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Gantsara: Alone Across Mongolia, Ian D. Robinson
HarperCollins
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Robinson's preface to Gantsara is a third-person argument with himself about his motives for riding on horseback, alone, across Mongolia. It doesn't explain the motives at all, but helps the reader get a grasp of the man's character.

Gantsara means alone in Mongolian and it's a concept that bewilders the local nomads.
"Why would anyone want to ride across the steppes alone? Isn't life tough enough already without inviting more misfortune?"

Robinson (24) starts out in the tradition of the great English travel writer of the early 1900s, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that he's a Kiwi, by his easygoing acceptance of the nomadic people and their culture. His is the great OE that got out of hand.

The riding may have been done alone but he spends almost every night in a different ger (tent) with different nomad families. For four months and 2700 kilometres he coaxes a succession of hardy ponies across some of the roughest (and awe-inspiringly beautiful) terrain in the world, coming close to severe hypothermia, wolf attack and assault by some drunken descendants of Genghis Khan's hordes. But Robinson never loses his respect for the hospitable people living a tenuous existence on the high steppes.

The trek took incredible fortitude and determination – qualities that are just hinted at in the text. But that's enough to make you warm towards the lone Kiwi horseman, just as whole nomad villages did.