the food of the poor. Centuries before that, Strabo reported that you could pull bonito, a small relative of tuna, out of the Bosporus with bare hands. Now I was more likely to pull out a plastic bottle.

  Although the Black Sea’s oxygenated shallows and undersea shelves once boiled with life, coastal cities in the nations surrounding it have been dumping pesticides, fertilizers, detergents, and poorly treated sewage into the shared borderland of its waters. This flush of nitrogen and phosphorus has triggered massive blooms of phytoplankton, which grow in vast, rippling sheets of crimson goo that shield sea water from sunlight. When the blooms die off and decompose, huge quantities of oxygen are consumed, leaving surface waters nearly as anoxic and sterile as the Black Sea’s depths. Only a few invasive species thrive in such conditions, among them the rapa whelk, a Japanese snail that has decimated bivalve diversity in the Black Sea. Beaches are strewn with punctured seashells, the tiny holes marking where small whelks drilled into the carapace, injected digestive enzymes, and slurped out the liquefied flesh. Large whelks don’t waste their time drilling but instead pry bivalves open with their one creepy muscled limb.

  It was enough to make MIT seem appealing. If I was doomed to spend my life with anoxic microbes and alien species, at least laboratories lacked rain and roadkill. Turkey was nothing like I’d imagined, nothing like the Silk Road I’d dreamed of and talked about finishing for so long. If someone had offered me a spacesuit at that point in the bike ride, I would have accepted it gratefully, relieved for any kind of protective barrier between me and weather and traffic on the Black Sea. At what point was I running away from life, and at what point was I running toward it? The distinction suddenly struck me as crucial and troubling.

  A truck veered so close to Mel that its draft sucked her off the road shoulder and onto the highway. Fortunately no other traffic was nearby. She veered back onto the shoulder, giving the truck driver the finger in the process, but he didn’t see it or didn’t care. The two of us differed only slightly in scale from the bugs flecking his truck’s giant windshield. When I’d realized, as a kid, that explorers should put themselves at stake, I hadn’t exactly had Turkish transport trucks in mind.

  “And we chose this,” I despaired. “We have no one to blame but ourselves.”

  “And Marco Polo,” Mel added.

  She had a point, though some historians doubt the Venetian merchant ever travelled beyond the Black Sea. Polo’s name isn’t mentioned in surviving Mongol or Chinese records, which seems odd for a high-level diplomat in the court of Kublai Khan. He confused major Asian battles that happened years apart. He failed to mention the Great Wall, chopsticks, and other striking peculiarities of the region he supposedly called home for more than a decade. Because of these errors and omissions, some scholars, notably British historian Frances Wood, argue that Polo likely stopped travelling thousands of miles short of the Orient and that his stories were merely hearsay from fellow traders.

  She might as well have accused Neil Armstrong of not landing on the moon. “I am condemned to a lifetime of Marco Polo,” Wood noted ruefully in a lecture she gave a year after publishing her playfully subversive book, Did Marco Polo Go to China? “Before embarking upon what I had thought was an amusing little exercise in the cutting down (though not necessarily total demolition) of a legend, I had no idea how seriously Marco Polo is viewed.” He is seriously viewed in the public imagination, at least, where the Venetian merchant has long been apotheosized as a household name—and one romantically synonymous with “explorer,” though all Polo did was travel to lands new to him but old to others and write about what he saw. Could it be so simple? The idea gave me strange hope.

  Some academics take Polo at his word, arguing that for whatever picky facts he got wrong—such as reporting twenty-four rather than thirteen arches on what is now called “Marco Polo Bridge” near modern Beijing—he got many other cultural and geographic details right, far more than can be ascribed to fluke or gossip. Plus Polo didn’t even write his book; he dictated stories to Rustichello da Pisa while both men were imprisoned during the Venetian-Genoese Wars, and Rustichello compiled them into The Description of the World. Any errors or omissions in the manuscript, then, can be blamed on a bad ghostw
riter.

  I align myself with the believers, though for a rather different reason: the book is frankly too boring to have been made up. If Marco Polo was such a fabulist, why does his magnum opus read like a guidebook written by a merchant for other merchants? His account of the Silk Road is so utilitarian, so oblivious to wonder and beauty, so obsessed with the bottom line. If Polo had written a dream-like sequence in the style of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, describing a Silk Road of possible futures and unforgettable pasts—territories of memory and desire, ruin and renewal—I might be less likely to believe the book. I would also love it more.

  Of course, I’m judging Polo’s work by modern literary standards. In his day and age, The Description of the World seemed as sensational as a science fiction novel, at least to its mostly European readers, who had never heard of cities with twelve thousand bridges, winds so hot they suffocated people and turned them to dust, or black stones and a black liquid that burned. His book would go on to be the most famous and influential travelogue of all time, spurring the likes of Columbus to seek shortcuts to Asia’s treasure trove of gold and spices. When it was first published, though, the book mostly earned Polo the mocking nickname “Il Milione,” or Marco of the Millions, reflecting the extravagant scale of his claims about the wealth and territories of Kublai Khan. People doubted the Venetian merchant’s seemingly tall tales even then. And perhaps such skepticism was deserved, given Rustichello’s fulsome prologue asserting that “from the creation of Adam to the present day, no man, whether Pagan, or Saracen, or Christian, or other, of whatever progeny or generation he may have been, ever saw or inquired into so many and such great things as Marco Polo.” When Polo was on his deathbed, several nobles of Venice visited him to extract confessions, threatening that this was his final chance to come clean. But Polo, defiant to the last wheeze, said, “I did not tell the half of what I saw.”