Mongolia (Country Guide)
by Michael Kohn
from Lonely Planet
Discover Mongolia
Cling to your camel as a Gobi sandstorm sweeps past
Learn the 'three manly sports' while visiting nomad families on a Ger-to-Ger adventure
Honor the sky gods with the famous vodka dip-and-flick ritual
Stretch out your vocal cords with a throat-singing lesson in Chandmani
In This Guide:
Our intrepid author conducted 180 days' research, covered 8259km and drank 135 cups of salty milk tea
New Outdoors chapter details activities from cycling the Chinggis Khaan trail to horse trekking in the steppes
Content updated daily - visit lonelyplanet.com for up-to-the-minute reviews, news and traveler insights
Mongolian: Lonely Planet Phrasebook
by Alan J. K. Sanders
from Lonely Planet
As the traveler at a neighboring table struggles with the menu, you're glad you came equipped with your phrasebook. Not only did you order your meal with ease, you're also sure of what's coming. You smile as the waiter brings your dish and say en minii zakhialsan khool bish... Travel with confidence, using language as your guide.
Our phrasebooks give you a comprehensive mix of practical and social words and phrases in more than 120 languages. Chat with the locals and discover their culture - a guaranteed way to enrich your travel experience.
Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia
by Louisa Waugh
from Little, Brown Book Group
Walking the Gobi: 1,600 Mile-trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair
by Helen Thayer
from Mountaineers Books
By the bestselling author of Polar Dream (more than 40,000 copies sold) At the age of 63, Helen Thayer fulfilled her lifelong dream of crossing Mongolia's Gobi Desert. Accompanied by her 74-year-old husband Bill and two camels, Tom and Jerry, Thayer walked 1600 miles in 126-degree temperatures, battling fierce sandstorms, dehydration, dangerous drug smugglers, and ubiquitous scorpions. For more than 60 days Helen struggled to keep moving through this inhospitable terrain despite a severe leg injury. Without sponsors, a support team, or radio contact, hers is a journey of pure discovery and adventure.
Walking the Gobi takes readers on a trip through a little-known landscape and introduces them to the culture of the nomadic people whose ancestors have eked out an existence in the Gobi for thousands of years. Thayer's respect and admiration for the culture of Gobi and her gentle weaving of natural history shine throughout this remarkable story. The author proves that Baby Boomers don't have to take life lying down-their adventures have just begun.
Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia
by George Crane
from Bantam
In the steady hands of poet George Crane, previously unknown Zen master Tsung Tsai comes off as truly extraordinary. A "poet, philosopher, house builder, scientist, doctor, and when necessary, kung fu ass-kicker," Tsung Tsai would still be wandering about anonymously if it were not, Crane says, for the need of financing provided by an advance on this book. The last of the monks from his Chinese monastery, Tsung Tsai felt he had to return one last time to find and honor his master's bones and rekindle his tradition. Crane recounts their joint adventure, opening with Tsung Tsai's harrowing decades-earlier escape from newly communist China, walking from Inner Mongolia to Hong Kong through a war-torn, famine-struck, psychotic land, nearly starving along the way. Crane, a self-styled hedonist ne'er-do-well, who says that meditation makes him nauseous, sets the stage for an entrancing buddy story back to China with this highly disciplined but carefree Zen master. As their mutual affection grows, Crane absorbs Tsung Tsai's spare but demanding philosophy, which sustains them through the base poverty of northern China, a life-threatening 18-hour climb up and down a treacherous mountain, and a confrontation with a master of black magic. A page-turner and an eye-opener, Bones of the Master is worth every penny of that advance. --Brian Bruya
In 1959 a young monk named Tsung Tsai (Ancestor Wisdom) escapes the Red Army troops that destroy his monastery, and flees alone three thousand miles across a China swept by chaos and famine. Knowing his fellow monks are dead, himself starving and hunted, he is sustained by his mission: to carry on the teachings of his Buddhist meditation master, who was too old to leave with his disciple.
Nearly forty years later Tsung Tsai — now an old master himself — persuades his American neighbor, maverick poet George Crane, to travel with him back to his birthplace at the edge of the Gobi Desert.
They are unlikely companions. Crane seeks freedom, adventure, sensation. Tsung Tsai is determined to find his master's grave and plant the seeds of a spiritual renewal in China. As their search culminates in a torturous climb to a remote mountain cave, it becomes clear that this seemingly quixotic quest may cost both men's lives.
Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia
by Stephen J. Bodio
from The Lyons Press
"Stephen Bodio has written an unpretentious yet thrilling book about falconry, one of man's oldest and most mysterious alliances in the natural world; and he takes us afield under the wild skies of birds of prey." --Thomas McGuane (for A Rage for Falcons)
"Fascinating, funny, sad, beautiful . . . Aloft is full of wonderful images and energy." --Annie Proulx
When Stephen Bodio was a young boy in the early 50's he saw an image in National Geographic which became forever etched in his mind: it was a photograph of a Kazakh nomad, dressed in a long coat and wearing a fur hat, holding a huge tame eagle on his fist. And a life-long fascination with Central Asia was born.
Mongolia, a vast country located between Siberia and China and little known to outsiders, was long under Soviet domination and inaccessible to westerners. When it became independent in 1990 Bodio began planning a pilgrimage to see if the eagle hunters of "The Picture" had survived. A life-long falconer himself, he longed to visit the birth place of falconry and observe the traditions that had survived intact through the ages. His fantasy was realized when he traveled independently twice to the westernmost region of Mongolia and spent months with the people and birds of his dreams. The ancient rituals of hunting with eagles are fascinating and the remarkable relationship these nomadic people have with their birds of prey is thrilling. With vivid prose and humor, Bodio gives life to his dreams and the people, landscapes, and animals of Mongolia that have become part of his soul.
Mongolia Map by ITMB (International Travel Maps)
by International Travel Maps
from International Travel Maps and Books
Paper folded road and travel map in color. Scale 1:2,500,000. Distinguishes roads ranging from main roads (paved) to other roads (usually unpaved). Legend includes permanent tracks (unpaved), railways, international boundaries, province boundaries, mountain peaks, springs, caves, points of interest, official tourist resorts, official camp sites, nature sights, international airports, other airfields, sand dunes, nature reserves (approximate boundary), mountain passes. Includes inset map of Ulaanbaatar, index of Mongolia places and meaning of important terms.
Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman's Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China & Vietnam
by Erika Warmbrunn
from Mountaineers Books
Living in Seattle and failing to make her mark as an actress, Erika Warmbrunn decides to chuck it all and go traveling. Her resulting novel, Where the Pavement Ends, is an absorbing account of her ambitious eight-month solo bicycle trip through the countries of Mongolia, China, and Vietnam. While Warmbrunn's accounts of the travails of traveling in far-off lands doesn't necessarily break new ground, she writes with humor and candor. If you have even a twinge of wanderlust, you'll appreciate this book. Her adventure begins in Mongolia, where she cycles past curious onlookers in dusty towns with names like Khatgal and Moron. Abandoning her set-in-stone itinerary, she spends a memorable month in the village of Ashaant teaching English to schoolchildren and living in a traditional ger (tent). In China she braves the cold and nerve-racking interrogation but is awed by the Great Wall and intrigued by fellow backpackers' tales, told over noodles and beer. By the time she reaches Vietnam, with the frenetic Saigon and its ever-present reminders of the war, she is psychically and emotionally spent. Four thousand miles is a long way to go--even when it's a journey in search of self. --Jill Fergus
- "In the middle of the night I crawled out of my tent into a silvery vastness truly unchanged since Genghis Khan and his hordes loped west more than half a millennium ago. There was no glow of city lights on the horizon, no ranger station at the edge of the next valley, no quaint general store, no paved road. There was nothing but space, unbounded and untamed. A brilliant moon lit the blackness crystal clear. Moonshadows of every blade of grass danced silently in the wildness. It was the emptiest, quietest place I had ever been. I threw my arms out wide and spun slowly around and around in the dazzling clarity of the night, the stars blurring into ribbons of light above me."
Mongolia. It was Erika Warmbrunn's dream. To escape deep into parts of Asia inaccessible to tours and guidebooks, to abandon herself to the risks of the unknown. And so, with only a bicycle named Greene for a traveling companion, she set off on an eight month, 8,000 kilometer trek that stretched across the steppes of this ancient land, on through China, and down the length of Vietnam. Freed by Greene's two wheels from the tyranny of discrete points on a map, she found that the true merit of travel was not in the simple seeing, but in flowing with the unexpected adventure or invitation, in savoring the moments in between-the daily challenges of new words and customs, the tiny triumphs of learning a new way of life, the daunting thrill of never knowing what the next day would bring.
Wanting to ride a Mongolian horse and finding herself in the saddle for four hours, herding fifty head of cattle. Asking for a hotel in a Chinese village and being taken into a family's home to share their grandmother's bed for the night. Pedaling into the Vietnamese highlands and being stopped along the muddy road by a father asking that she join his two-year-old son's birthday party. Accepting a Mongolian village's invitation to stop pedaling and stay for a while, to live with them and teach them English. In the doing and the telling, Where the Pavement Ends is a much richer experience than any line on a map can show.
Where the Pavement Ends is the recipient of the Barbara Savage Miles From Nowhere Memorial Award.
Dateline Mongolia: An American Journalist in Nomad's Land
by Michael Kohn
from Rdr Books
Michael Kohn, editor of the Mongol Messenger, is one steppe ahead of the journalistic posse in this epic Western set in the Far East. Kohn's book is an irresistible account of a nation where falcon poachers, cattle rustlers, exiled Buddhist leaders, death-defying child jockeys and political assassins vie for page one. The turf war between lamas, shamans, Mormon elders and ministers provides the spiritual backdrop in this nation recently liberated from Soviet orthodoxy. From the reincarnated Bogd Khaan and his press spokesman to vodka-fueled racing entrepreneurs and political leaders unclear on the concept of freedom of the press, Kohn explores one of Asia's most fascinating, mysterious and misunderstood lands.
Fly-Fishing the 41st: From Connecticut to Mongolia and Home Again: A Fisherman's Odyssey
by James Prosek
from Harper Paperbacks
The New York Times has called James Prosek "the Audubon of the fishing world," and in Fly-Fishing the 41st, he uses his talent for descriptive writing to illuminate an astonishing adventure. Beginning in his hometown of Easton, Connecticut, Prosek circumnavigates the globe along the 41st parallel, traveling through Spain, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, China, and Japan. Along the way he shares some of the best fishing in the world with a host of wonderfully eccentric and memorable characters.
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