The fact that these places are not connected on any map reveals the shortcomings of our usual cartography. The Aksai Chin trip emerged from this basic need to see around the bend, but it evolved into a pilgrimage of sorts, a kind of restless propulsion that saw me meander, over half a decade, into the borderlands of Kashmir, Tajikistan, Turkey, and the Koreas before I ended up back on the Tibetan Plateau. To avoid this I mostly subsist on instant noodles, and I travel whenever possible by my own two legs, enabling a vagabond life rich in every currency but money. My greatest fear is having to work, heaven forbid, in a cubicle. From then on my greatest joy has been wandering the planet’s rough peripheries with a tent and a backpack full of books. It wasn’t until university that I finally stepped beyond the borders of my home country, finally saw a mountain and a desert in more than pixels or words on a page, and there was no looking back. Growing up in small-town Ontario, where the tallest mountain was a haystack and the broadest horizon a field of corn, I’d felt wilder than the world in all directions. In some ways getting lost was my goal from the start. Ask me, and I was in paradise, no further names necessary. Where on this spinning world was I? Ask a Chinese, and I was in China an Indian, and I was in India a Tibetan, and I was in Tibet. On a daily basis the wild fact of being here knocked me sideways with astonishment. The horizon was more a hesitation than a hard edge, and every so often it spat out a dust tornado that would skim across the road just meters ahead of us, its flue curved into a question mark missing its point.

Turquoise lakes glimmered in the distance like puddles of sky.

For weeks we traversed this high-altitude wilderness, a land spread wide as wings, folded here and there into mountains. I was in my early twenties, biking with a friend across the parched soda plains of the Askai Chin. My obsession with borders was born all at once in three different countries, depending on who you ask.

Land of lost borders kate harris