This intrepid, restless, young Canadian here writes an engaging and enlightening travelogue of her risky and demanding year-long travel, mostly by bicycle, through China and Tibet, and then from Turkey through Central Asia to India and Tibet trying to retrace the Silk Road. Like the late Christopher Hitchens, she seems happiest when alone in dangerous situations, far away from anything that could be called civilization. Along the way she reflects on the meaning of borders she prefers to ignore, whether political, geographic, physical or mental, with stunning analogies, metaphors, and similes. But she never judges any political borders harshly. Her political allegiances remain a enigma.
The risks of hypothermia, heat stroke, starvation, altitude sickness, falls off an icy mountain pass, endemic diseases, or incarceration by hostile natives provide the adrenaline rushes she seems to need to feel alive. Is there some unique genetic brain wiring that makes some people head off on dangerous hikes to the earth’s poles, peaks or bleak uninhabitable deserts? But she is no antisocial loner. Although her home, where I suspect she spends little time, is apparently in remote British Columbia forest off the grid, she developed strong bonds with fellow Rhodes scholars at Oxford, her teachers at M.I.T., with her intermittent fellow adventurers, and with natives along the route. But she declined a desirable cushy lucrative career as a biology lab researcher, preferring to study nature in the raw, cruel outdoors. And far from being an uneducated wanderer, she discusses the lives and writings of Darwin, Marco Polo, various philosophers, Indian mystics, the Dali Llama, Homer, Goethe, John Muir, Thoreau, and Carl Sagan in the context of her travel experiences.
There is a very helpful map of the route provided at the front: it needs to be consulted frequently by those of us who are geographically challenged, but I was often still unable to pinpoint the progress of the travellers. Perhaps that is the point- she thills in getting lost and probably intends to let her readers do so also.
There must be a great temptation to adapt this journey into a Hollywood movie or a T.V. serial, and the scenery could be stunning, but I doubt that the beauty of the writing could ever be conveyed in another medium.
So many good quotes. “We need this world and this world doesn’t need us. Why do we persist in behaving as if the converse was true?” “The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear that you will be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t.” And to succinctly capture her outlook on life. “We are here only by fluke and only for a little while. So why not run with life as far and as wide as you can?”.
Thanks, Michelle.
The Passionate Reader 