Mongol Journal

This book is about the 9 1/2 weeks a teen-aged girl spent traveling through Mongolia by horse and by hitchhiking in the summer of 1993. This was a few months after the withdrawal of Communist control from the former Soviet Union and Mongolia itself. She was eighteen years old. There was no email and no Internet we now know it. She could not contact her parents or her family for two months and they had no way to know whether she was alive or dead. She was alone but never alone as she was accompanied by Mongolian friends and voluntary caretakers almost anywhere she went - and whether she liked it or not. The book is composed of slightly edited versions of her letters and journal from the time. It is meant to communicate what everyday life in Mongolia was like at the dawn of its new independence in 1993 through the eyes of a lone American teenager.