As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved—to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician—had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars.
In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.
Q&A: Kate Harris and Rolf Potts
In the book you say that “travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more about how complicated the world is.” It struck me that this is also applies to travel writing in the 21st century — that, unlike previous eras of travel writing, we can’t presume to be objective in our analysis of the places we visit. Did you go into the journey knowing that seeking complexity was more important than sussing out truths, or did you discover this through the very process of embracing the journey and (later) writing about it? How did your understanding of this change as the journey (and the book) came together?
I do think travel writing has changed, and for the better. Instead of stiff-upper-lip Europeans purporting to offer an all-seeing, objective take on a far-flung place or culture, all while revealing nothing of themselves, the move toward memoir in travel writing strikes me as both refreshing and more honest. Because no one is objective! We’re all flawed, biased beings driven by certain idiosyncratic questions and obsessions, and these dictate what details we take in of a place and deem worthy of report. With travel memoir, readers at least get a sense of where the author is coming from, what motivates them to hit the road. As for sussing out truths, I would be delighted to do this in my travels, but whenever I think I’ve found any they shimmer into complexity—the world is so huge and fraught and full of mystery that it confounds (and dazzles) me at every turn. This is one of the joys of travel: realizing that you don’t have it all figured out, that frankly no one does. That said, certain verities do hold up wherever you go in the world: love matters, wonder matters, kindness always, always, always matters—basically if it’s clichéd and a little corny, it probably matters and gives life meaning. Writing is an opportunity to make these tired truths fresh again, give them a bit of shine, show them rather than tell them.
The very concept of “exploration” comes with a lot of colonial baggage and cross-cultural presumptuousness, as you point out in the book. Yet you decided to embrace the concept and recast it on your own terms – noting that a certain kind of exploration is inseparable from “the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.” How did this journey fine-tune your definition of exploring, and in what ways do you continue to seek it out?
I still cringe sometimes when I hear the term “explorer” or “exploration,” because these concepts have been worn so thin and endowed with such baggage by the likes of imperial adventurers, mining geologists, and marketing companies. Is there anything left to exploration beyond grandiose, obsolete jargon, especially on a planet that feels, at times, so mapped and tamed? After all, exploratory “firsts” these days really only count in terms of landing the “explorers” lucrative gigs on the inspirational speaking circuit! But one job of literature is to make language mean again, and exploration at its idealistic heart is about setting off into the unknown, not in search of profit or power but truth or beauty. This is a beautiful impulse and one worth keeping alive in the world in some form, and words are how we keep ideas alive. So I wanted to celebrate that kind of longing in exploration and I also wanted to live it out myself, not just during my and Mel’s bike ride on the Silk Road, but forever, throughout my life. Exploring is an attitude, really, a quality of attention to the world around you. It’s also more of an art than a science, and like all art, creative and digressive and rebellious to the status quo. Exploration demands a refusal of all the usual maps: of the world, of how you’re told to live your one and only life.
Over the course of your book you reveal a complicated psychic relationship to Marco Polo, who at first inspired you for the scope of his journey, and later disappointed you in the dispassionate merchant-traveler fixations of his tale. But allusions to Marco Polo feel difficult to avoid when writing about travels in Asia. I’m writing to you from Sumatra, for example, and even here – well east and south of Central Asia – Marco logged second-hand tales of intrigue and cannibalism. When it came down to writing the book, did the legacy of Marco Polo dovetail with the story you were trying to convey, or was he more of a dusty interloper who needed mentioning because he covered so much of the same ground as you?
We’re always hardest on our fallen heroes. As a kid, I worshipped Marco Polo, so when he turned out to be a merchant not just in trade but spirit, I was pretty crushed. But while I’m harsh on Polo in my book, he deserves credit for galvanizing my curiosity about that part of the world we now call the Silk Road, just as he has galvanized so many others throughout history. He essentially gave the Western world some of its earliest impressions of lands that were as alien and remote to folks back then as Mars is to us today. So as I wrote the book, Polo proved less than a dusty interloper than a useful literary foil, in the sense that I could compare and contrast our experiences and impressions as we covered similar territory in space if not time. Plus it would’ve been pretty cheeky to travel the Silk Road and not mention Marco Polo! We should pay respect to our elders, acknowledge the age/attitudes from which they emerged–and hold them to a fierce moral reckoning.
One thing I find intriguing about your book is the way you return again and again in your book to the concept of borders, of frontiers. At times in your journey, frontiers can feel whimsical and abstract, as when you note how birds don’t really care about land borders. Other times borders seem all too concrete, like when you spend a month in “bureaucratic doldrums” waiting for a paperwork that will enable you to cross into the next country. Once one begins thinking about borders one begins to see them everywhere. The ATMs here in Sumatra, for example, dispense a maximum of $140 in Indonesian rupiah, so I’ve found myself going back to them again and again to cover my expenses. Every time I make a new withdrawal it occurs to me that I’m crossing a border of sorts – pinging an American bank account to get local currency on the other side of the world. What surprised you the most as you dug into the concept of borders, both as a traveler and a writer?
Borders are fascinating, shapeshifting things, sometimes flimsy, often formidable, always changing. And they’re not even “things,” really, so much as ideas and abstractions that sometimes find physical expression. I’ve always found meaningless bureaucracy maddening—who doesn’t, whether at home or abroad?—but it wasn’t until Mel and I snuck across Tibet in 2006 that borders took on sinister new meaning in a social justice sense. We had relative freedom on the plateau that first trip, despite our illegal status, while Tibetans were controlled and restricted at every turn, which seemed the furthest thing from fair, the fact that by fluke of where Mel and I were born we carried powerful passports. So that sparked my obsession with borders, and I began researching all the absurd and dangerous ways they fragment landscapes and lives. But in all of this, what surprised me most was how entrenched the walls were in my own mind, my own ways of thinking. About trophy hunting in Tajikistan, for example. I’m no fan of the idea of wealthy foreigners paying a fortune to kill a rare species of wild sheep just to hang an ego-boosting horns on their wall. But the fact is, trophy hunting in this specific context is a boon not just to wildlife, but local communities as well. The hardest thing, in travel and life generally, is keeping an open mind. And a closed mind is the most rigid border imaginable. Overall, it seems to me we’ve got borders in all the wrong places: constraining human lives, human potential, but not capitalism or corporate greed, for example.
For most of human history the sheer difficulty of travel lent a tangible aura to the idea of frontiers. Regions were demarcated less by political boundaries than by wide oceans, wind-whipped deserts, glacier-encrusted mountains, swift-flowing rivers. This changed – and borders became more psychological – when the transportation revolution of the early 19th century shrank distances, technologized journeys, and made the task of travel more accessible to the average person. Was your decision to travel by bicycle tied the notion of an earlier notion of frontiers – to slowing the journey in such a way that those distances and challenges could be felt?
I’ve never thought of bicycle travel in terms of summoning earlier notions of natural frontiers, their scope and challenge, but I love this idea. In a world that prizes speed and efficiency travelling by bicycle is powerful gesture of rebellion, as well as an argument for the virtues of distance and dawdling. I love how riding a bike enables (you might say forces) a certain intimacy with the world around you: the weather, the road surface, the mountains you climb up at a snail pace. Plus it’s a mode of transportation that people all over the world use on a regular basis: it’s a cheap, affordable, and eminently accessible form of travel, so you’ll share the road with Uzbek craftsmen and Nepali students. And when you rock up in a strange town on two wheels, versus on a tour bus, locals are inclined to see you in a different and more welcoming light, because they can see you’ve worked hard for that arrival.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a terrestrial travel book that so frequently alludes to the planet Mars as yours does. “Travel is perhaps one-part geography,” you note, “nine parts imagination.” I don’t think I ever considered things in this way – yet it feels true, and I’m surprised this dynamic doesn’t creep into travel writing more often. I recall climbing the mountains of Lantau Island in Hong Kong 20 years ago and dreaming I was in Scotland, a place I had not yet been. Just a couple days ago I swam out to a little islet in Sumatra’s Lake Maninjau, and my imagination drifted to a half-dozen other lake swims, both real and longed for, going all the way back to my first cold-water swimming lessons as a kid in south-central Kansas. Do you feel like you’ve explored Mars now, in a sense, or will it always anchor your imagination as a traveler? What reveries and imagined places have invaded your travel dreams in the years since you biked across Central Asia?
I will always root for the scientific exploration of the red planet, and I’m eager to learn what it can uniquely teach us about our place in the cosmic scheme of things. I have great hope that we’ll discover microbial life there—alive or fossilized—in the near future. But I’m over Mars now, in the sense that I don’t see it everywhere I go. Instead, I feel a nostalgia, a certain fondness, for a planet that taught me so much despite never having set foot there. My allegiances have shifted to this world, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. But I think the tendancy to relate one place or experience to something else—another planet or place on Earth, or perhaps a book or a work of art—is such a generative, way of moving through and making meaning from life. Everything’s connected, after all, if only imaginatively, and for me that’s as solid a link as a land bridge. Those swims in Sumatra began for you, in a very real sense, in Kansas, just as biking across Uzbekistan at night was akin, for me, to cycling among the stars. As for where my reveries will take me next, I’m quite smitten with the sky and with learning to fly, so I’m guessing my head will be in the clouds, in every possible sense.
You admit in the book that your interest in science and geography is an incidental by-product of your more visceral love of wildness. Yet your narrative is threaded with science and geography, history and technology – from the strange abundance of wildlife in the Korean DMZ to the very direct connection between the development of the bicycle and the development of manned flight. How can a scientific interest in the world deepen the more spiritual and intuitive gifts of travel? Can one exist without the other for you?
Whenever I’m intrigued by something, a place or idea or object, I try to come at it from all possible angles—through science, geography, history, philosophy, religion, literature, art, and of course immersive, personal experience. There are so many ways of knowing the world, and despite having studied science intensively for much of my life, I’m a generalist at heart, far too restless and roaming in my interests to specialize in the way science demands. Which is why writing suits me so well, and travel writing in particular, because being a generalist is an advantage versus not a shortcoming. There are so many ways of knowing, and with writing you can draw on all of them. Not to mention, as you say, the spiritual and intuitive gifts of travel—what a beautiful way of putting it. You can bring all of these to bear on a place or experience, with the goal of not making sense of something, exactly, so much as suss out the meaning in it, for you and the world.
There is a lot of travel philosophy in your book – much of it tied into existential concerns: The idea that maps should imply limitlessness; that slow trips engender more meaningful experiences; that routine can be more dangerous than risk; that the shortness of life compels us to run as far and wide as we can. Have these philosophies changed over the years? Did they exist in your earliest imaginative urges for other lands, or have they been a by-product of travel itself?
These philosophies crystallized pretty slowly, as obvious as they seem to me in retrospect, and they were definitely a by-product of travel, but also of writing. Biking the Silk Road was a means for stumbling upon and testing out new ideas about what makes for a meaningful life. And then putting those experiences to the page, with all the intensity of reflection and processing that involves, helped in their genesis. I still stand by all of those philosophies, but I sure hope I stumble on more in the future as I keep wandering and keep writing.
You appear to have had an exuberant, lifelong obsession with distant places – and your excitement at your earliest journeys is still palpable in your writing. I recall having similar enthusiasms early in my travel career – and as it happens I’m traveling across Asia this winter exactly 20 years after my first sojourn on this continent. My enthusiasm for the simple joys of the journey remains, but two decades of further travel and life experience has made it more complicated, more nuanced. How has your own relationship to the notion of faraway places changed as you’ve become more experienced and spent time in these places? Can anyone’s further travels compare to those blessed first journeys?
First journeys to faraway lands are like first loves: awkward and thrilling and intense and profoundly upending. The revelation that the world is so much weirder and vaster and wilder than you guessed is no doubt most powerful on those early ventures, and it can be tempting to continually recreate that thrill by by throwing yourself into novel situations and places over and over again. But like any relationship, the more time and energy you give to it, the deeper and more sustaining the connection, and I find I’m craving that sort of intimacy over dizzying novelty these days. Which is not to say that I’d turn down a trip to, say, Bhutan or Ellesmere—I’m wild for the world, I’ll never get enough of it. Nor would I turn down the chance to go back to some of the places I’ve been before, like you, to perhaps get a more nuanced perspective on them, as well as measure their changes and mine. But above all, I want to get to know my chosen home in all kinds of weather, in every mood and season. I’m excited by the challenge of traveling in place, by which I mean bringing the same acuity of wonder and attention that I take to faraway lands to everyday life.
On that note, you and I have, in the past, discussed our similarity in the way we’re both travel writers who’ve been chosen to live not in bustling cities but in remote, bucolic landscapes – Yukon-proximal British Columbia in your case, and the rural American prairie in mine. How does your relationship to home complement your relationship to travel, and what does each teach you about the other?
After ten months on a bicycle on the Silk Road, I found myself longing for a place to unpack my bags (and especially my books) for longer than a night at a time, and in something less flimsy than a tent. But I also wanted to sustain in whatever life I led back home some of what I loved about being on the road: waking up to wildness regularly, ample time in which to think and dream and write, and the satisfaction that comes with living as self-sufficiently and cheaply as possible, without many material burdens. I also knew I wanted to write, but the kind of writing I was (and still am) most excited about rarely pays off in an economic sense, certainly not immediately (i.e. multi-year book projects) and possibly not ever (i.e. poetry). So when I thought about coming home, I knew I’d have to earn just enough money to carve out the silence and spaciousness I needed to do my real work.
Far easier than making a heap of cash, as we both know, is keeping costs down. So practicality was one reason my partner and I moved to an off-grid cabin in a spectacularly remote community in northern British Columbia. With no monthly bills, minimal rent, and mountains to hike and bike and climb right out the door, we don’t need much cash to get by and every day feels rich with possibility. But if I’m being honest, economics had far less to do with it than emotion: I fell in love with Atlin as an undergraduate student, and vowed to someday move here. Perhaps I sensed even then that living off-grid would not only be an adventure in itself, but would free me, to a large extent, from the tyranny of constantly hustling for paid work, which in turn frees up time for the work that really matters. It’s such a joy to live in a place where people don’t dominate the view. Nothing does away with writerly self-doubt (or with self-importance, which is just as crippling) like a walk among mountains so much older than any idea of literature.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing? What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
There are so many ways of becoming a travel writer, but speaking from my own experience, I’d recommend studying anything but writing at university. Not only will majoring in, say, physics or history or linguistics open up other doors, in terms of making economic ends meet, it’ll give you something to write about—and, crucially, a fresh slant on the world. I’d warn would-be travel writers that the ratio of time spent traveling to time spent at a desk is alarmingly skewed, at least if you’re in this line of work for the fresh air and foreign perks. You really have to love traveling in words as much as—even more than—you love traveling in the world. I’d also warn that writing is more accurately rewriting. You need to be electrified by language, of course, but you also need a certain dogged obsessiveness, a capacity for thankless slogging, to see a writing project through—and a bike trip for that matter.
And the biggest reward? As a travel writer, you essentially have a license to explore—not in the narrow colonial meaning of planting flags and charting maps, but in the more generous sense of setting off for a place (possibly in the world, unquestionably in words) that you’re not certain to reach. Your job is to wander, to wonder, to stumble on unexpected connections, to fall in love with the world and to let it break your heart over and over again. Above all, your job is to be reminded that you know next to nothing—and then to write out of that state of wonder and bewilderment, which is the state of mind and being most appropriate to the circumstances in which we’ve found ourselves: alive on a tiny planet in a universe full of stars. Travel wakes you up to the strangeness of existence, and so does the best kind of writing: what better way to spend this one and only life than by devoting yourself to both?
