Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia by Louisa Waugh

From the Publisher

After two years of working in the capital of Mongolia, journalist Louisa Waugh moved to the remote village of Tsengel, in the extreme west of the country. This is the story of the year she spent there, living and working with the people who have made a home in the stark but beautiful landscape. The villagers and their culture vividly emerge as she shares her happiness, frustrations, and occasional extreme loneliness and fear.

Library Journal

Tsengel is a remote village in the far west of Mongolia, 1000 miles over poor roads from the capital city of Ulan Bator. British journalist Waugh decided to spend a year there teaching English while living in a ger (yurt), eating monotonous basic food, and enduring dust storms, bitter cold, filthy and unhealthy conditions, and loneliness. She befriended Mongols, Tuvans, and Kazakhs and writes sympathetically of their simple, seminomadic lives. A good study of life in contemporary rural Mongolia, the book is also an account of the author's determination to test herself in this most hostile environment. Unfortunately, the text bogs down in Waugh's own considerable but self-induced discomforts. Still, with growing political and tourist interest in this little understood but vast region of central Asia, this book has a niche. For larger public libraries. Harold M. Otness, formerly with Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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Table of Contents