Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  At first traffic was quiet just beyond the India-Nepal border, the final frontier of our trip. Then we saw cars swerving erratically on the horizon, as though the drivers had lost their minds or were dodging enormous potholes. In fact, they were dodging monkeys. A hooting, scratching, shuffling congress of primates occupied the pavement, several with babies gripping the fur of their arched backs. Unnervingly humanoid heads swivelled to watch us pass. The sudden, jerky movements with which we manoeuvred around these road pylons made us look deranged ourselves—a word from the French meaning “to flee from orderly rows,” and the organizing principle for traffic in India.

  The road became an obliterating press of dust, horns, people, and fumes. Cars teemed over the tarmac like flies on rot. The sky was sour and curdled-looking with pollution and heat, and the air smelled by turns or all at once like shit, curry, burning tires, woodsmoke, the sulphurous burst of matches flaring, urine brought to a boil, and some kind of chemical that singed my nose like swimming pool chlorine. Occasionally the blasting of a bus horn swept the congested road clear, a sonic plough, and the ringing in our ears was almost a relief because we couldn’t hear the shouts of “Hello!” “How are you?” and “What is your name?”

  Mel and I ignored these catcalls, but our temporary new travelling companion, Hana, took them for earnest greetings and never failed to wave back when someone blared their horn. An environmental lawyer friend from British Columbia who in her spare time builds guitars, Hana flew to India to join us for a few weeks after passing her bar exam and before starting at a law firm. Her idea of a holiday was pedalling all day, every day, through deadly traffic, constant ogling, choking pollution, and withering heat. It was admirable, really, Hana’s openness to the experience, but I worried that her enthusiasm would prove wearying. In fact the opposite was true, for if anything, her frequent exclamations of “Holy cow!” alerted us to the shifting baseline of what Mel and I deemed bizarre. How had sacred heifers nuzzling at trash in a snarl of traffic become ordinary to us?

  The three of us stopped for a break when we saw a sign for a Sweet Shop. Inside I picked out a candied green square that looked delicious, but when the shopkeeper handed it to me, I noticed a fleck of fly wing stuck to it. I pointed this out to the shopkeeper, who looked appalled and swapped it out for a different square—that had another fly wing on it. I pocketed the sweet when the teller wasn’t looking and turned to address the mob of friendly young Indians who had surrounded us, making rapid-fire small talk. “How are you?” “Where are you from?” “What is your name?” On and on, in such quick succession that even Hana grew a little flustered. Eventually a hefty young man with an air of authority pushed himself forward and instructed everyone to quiet down. He introduced himself as Alok, and explained, in an urgent tone, that people were waiting for us next door.

  “Sorry?” Mel said.

  “Please, ladies, only five minutes. You must come,” he implored. “They are waiting!”

  Who was waiting? Why, and for whom? These are the great mysteries. Glad for any excuse not to get back on the bikes yet, or ever, we followed Alok to a nearby building that a sign identified as an English Institute. Inside, the walls were covered in posters with inspirational sayings like “Impossible Says I, Am Possible” and “Great Communication Is Demand of Universe.” People were indeed waiting for us, with chai and samosas. These Indian students deployed their English questions at a more conversational pace in the moderating presence of their teachers, and we took turns answering them. “We are very well, thank you.” “We are from Canada.” “I am Kate, this is Mel, and this is Hana.”

  “How do you like India?” one girl asked earnestly.

  Dozens of earnest faces crowded close, anxious to hear our answer. Mel looked to me to field the question, I looked to Hana, and Hana looked back to Mel. In the silence of us not answering there was a sense of gathering speed. Then Mel cleared her throat and turned to the girl.

  “It is very hot,” she offered diplomatically. The students laughed in agreement and relief.

  Only in the Himalayan foothills did the world cool down again. Even the light was crisper, edgier, honed to a higher-altitude glint. The air smelled of pine and shade and mist, and I felt like I could breathe for the first time in a month. We cheated to get here—namely, we cheated certain death by skipping just over a hundred miles of heinous traffic by taking a bus to Shimla. This former British hill town is like a stone dropped in water: hazy waves of hills roll out in concentric circles from its perch of cobbled plazas and colonial buildings. Though Shimla isn’t high by Himalayan standards, it is just high enough to take the edge off the heat. It is also where you have to go to travel any higher, for a special permit is required to visit the Jammu and Kashmir province of India, in which Ladakh is located.

  Hana fixed her hair before posing for her Inner Line Permit photo, though Mel and I didn’t realize it until we compared portraits afterwards. Despite posing in front of the same glaring white screen, Hana somehow emerged with a glamour shot, with soft light haloing her immaculately brushed locks, whereas “mug shot” was too delicate a term to describe Mel’s and my photos. Then again, Hana had an unfair advantage: her “expedition” packing included four (four!) fancy-smelling soaps, deodorant, and outfits colour-coordinated to match the red paint on her bike and panniers. And whereas Mel and I only had one pair of bike shorts each, Hana brought two, though she didn’t let on about this until a week later, when a monkey stole mine. At least I assume it was a monkey, because who else would filch a stinky pair of bike shorts hung out to dry overnight? Hana generously offered me her second pair.

  Thank goodness we had a few things to tease Hana about, because she was bionic, turbo-powered, easily outpacing us up mountain passes as if she’d been the one biking the Silk Road for nine months. As I huffed along far behind her I reminded myself that she was carrying less—no cameras or laptop, a lightweight bivy sack instead of a tent—but I knew these were the barest of handicaps. Only when the pavement disappeared, and landslides began posturing as roads, did I have a slight technical advantage. On one of these rough stretches a pair of herders came at us shouting, “Atcha!” and “Tigge!” as they urged hundreds of horned creatures along what was little more than a gash in a mountainside. With a sheer drop to our left and a sheer cliff to our right, we had nowhere to go, but the herd parted neatly around us, human boulders in a river of musk.

  We reached Kalpa just as the sun set, the glow slowly moving from the mountains to the stars. Although we weren’t technically in Ladakh yet, and Hindu shrines were more common than prayer flags along the road, a Buddhist monastery in town was blasting a musical rendition of “om mani padme hum” from massive speakers. Religion is nothing if not loud in India, at least on the outside of temples. Inside a group of monks sat in contemplative silence. I badly wanted to take their picture but didn’t dare disturb them. I shouldn’t have worried: at one point a cellphone rang from somewhere deep in the folds of a robe on a wizened old monk. He fished it out and chatted loudly as his companions continued to meditate.

  Beyond Kalpa the terrain grew so steep I flinched when a flock of birds flew above me, thinking they were falling rocks. Farther down the road a waterfall blessed every car (and cyclist) that went by. After four and a half hours of biking, which somehow took all day, we saw a sign for the town of Pooh. A look of joy bloomed on Hana’s face. She dug into her bags, and a few seconds later held up Winnie-the-Pooh stickers.

  “You just happened to have these?” I exclaimed.

  “So prepared!” teased Mel.

  A friend had given Hana the stickers, figuring they’d make a lightweight, portable gift to pass out to children along the way. For now we stuck them on the sign as pictographs. When Hana’s holiday ended a few days later, we were sad to see her go.

  The cold air sharpened itself on the mountains as Mel and I climbed farther north. Vast slopes of crumbling rock leaned into the light at the angle of repose. Switchbacks veered up an
d over contours so corrugated they made the road, from a distance, appear to break off suddenly at random angles. Horizons were as suggestive in some directions as they were solid in others, which was part of the appeal of the Himalaya—the way the landscape always keeps you guessing.

  The same could be said for the Silk Road. Until now the end of this ride had seemed so far away it didn’t bear thinking about, or at least I hadn’t thought much about it, though Mel had been applying for jobs since Kashgar. She knew what she wanted to do and where she wanted to live: work for a community non-profit in Toronto. All I knew was that there was no going back to the lab, that I would never stop exploring. The French sailor Bernard Moitessier had the right idea: after taking a generous lead in the inaugural Golden Globe of 1968—a year-long, solo, non-stop, round-the-world yacht race—he was so content at sea that he skipped the finish line, forfeited the cash prize and world record, and kept on sailing. “Maybe I will be able to go beyond my dream,” he mused, “to get inside it, where the true thing is . . .”

  So what was inside the Silk Road, beyond it, where the true thing was? It wasn’t that I wanted to bike on and on around the globe like an astronaut stuck in low orbit, falling and missing the earth forever. What I pictured at the end of the road was a log cabin insulated with books near the Juneau Icefield—an existence rich in mountains, words, stars, wildness, really everything but money, but when it comes to that, who needs more than enough? Lacking Darwin’s inherited affluence, I figured I could eke out a basic living, like Wallace, as a freelance explorer, doing just enough paid work to buy time and space for my own reading, wandering, and writing. It wasn’t a different world I craved anymore so much as this world done differently, done better for everyone. Maybe the right words could launch us there, or more accurately bring us home.

  The road climbed above a river the colour of tiled domes in Samarkand, meaning ten thousand shades of turquoise. Feeding into it were streams too shallow to carry any colour, their water approaching the clarity of ice. One of them drained from a teardrop-shaped lake where, according to our map, a series of dhabas, or roadside restaurants, operated in the summer. The place was deserted now. A few bright paddleboats were still parked on the shore. “That’s our sport!” exclaimed Mel. “We’ll make waves with these legs.” But the boats were padlocked and half-sunk with water. We set up the tent and cooked dinner instead.

  The last light of day cooled on the mountaintops. We sat outside drinking tea in down jackets as it grew dark. I watched a nearly full moon float over the peaks, growing smaller the higher it got, and thought about Armstrong’s first stroll on it, or more accurately what happened after. When he and Buzz Aldrin returned to the Eagle, the insect-like lunar module, they discovered a broken switch on the circuit breaker required to ignite the ascent engine. The astronauts reported the problem to Mission Control and tried to nap as the earth-bound engineers brainstormed solutions. Hours passed as fellow astronaut Michael Collins orbited above them in the Columbia command module, seventy miles away and completely out of reach. Whether it was inspiration or desperation that finally prompted Aldrin to jam a felt-tipped pen into the circuit breaker is hard to say. Either way, the makeshift switch worked, and so it was rockets but more crucially a pen that launched the astronauts off the moon and on a trajectory back to Earth.

  A few days later we topped out on Baralacha La, a pass marking the edge of Ladakh. The road twisted down through flame-licked mountains, then a canyon carved by an emerald river. Eventually it flattened out across a mesa where yellow grasses flared in the setting sun. Herds of yaks seemed to graze on pure light. “No wonder you love Ladakh!” Mel said as we biked side by side. “It looks like Mars, only more alive.”

  Raised by the same crash and warp of continents that threw the Tibetan Plateau skyward, Ladakh in many ways felt more like Tibet than Tibet. I thought back to my first morning in Leh, the regional capital, when I travelled there on a summer break from MIT: the Dalai Lama had driven past my hotel, grinning widely out the window behind his trademark glasses. People lined the street into town and watched him pass in rapt silence, bouquets of incense smoking from their fists. Across the border, in Tibet, barely a hundred miles away, possessing a photo of His Holiness could get you arrested.

  But more than the bleached prayer flags on every pass, the Buddhist monasteries barnacled on cliffs, the infrastructure of ice and rock and sky, it was the slant of light that brought me back to Tibet. It fell in huge, silken throws across the mountains of Ladakh, articulating the creases and folds of the land until it resembled the face of someone just woken, cheeks impressed with the pattern of some huge pillow’s fabric. I couldn’t stop rubbing my eyes.

  Nothing like a motorsport rally to really jolt you awake. Mel and I were spinning up the first of the twenty-one switchbacks of the Gata Loops, a stretch of road that coils up a mountainside like a small intestine. I didn’t think anything of the dirt bike that revved past, spitting up gravel. A few minutes later another nearly hit us on a hairpin turn. Then a souped-up jeep careened by, the smooth white helmets of its driver and passenger shaking like eggs in an out-of-control crate. It was followed by more than sixty dirt bikes, quads, and rally cars, for we’d inadvertently become the slowest contestants in Raid the Himalaya, the world’s highest and toughest motorsport rally.

  Hyped as “the ultimate test of man and machine,” racers cover up to two hundred miles a day during the week-long event, which starts in Shimla and ends in Leh, though the route can vary from year to year. Drivers contend with non-race vehicles during early race stages, but the Leh-Manali Highway is closed to traffic as the race moves farther north. Mel and I weren’t aware of the closure because we’d been camping between towns, and drivers weren’t aware of us, for they assumed nobody else was on the road. This made for some terrifying near-misses, particularly on switchbacks, where it wasn’t easy to scoot out of the way. “Ahh, serenity,” sighed Mel as we pressed ourselves into a cliff to avoid death by yet another rally car.

  The stop-start nature of our day meant we didn’t cover the distance planned. Instead of biking four high passes, we gave up after the third, in a valley called Whisky Nala, where we hoped to find its namesake or at least some water. But the only stream was frozen, and the valley was abandoned except for a Raid the Himalaya checkpoint. After cursing the motorsport rally all day, I sheepishly asked the checkpoint volunteers for water. They handed me bottles just as the last competitor revved through, and then they drove away themselves.

  Silence rang off the peaks. The sun sank behind the mountains and the air instantly felt twenty degrees colder. Mel and I put on all the clothing we had and crawled into the tent, then into our sleeping bags. It wasn’t bedtime, but it was too cold to talk, to eat, to read. As I stared at the ceiling I thought about a Buddhist saying I’d read somewhere—“nowhere to go, nothing to do”—and marveled at how accurately it described our life on the road at times like this. Nowhere to go, and nothing to do but stay warm, stay still, wait for darkness to arrive like a bleed of ink from one side of a page to another.

  We slept until the sun lit the tent, a slow fuse of heat. Everything was frozen: the water tucked into the bottom of our sleeping bags, our toothpaste, our noses and toes, even the bike lube, as Mel discovered when she tried to apply some to her squeaky chain. The stove was reluctant to light with so little oxygen, and when it finally sizzled to life, the ice took forever to thaw. We forced tepid oatmeal down our throats and set off shivering up a 16,400-foot pass.

  Cracks in the road seemed to testify to something enormous surging up from below, a monstrous root system or new mountain range. Mel had strapped the empty Raid the Himalaya water bottles to the back of her bike, where they rattled and flailed and at one point flew off. “Nooooo!” she wailed. “My life savings!” I stopped to help her pick them up but wished I hadn’t: ten seconds into pedalling again I felt the usual flush of deep fatigue in my legs, a crawl of acid through my thighs and calves. Mel felt the burn at th
e exact same moment, judging by our synchronized groans. The pain of starting again cancelled out any relief in stopping. We learned to inch along no matter the pace, even when the only force on the pedals was the weight of our legs pulled down by gravity and wearily hauled back up again. I couldn’t remember how it was to feel fresh, legs firing strong, hands gripping the handlebars firmly rather than hovering weakly above them, my fingers barely making contact because my wrists were so sore from the jackhammer roads.

  Everything was falling apart, grinding down. Our clothing was in tatters, our socks poked through holes in our shoes, my watch strap was broken and the battery dead. Mel’s bike had been missing a handlebar grip since Kyrgyzstan, a bungee cord was tangled permanently around her rear hub, and my kickstand and mirror had bailed on me several countries ago. Our inner tubes were more patches than rubber by now, and the chains and gears on our bikes protested loudly with every pedal stroke. The tent zippers refused to zip, the bit of wire that fixed the burner to our stove was broken, and our Therm-a-Rest mattresses leaked from pricks so microscopic we couldn’t find and plug them, so we woke up hugging the cold, hard ground. After nearly a year on the road, it was a wonder anything still worked, especially our friendship.

  That was saved by the smallest of things: The way Mel would kick out her legs with a goofy flourish when I glanced back to see where she was. Her sense of absurdity perfectly matched the landscape we passed through, and her commentary about it was always illuminating, such as when we came across a patch of ground creepily strewn with long grey hairs. “Satanic rituals involving shears and senior citizens,” confirmed Mel. “You said that a little too knowingly,” I replied. Both of us craved solitude as much as company, and more than anything it was this ability to be alone together that let us survive the trip. Of course we had bad days, terrible days, like when Mel poured herself a hearty mug of instant coffee at breakfast and drank it all before noticing she’d barely left me any hot water. “Oops!” she said, as if morning coffee weren’t a matter of life and death. “You grew up with siblings, Mel!” I fumed. “You know proportions matter!” I drove her crazy at times too, but even so she’d follow me to the ends of the Earth and I’d follow her in turn, because that’s what we did on a daily basis. We biked on and on, whatever our mood or the weather, until finally, after ten months, we were as close as the Silk Road gets to the stars.