Lands of Lost Borders

I've been on a "adventure/travel" books spree for a while and this didn't disappoint. In fact, I've quite enjoyed it and I've learned a few things. You end up feeling like travelling with the two cyclists along the Silk Road yourself, and this isn't the type of "everything is awesome" book with a touristy approach. It's full of reflections on what is travelling for discovery (yes, even today) and what it means that we are part of nature and must be respectful. I leave here some quotes (for lack of a features that allows you to add them manually if you read a physical book):

"[...] 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."

"I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn't deserve a new world; we'd just wreck it all over again."

"The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn't that they are monstrous, offensive and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem with evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape - at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports - because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desire, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else."