Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  To the east, Giorgi pointed out the frontier with Azerbaijan, dim and suggestive, as though it hadn’t mustered the force to wholly take form. The trunks of beech trees gleamed silver in the dark woods, and the dull light of a cloudy day gave everything a ghostly cast, particularly the two camouflaged men who materialized from the mist, lugging rifles. After a perfunctory glance at our passports, the Georgian border guards hiked along with us, happy for company on their lonely patrol.

  Back at the park headquarters, we spent the evening attempting to interview another Giorgi, this one the head of administration at Lagodekhi Protected Areas. The dark-eyed, bearded man was a younger, swarthier version of our stalwart guide, but unlike ranger Giorgi, who didn’t know any English, this Giorgi spoke “a leetle,” which proved less communicative than none at all.

  “So what kinds of endangered animals live in the Lagodekhi reserve?” Mel asked.

  “No, no, no,” said Giorgi dismissively. “There are no dangerous animals here.”

  “Sorry, I think we’ve confused you,” I tried. “By ‘endangered animals’ we mean species at risk.”

  “No, no, you are not at risk, I am saying!” said Giorgi, indignant. “Ladies, there is no dangers in Lagodekhi!”

  And on it went, for about an hour. At which point we gave up, thanked him, and walked away more bewildered than ever. I consoled myself with the fact that the Peace Corps volunteer we’d spoken to the day before had still seemed pretty lost despite living in Lagodekhi for nearly two years. “So what do people do here for a living?” I’d asked. “I’m not . . . sure,” he’d confessed with a helpless, homesick look.

  In some ways it was the clearest answer we’d heard yet. It was certainly the most honest response he could’ve given. For other than exposing the obvious differences between a foreign land and wherever you’re from—the way the Polish explorer noticed a peony growing in Georgia and nowhere else—travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more at how complicated the world is, how reeling and inscrutable. Perhaps that’s the best thing going for bicycle travel in particular: the way it’s an antidote to straight lines, haste. The danger of growing so sure of yourself that you forget you know nothing. Not the meaning of existence, not what’s around the next bend, not even the way back to our room at the Lagodekhi park headquarters until ranger Giorgi showed us there.

  Beyond the imposing Azerbaijani border gate, which we formally crossed the next day, a series of hulking, empty buildings had benches outside that were still wrapped in plastic, as though recently installed. Mel and I were hardly the first to cycle the Silk Road, nor would we accomplish anything noteworthy in an exploratory sense along its historic sprawl—but now I saw my chance! While waiting for Mel to take a bathroom break, I pulled away a strip of plastic on one of the benches and discreetly claimed the very first sit, because it was there. Then I rearranged the plastic and we biked on toward Zakatala, the zapovednik, or strictly protected area, that mirrors Lagodekhi across the Georgian border and also bumps up against Russia.

  When there are no fences, no signs, it’s hard to tell when you’ve arrived. A friend of the Peace Corps volunteer in Lagodekhi had given us directions, which verbatim consisted of “turn off at Mazix and ask for my friend Konul in Gobizara.” We managed to find the turnoff at Mazix, which took us past stone walls and cottages that reminded me of the English Cotswolds, only they were grittier, more hardscrabble. Women in headscarves bent over the black earth, planting in soil freshly unburdened of snow. Soft-eyed cows chewed cud in the middle of the road, unperturbed by us biking within inches of their bony ribs. Nobody we spoke to showed even a glimmer of understanding when we asked, in a hopeful tone, “Konul? Gobizara? Zakatala?” Niet, they told us. Niet, niet, niet.

  The gravel beneath our wheels grew into fist-sized rocks, then dissolved into mud. The road forked at one point, and when we stopped, a portly man wearing a Bauer jacket and blue jeans approached us. He had bangs but otherwise buzzed hair, and an enormous mole on his upper lip. We asked him our standard trio of questions and he listened with what seemed an unusual effort at understanding. Then he gave us the usual trio of answers. We opted to take the left fork because it looked as though it continued up the valley toward Russia, in what seemed the vague direction of the zapovednik.

  Trees surged closer on all sides. The road turned to gravel and at one point vanished under a stream. The gravel turned to dirt, then an ooze of mud, then disappeared entirely where the woods thinned into a huge meadow. “In the middle of the forest,” wrote the poet Tomas Tranströmer, “there’s an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost”—an apt description of our circumstances, except that this particular clearing was constellated with dung and close-cropped grass. It was more a cow pasture than a wilderness. We gave up on the zapovednik, pitched our tent, and refocused on food.

  “Tonight’s menu,” Mel announced with a flourish, “features instant noodles, instant noodles, or, if you prefer, instant noodles.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “What I’ve been craving all day.”

  As we boiled water on the camp stove, a pair of birds swooped above us, perhaps trying to glean whether Mel and I were dead enough to eat. Those dark, roaming knots of sky coasted toward Russian airspace, veered above us in Azerbaijan, and swooped toward Georgia, crossing frontiers with a few flaps of their wings. I thought of Halitherses, the elderly soothsayer in The Odyssey who boasted the unimprovable epithet of “keenest among the old at reading birdflight into accurate speech.” Mel and I tried to guess at what the birds were scribbling on the sky. Think beyond borders! Turn back while you still can! Or maybe, gvbrdghvnit, “you tear us into pieces,” which is what ecosystems say to fences—except at Ani, the Korean DMZ, and other frontiers that by chance let wildness flourish. If we read borders as narrative lines, sometimes they tell different stories than their authors intended. Sometimes the original plot runs wild.

  We lingered outside after the meal, enjoying the quiet, the fact of thaw. A high ridge of the Greater Caucasus range, barely visible above the forest, burned coral in the fading light. Those mountains are synonymous with the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and was chained to an icy peak as punishment—which didn’t sound so punitive to me, except for the chain part, as well as the eagle eating his liver daily (since he was immortal, it grew back each night). Those minor details aside, who wouldn’t want to live above the clouds, with stars tangled in one’s hair like burrs? Then again, springtime down here had its perks, such as roads with reliable traction; mornings that didn’t begin with blizzards, inside the tent or out; and less miserable travelling companions.

  “Mel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  For being secretly pleased when you found the going tough. For not forgiving you completely for high school. For eating more than my fair share of baklava on several occasions in Turkey.

  “. . . sorry . . . that it was such a hard go for a while.”

  It wasn’t a perfect apology, but Mel seemed to know it was heartfelt.

  “The road can only go up from here. Like really up, to the Tibetan Plateau.” She paused and fumbled around in the food bag. “Now how about dessert? On the menu is this tiny square of chocolate, or this tiny square of chocolate.”

  We savoured nubs of chocolate all the sweeter for their smallness as the sun sank behind the mountains, and when it was too dark to read birdflight into speech anymore, even the silence was like something winged.

  7.

  Borderlandia

  Caspian Sea

  Zakatala the town proved easier to find than the nature reserve. The next morning we backtracked from the cow pasture after our failed mission to locate the zapovednik and rode our muddy bikes into a bustling town where everyone was dressed in black. I felt like a neon sign in my red synthetic jacket, and Mel was impossible to lose in her bright purple version and red curls. Without consulting each other we stopped
when we saw a sign advertising baklava, or rather пахлава, as the pastry is rendered in Cyrillic. The sweets brought us right back to the Black Sea, rather unfortunately, for it was pouring when we left the restaurant.

  Azerbaijan was reminiscent of Turkey not only in its weather but also in its abundance of tea salons. Lounging inside them was the usual profusion of jovial, unemployed men (never any women) who confidently informed us that Baku, the capital city, was 350, 500, or 230 miles away. Several of these tea-sipping Azeris asked to see our map—not to confirm the distance to Baku, I suspected later, but to see how their country, not much larger than New Brunswick, was demarcated on foreign maps, particularly the part of it known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. This majority Armenian enclave voted to secede in 1990 from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, where arbitrary Stalinist borders had stranded it outside the equally arbitrary borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the referendum led to a full-blown war. When the USSR collapsed under the weight of its centralized political and economic systems in 1991, fragmenting overnight into fifteen different nations, Nagorno-Karabakh—comprising roughly a seventh of Azerbaijan’s total territory—was under de facto Armenian control and has remained so ever since. The ongoing conflict remains a sore spot for Azerbaijan, which regularly swaps crossfire with its nemesis neighbour in the form of bullets and also words: AzerNews, a popular daily English-language newspaper, features the usual sports, politics, and business sections, and also one dedicated to “Armenian Aggression.”

  I was relieved when our map provoked no outrage. We continued down the road to Baku, where Azerbaijan’s former ties to the USSR are evident not just in the alphabet on signs but the country’s apparent obsession with roadside concrete statues. Most of the ones we saw were of animals, and not species native to the Caucasus, but pink flamingoes, a tiger missing an ear, and a lion. We also saw larger-than-life statues of a man and woman saluting the USSR, or possibly God, or most likely the local equivalent, Heydar Aliyev, “father of the nation,” the first dictatorial president of Azerbaijan. He’d bequeathed the government to his son, Ilham, who loyally continues the family tradition of flagrant corruption and human rights abuses, though he hasn’t yet gotten around to swapping in his own portrait for his father’s on billboards. Every town featured a larger-than-life portrait of Heydar Aliyev beaming benevolently in front of an Azeri flag, which has the same eight-pointed star and crescent as the Turkish flag, only with a backdrop of blue and green stripes.

  Fortunately the rain stopped a day later. In its absence the countryside seemed less drab than Georgia, the cows plumper, the grass greener. We followed a quiet, dreamy two-lane road that twisted and stretched like black taffy across Azerbaijan. The farther we pedalled east, the warmer it was when we woke up each morning, as though we were biking closer and closer to the sun. Every little town seemed more prosperous than the last, their streets lined with cellphone shops and Internet cafés, though the land beyond them quickly reverted to meadows and forests. Always to our left was the Greater Caucasus range, where mountains sleeved in ice held up the deep blue sky. Despite the region’s conflicts ancient and ongoing, despite it having the longest history of human habitation outside of Africa, it was sometimes hard to tell where wilderness began and ended in Azerbaijan—with the exception, that is, of the country’s designated roadside picnic areas.

  Judging by how often these rest stops were packed with Azeri families, it seemed that picnicking in the sunshine was a popular pastime. With their cemented walkways, shin-high metal fences, overgrown lawns, and flowers wilting in concrete pots, the rest stops didn’t exactly scream natural splendour, but at least they encouraged people to linger outdoors and appreciate the fresh air. Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.

  It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applies almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.

  By late afternoon these rest stops were generally empty. We pitched our tent in one on the way to Baku, but the lawn was so uneven we had to patch the holes in it with socks and underwear so the sleeping bags would lie flat. Using a concrete picnic table as a kitchen counter, Mel and I prepared our blandest meal yet, namely plain noodles mixed with flavourless flecks of corn from a soup mix. As I tried to pull the concrete bench closer to the table, for they were placed an awkward distance apart, I realized that these picnic areas, however neat and delimited, still hinted at the deep connectedness of all things: the bench wouldn’t budge, being firmly anchored to the earth. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” observed John Muir, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

  The next day a young Azeri boy hitched a ride on my bicycle. He grabbed the rear rack and surfed along the road in his sneakers, refusing to let go even as I shouted and shook the bike. The boy eventually released his grip and ran off giggling, but I could’ve sworn he was still hanging on all the rest of that day, dragging his heels on steep climbs. The terrain flattened a few days later into a desert cut with canyons, sun-baked and glittering, a landscape that gave more literal meaning to the name Azerbaijan, which was derived from azer, Persian for “fire.” It was so hot that I was sure the watermelon stand wobbling on the horizon must be a mirage. After stuffing our faces with fruit, the tailwind that picked up seemed no less miraculous. I was enjoying the boost of the breeze so much that I forgot the basic rule of flight: it’s easiest when you counterintuitively go against the wind, not with it, which is perhaps why arriving in Baku felt like crashing.

  Located on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the oil-slick capital of Azerbaijan is the kind of place that sticks out its chest to hide its paunch. Until the early twentieth century, the oil fields of Baku supplied up to half the world’s oil, padding the pockets of Azerbaijan’s ruling elite. Because the city was so expensive we sought free accommodations through Couchsurfing.com, a website that connects travellers with hosts around the world. We accepted an offer to stay at an American student apartment that in photos looked vaguely bohemian, but in fact was just a dive. We unfurled our sleeping bags on the mouldy carpets of a room without a door, and between the students partying all night to the beats of Bob Marley, and getting snacked on by fleas or mosq
uitoes or both, we barely slept. Mel woke up with huge bags under her eyes and a swollen, rashy face, with bites freckling her freckles. I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked the same.

  We set off, bleary-eyed, to apply for visas for Kazakhstan, our next stop on the Silk Road, which was less a road, it turned out, than a long stretch of red tape. Forget traffic, weather, potholes, mountain passes: the hardest part about cycling from Turkey to India is getting permission to cycle from Turkey to India. We took a taxi to the Kazakh embassy in Baku, only to discover it had moved. We prowled around at great expense until we found the new location, but it was closed; a sign stated that the embassy’s visa-granting hours were Tuesday through Friday, and it was Monday. Defeated, we caught another expensive taxi to our Couchsurfing apartment, but we’d neglected to write down the exact address. We got out in what vaguely seemed the right area, but we couldn’t find the place after searching on foot for an hour, and our cellphone was dead, so we couldn’t call our hosts for clarification. Having now spent most of our cash on fruitless taxi fares, we tried to withdraw money from half a dozen ATMs but they denied our bank cards. We tried to cash traveller’s cheques at four different banks, but the tellers refused them. With just five manat left in our pockets (roughly equivalent to five dollars), we ducked into a dingy restaurant and ordered soup as an excuse to charge our cellphone.

  Mel read over her logistical notes about applying for visas as we ate. In our division of responsibilities for the expedition, I was tasked with updating the website and fundraising, the latter of which wasn’t going so well, given we were less than halfway through the trip and more than halfway through our money. Mel was responsible for visas and logistics, which so far had worked out just fine. But in the notoriously bureaucratic “Stans” of Central Asia, things were about to get trickier. Visas for Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan came with fixed entry and exit dates, meaning they had to line up perfectly in time and space, like moves in a chess game.