A BBC motoring program changed everything.
Watching three Englishmen barrel across Bolivia in impractical vehicles, one restless American made a decision: he needed a confrontation with the world that didn't arrive shrink-wrapped or bookmarked. When a single-line email arrived from his cousin ? "What about Mongolia?" ? the answer was immediate.
What followed was a journey across three countries and a lifetime of impressions: the silvered dusk of Seoul's skyline seen from a rooftop among family; the forbidden courtyards of Beijing where fifty thousand dragons watch from every beam and battlement; and finally, the vast Mongolian steppe ? a land of nomads, stallions, and skies too wide to remember ceilings.
Written in the tradition of the great literary travel memoirs, Mongolia: Yurts, Yaks, and Yearnings moves between the personal and the panoramic ? the new romance left behind at the departure gate, the cousin who navigates Seoul's subways with quiet authority, the customs official whose lunch break decided a man's fate. It is a book about what happens when ordinary people step into extraordinary geography, and discover that the machinery of routine, once broken, is not always easy to reassemble.
Part adventure, part meditation, entirely true. The names have been changed. The wonder has not.
