The Abode of Snow, Andrew Wilson - In the year 1873 the author traveled through one of the most inhospitable, but beautiful mountain ranges in the world, the mighty Himalayas.  For six months Wilson made his way through these unforgiving mountains, struggling against the elements, desperate to buy provisions from a suspicious native populace, and always trying to fight off the unrelenting cold. 
During portions of this epic journey Wilson rode a native Spiti pony. His descriptions of how this trusty mare saved her rider’s life by clambering over boulders and threading her way along sheer cliffs makes for thrilling reading. The lowest pass they crossed was the 11,578 foot high Zoji-la.
Alternately an adventure tale full of murderers and rogues, “The Abode of Snow” is also strewn with poetic passages regarding Wilson’s observations of the natural beauties he traveled through, including glacier flowers and snowy peaks.
The book remains one of the best accounts of overland equestrian travel ever written about the wild lands that lie between Tibet and Afghanistan.  Go to Amazon.co.uk or Barnes & Noble for more details

ISBN 1590481143

Among the Tibetans, Isabella Bird - She was a legend, and now she is forgotten. She risked her life to bring back tales about exotic places, and now those tales lie lost. She rode horses in wild countries, while the majority of her fellow English women were content to reside at home. Her name was Isabella Bird and she was one of the greatest equestrian travelers of all time. Alas, this fickle world has laid aside her wonderful story for too long.
No one could have foreseen the amazing life that lay ahead of the clergyman’s daughter. Of moderate means, blessed with ill-health, unwed, physically unimpressive, Isabella Bird had every reason to stay at home in the safety of her English village. She choose instead to venture out into the world, a place in the late nineteenth century still full of dangers, brigands, discomforts, and unexplored countries. And, whenever possible, Isabella chose to see the world from the back of a horse!
“Among the Tibetans” is one of her five famous equestrian trips. She had ridden through out the Hawaiian paradise. She had crossed the mighty Rocky Mountains on horseback. She explored Japan and went on to canter across Morocco when she was in her seventies. But of all her equestrian adventures, her ride through Tibet takes precedence. For it was here, in this vast, windswept, frozen northland that the intrepid English woman nearly met her match! She and her little horse, “Gyalo”, were dashed into icy rivers. They crossed passes so high that the porters begged for mercy. They saw more adventure, and covered more miles than had ever been experienced by a female equestrian explorer.
“Among the Tibetans” is that most wonderful of books, a rousing adventure, an enchanting travelogue, a forgotten peek at a mountain kingdom swept away by the waves of time.   Go to Amazon.co.uk or Barnes & Noble for more details

ISBN 1590481712

ISBN 1590480317

In the Forbidden Land, Henry Savage Landor - The nineteenth century can rightly claim to have seen the birth and travels of a host of brave men and women who undertook great hardships in their quest for adventure. Legendary names come to mind like Sven Hedin, Sir Richard Burton and Isabella Bird. Yet sadly, one name is largely forgotten today, that is Henry Savage Landor.
Though Savage Landor became justly famous for making a series of trips to many outlandish and dangerous places, none of his trips aroused public sentiment like his famed journey through Tibet in the late 1890s. Fearing her covetous foreign neighbors in British-occupied India and Imperial China, this high Himalayan country had sealed her borders to outsiders. Thereafter a number of Europeans, including several British explorers, had been detected by Tibetan officials and turned back before they could reach the nation’s isolated capital at Lhasa.  With such a geographic prize at stake, Savage Landor determined to set off with a small group of native porters to reach the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, by stealth. To say he failed would be too polite a term for what occurred next.
After making his way across vast and primitive lands, the would-be explorer was detected by the Tibetans and arrested. Once they determined that the Englishman was traveling without the official sponsorship of his government, the situation turned from bad to worse. Savage Landor and his servants were first imprisoned, then brutally tortured. At one point the explorer had his arms tied behind his back. He was then mounted on a half-wild horse, placed in an infamous “torture saddle” that had spikes sticking into his back, and forced to ride many miles, all the while being slowly torn to bits by the cruel spikes.
Illustrated with hundreds of photographs and drawings, this blood-chilling account of equestrian adventure still makes for page-turning excitement. Go to Amazon.co.uk or Barnes & Noble

In the Hoofprints of Marco Polo, Major Clarence Dalrymple Bruce - There is an old saying among the equestrian journeyers of Central Asia that a unique occasion will produce a special man. When such a rare occasion arose in 1905 for a courageous horseman to ride from Kashmir to Peking, Major Clarence Bruce stepped into the saddle and cantered into Long Rider history.

As the 20^th century dawned this soldier turned author found himself on the wrong side of the Himalayas. Bruce had previously led a regiment of Chinese solders. Yet fate now placed him in picturesque Srinagar, Kashmir, thousands of miles away from faraway Peking where he wished to be.

So Bruce did what any Long Rider would do – the impossible.

He began by making his way to the mountain kingdom of Ladakh. There he enlisted a crew of “wild looking ruffians and 28 rugged ponies,” then set off on an eight-month journey that taxed men and horses to their limits. Mounted on his trusty 13 hand high Kashmiri pony, Bruce started by leading his caravan over 18,000 foot high Himalayan passes, before descending onto the Devil’s Plain in Tibet. The caravan was hard pressed to avoid detection by these xenophobic mountaineers who were adamant about keeping foreigners like Bruce out of their “forbidden kingdom.”

They needn’t have bothered. Bruce had set his sights on Peking, thousands of kilometers away, so he wasn’t inclined to linger near Lhasa. From freezing in Tibet, Bruce next crossed into Chinese Turkistan. There he stood face to face with the infamous Lop Nor desert.

It was in this dreaded wasteland, as they followed “in the hoofprints of Marco Polo,” that Bruce’s caravan suffered. Men collapsed. Ponies died. Yet they still rode towards mythical Peking. “The ponies never failed us, no matter how impossible the ground was,” Bruce recalled.

“In the Hoofprints of Marco Polo” is that rare kind of book, one that reads as fresh today as it did the day Bruce set his pen to paper. Its pages are full of brave men and braver horses, wild mountains and picturesque tribesmen. Amply illustrated with photos taken by the author, this equestrian travel classic also contains an excellent appendix, complete with all of the author’s geographical observations.   

Journey with Loshay,  George Patterson - This is an amazing book written by a truly remarkable man!

The Long Rider author was a Scottish medical missionary who had become Tibetan in all but his broad Highland brand of personal enthusiasm. Relying both on his companionship with God and on his own strength, he undertook a life few can have known, and a journey of emergency across the wildest parts of Tibet.

In 1950 the Communists advanced into Tibet, and a warning had to be taken to India. The only way to achieve this was by riding through the Himalayas!

“Though it was winter Patterson chose a 300-mile route to Sadiyah, in northern Assam, which hardly anyone had completed before. The snows on the high passes might beat him, but at any rate he would be travelling first-class by Tibetan standards. He knew how to behave if the Tibetan winter would let him. If he could find the villages he had authority to commandeer relays of food and transport; the headmen would be (and were) beaten up if these were not forthcoming. As for his companions of the Khamba tribe, he could beat them at most of their own games. He was a superb horseman; he loved their horseplay and their ribaldries; his body was an engine as efficient as theirs for mobile operation in low temperatures at 20,000 feet; he could forget about baths for two months as happily as they could for their whole lives.” said London’s The Times.  This classic narrative matches in sheer virility the equestrian journey it records.  Please visit Barnes & Noble or Amazon.co.uk for details.

Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, Isabella Bird - A small ship made its way up the Tigris river in the winter of 1890. Bound for Baghdad, the steamer Mejidieh was carrying what would prove to be a historically significant load of singular humanity.

On board were two of the most important equestrian travellers of the Victorian era – Lord Curzon and Isabella Bird. Though he would later become the most celebrated Viceroy of India, George Curzon had initially made a name for himself by becoming the first Englishman to ride through  the remote Pamir mountains of Central Asia. The Long Rider turned politician was now entering Persia to ascertain its political importance to the British Raj.

Isabella had already survived so many mounted adventures that the Times of London had dubbed her “the boldest of travellers.”

She was intoxicated with the freedom she discovered on horseback and praised the “charm of the nomadic life” she had chosen to lead.

Khyber Knights, CuChullaine O’Reilly - Few places on Earth were more dangerous in 1983 than Peshawar, Pakistan. With a savage war being waged a few miles away between the Soviet Union and the Afghan mujahideen, Peshawar had become the new Casablanca. When she wasn’t being bombed, her narrow streets hosted a swirling human cocktail of turbaned freedom fighters, tight-lipped foreign mercenaries, naïve foreign aid workers, cruel Pathan warlords, and more spies than ever lurked in Berlin.
Riding through this fiery forge was CuChullaine O’Reilly. The journalist who turned equestrian explorer was already familiar with Peshawar and the surrounding lawless portions of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. A convert to Islam, the wandering horseman was unfazed by religious obstacles, fluent in the patois of the tribesmen, and able to partake of any local offering from luke warm goat fat to sullied ditch water.
Setting off from Peshawar, O’Reilly began an equestrian odyssey into a mediaeval portion of the world devoid of mercy and machinery. His mission was to ride over some of the world’s highest mountain ranges, thread his way through untamed tribes, and miraculously get back to war-torn Peshawar. Yet the adventure he sought demanded a high price. His horse died and was eaten by eager natives. He was kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned in Pakistan’s most infamous prison, and met murderers, bandits, whores, and princes. Yet despite these setbacks, O’Reilly never lost hope that he would complete his mounted exploration of the remote and dangerous heart of Asia.
Lavishly illustrated with dozens of drawings and maps, the resulting book was compiled from the field notes, maps and diaries the author brought back from his travels. It includes an in-depth glossary of native words, and the largest collection of ethnological, historical, political, sexual, and religious information ever gathered about life in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.
“Khyber Knights” is thus a rare talisman against a world grown soft and predictable. Its pages burn with a bawdy portrayal of the darkest secrets of this cruel and beautiful region. It is a tissue of mishaps and romantic adventures, poetic passages and natural beauties, set to the echoing of horses’ hooves.
Told with grit and realism by one of the world’s foremost equestrian explorers, “Khyber Knights” has been penned the way lives are lived, not how books are written. It makes every effort to rip the reader’s nerves to rags with its ruthless devotion to the unvarnished truth about life in the North West Frontier.
You do not read “Khyber Knights”. You survive it!  Go to Amazon.co.uk or Barnes & Noble.

A Ride through Islam, Hippisley Cunliffe Marsh -

Seldom does an equestrian travel tale require its readers to exert more intellectual caution than this superbly written book. For herein lies a story whose message of intolerance is once again afoot in the world. True enough, young British officer Hippisley Cunliffe Marsh evaded plenty of danger in the way of Turkoman slave traders and other villains as he made his wary way from Turkey to India. Moreover, being a keen horseman, the Bengal Lancer made sure to note the equestrian practices of the countries he rode through.

“The Turkoman horses are specially trained on little food and less water for a month previous to an expedition; and once they start the horse gets large quantities of a mixture of one-half barley, one quarter maize, and one quarter sheep’s fat, all made into a soft mass of eight pounds, on which the horse is able to do a hundred miles a day for several days,” Captain Marsh noted.

With the decline of the Turkish, Persian, Afghan and Mughal kingdoms, the military might of the British Raj was in its ascendancy. With this rise in power, officers like Marsh harbored a corresponding belief in their personal superiority. The result was a long slide into religious and cultural bigotry.

On arriving at the holy city of Meshed, Persia, for example, Marsh was detained at the gates by guards intent on inspecting his saddlebags. Adhering to the belief that Europeans were exempt from local legalities, the author, “struck the rascal holding my horse with my whip, leaving him bellowing on the ground.”

Throughout history, the world of equestrian travel has been peopled by wise men and women. Their journeys taught them that custom and appearance count for little and that the perils of equestrian travel unite all Long Riders as they attempt to survive hunger, cold and danger. Such a bond of equestrian brotherhood has no room for the religious and political bigotry found in this book.

Yet in this time of global woe, when the Islamic world is being devalued by a new generation of Sahibs who cherish the myth of  their national superiority, Marsh’s “Ride through Islam” reads like a warning from the grave.  For more information, please visit Barnes & Noble or amazon.co.uk..

A Ride to India, Harry de Windt - Blame it on the Czar!  If Harry de Windt, that dashing 19th century Long Rider, had been allowed to follow his original plan, he would have galloped to India via the Central Asian satraps of His Imperial Russian Highness.  When suspicious St. Petersburg put a halt to Harry’s Russian route, the intrepid equestrian explorer determined to reach his goal via the Shah’s empire instead.

What followed was a ride to remember as Harry de Windt, lecturer, author, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and equestrian explorer par excellence, saddled up in 1890 and set off to examine the forgotten corners of Persia and Baluchistan.

The resultant journey was literally one for the record books as the redoubtable Harry proved time and again that he wasn’t going to be put off by a few minor inconveniences such as the weather, which ranged from an arctic storm in Persia that froze his cigar to his lips, to a howling desert wind in Baluchistan with temperatures nearing 120 degrees Fahrenheit!

Neither was handsome Harry bothered by the less than ideal accommodations he discovered.

“The floor was crawling with vermin but in Persia one must not be particular,” he casually observed.

Nor was our author overly concerned about his physical safety, dismissing the fact that the last foreign traveler who attempted this route had been “waylaid, robbed, tied to a tree, and left to starve.”

Though it reads like a mounted Jules Verne novel, “A Ride to India” is replete with the author’s scientific observations and appendices, including details from his exact route, “road overgrown, much camel thorn,” to Harry’s “Table of Languages in Baluchistan.”

Part science but all adventure, “A Ride to India” takes the reader for a canter across the Persian Empire of a romantic and bygone age.  For more details visit Barnes & Noble or Amazon.co.uk

Through the Heart of Afghanistan, Emil Trinkler - Few people recall today that Germany and Afghanistan were once close friends, allied in their mutual distrust of the then still-powerful British Empire. Within the space of a few years the British had beaten the Germans on the battlefields of the First World War. A few years later these same English victors used their military machine, complete with state-of-the-art airplanes based in India, to bomb their Afghan neighbors into political submission.
It was during the early 1920s, while both Germany and Afghanistan were thus licking their wounds and regaining their political power, that the German geologist Emil Trinkler made his legendary trip across the forbidden kingdom of Afghanistan.
The Afghan king had shut his borders to the majority of outsiders, which further heightened the kingdom’s already famous isolation.
Yet having arrived at the Afghan border via Russian Turkestan, Trinkler wasn’t about to go back. He mounted a local horse and rode off across the vast interior of that still-beautiful country. “Through the Heart of Afghanistan” describes his journey. Its pages are sprinkled with the author’s reminiscences of a Central Asian world now passed into memory. Solitary peaks. Peaceful valleys. Sunny plains and blazing deserts are all to be found on these loving pages.
Trinkler saw Afghanistan as she still was, asleep and dreaming in the last stages of her long medieval slumber. Amply illustrated with a series of period photographs, “Through the Heart of Afghanistan” takes the reader back in time, on the back of a horse, and in the company of a gentle man, to a country now recalled only in legends.  Go to Amazon.co.uk or  Barnes & Noble.

A Traveller on Horseback, Christina Dodwell - In the late 1980s, Christina Dodwell moves from a Greek Easter into a chilly Eastern Turkish spring, not improved for the cold and hungry traveller by the fairly strict observance of Ramadan. Retreating east, she visits the buried cities and rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia on the first of a number of hired, borrowed or bought horses, the ideal liberating companions for her unconventional style of travel.

While the snow still clothes the eastern mountains, the Long Rider moves further east over the border into Iran, to a ranch breeding miniature Caspian horses near the Russian frontier, to the salt desert villages of the south-east, and on into Pakistan for a visa renewal, the unity of her journey maintained by the fact that she is still within the confines of the Persian empire, as she celebrates the end of Ramadan in a festive village near the Afghan border.

Back in Iran, she visits the crumbling grandiloquence of lost empires at Pasargad, Naksh-i-Rustam and Persepolis, as well as the trouble spots of yesterday and today in the valleys of the Assassins and Kurdistan. But her journey reaches its happiest fulfilment back in Eastern Turkey when she buys a fine grey Arab stallion called Keyif — the name aptly means high-spirited. Together they travel among snow caps, salt lakes, nomadic summer camps and lowland rice paddies, across mountain country from Erzurum to Lake Van, up the Russian border to Mount Ararat, and discover the unexpected pleasures and hazards of remote mountain life.

The Sunday Telegraph has described Christina as “a natural nomad” and wrote of “her courage and insatiable wanderlust.”

Christina has the gift to communicate the zest for adventure, and even the occasional night in an Iranian police cell cannot dim her sheer delight in travelling to remote and challenging places.
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Växlande Horisont, J. Östrup - J. Östrup, som studerat Arabisk och kulturhistoria, red 4.500 km. på samma häst genom Egypten, Syrien & Asien Minor åren 1891-1893.

Hans lojal Arabiska hingst “Antar” tog honom slutligen hela vägen hem till Köpenhavn, efter en resa som satt honom I när kontakt med både historiska stader och öknens beduiner. För att inte tala om Tscherkessiska rövare och slugna Levantiner.

“Jag har därfor strävat att ge inte så mycket vad jag har sett, som däremot vad jag hört; ty just på denna punkt ligger enligt min åsikt skillnaden mellan den resande forskaren och den vanlige turisten. Vad jag sökte var först och främst människorna själva; att leva tillsammans med dem för att lära känna deras kulturhistoriska ståndpunkt och tala med dem, för att lära känna deras tankar, var min väsentligaste uppgift.”

Ostrups ovanliga och intellektuella synpunkt gör detta till en reseskildring som är mycket mer än den vanliga äventsrsboken.

Just som den homeriske sångaren samanfattads för 3000 år sedan:

“Människors städer han såg och dem själva han lärde att känna.”  Please visit Barnes & Noble or amazon.co.uk.