Silk Route adventure - Claire Burges Watson

Rebelling against the predictability of banking life, Claire set off on her own on an eighteen-month, 6,000-kilometer horseback adventure across Central Asia. Silk Route Adventure takes you through rolling Mongolian prairie lands, monotonous Kazakh steppes, scales 4,000-meter passes in Kyrgyzstan, and crosses the black sands of the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. Throughout the journey, the author overcomes numerous obstacles and dangers, such as drunken and sometimes violent guides, hostile border police, raging rivers, snow-bound passes, and seemingly endless stretches of desert. In contrast to her remote and often harsh surroundings, she encounters the warm tradition of nomadic hospitality, witnessing a way of life largely untouched by modernity. Woven into the story of her adventure, Claire sets Mongolia and the "Stans" in their historical context, tracing their history from the height of Genghis Khan's time to their absorption into the Soviet Union when they were largely forgotten by the West.