A Shaggy Yak Story

by PeterSomerville-Large (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1991

  $3.25

  As a boy Peter Somerville-Large was captivated by travellers' accounts of Central Asia. In 1953 when he was in his early 20s he was appointed lecturer in English to the Royal Military College in Kabul, still then a small town of bazaars and catwalks, whose citizens proudly retained ancient Moslem custom and values. For 18 months he struggled to teach Milton, fairy stories and the elements of rugby to cadets in the eccentric atmosphere of Afghanistan's answer to Sandhurst before setting out on his travels with a friend from Dublin. Their first destination was the roof of the world, the remote Wakhan corridor bordering Badakshan. Turned back by authority only a short distance from the lofty Pamirs, they set out to explore more accessible parts of Asia. They went to Gilgit and to Kathmandu, where they took part in a disastrous tiger shoot, and made an illegal expedition into the jungle of southern Bhutan. Their travels evoke a vanished eastern world unsullied by tourism or the Kalashnikov. Over 35 years later the author returned to north-east Pakistan. In a river-bed outside Gilgit he met a tribe of Kirghiz from the Wahkan who in 1979 under their venerable leader, Rahman Qul, had made a dramatic escape from the Russian advance into their territory. They were more fortunate than most refugees, since the Turkish government, acknowledging them to be of the same stock as Turks, gave them a new home near Lake Van in eastern Turkey. In Afghanistan they had herded yak, and it seemed fitting that they should have yak in Turkey. As a small compensation for travelling in their country long ago, Somerville-Large thought of providing them with these animals. He concludes his book with an account of his efforts to restore to these refugees a vestige of their nomadic culture by bringing them a pair of yak from Whipsnade Zoo.

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.25

  An account of the author's travels in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nepal spanning 40 years. In 1953, when he was in his early twenties, he went to Kabul to teach English at the Royal Military College, an experience which brought him much closer to the Afghan's lives than any diplomat and which he relates in this book. After 18 months teaching, he travelled with a friend to Badaksham, Nepal, and Bhutan, where they were arrested. 35 years later he returns, to reflect with nostalgia on the changes wrought by the Soviets in Afghanistan and by tourism on Nepal. In North-East Pakistan he remeets some of the Kirghiz nomads and finds the old chief and many of the tribe have been resettled in Turkey. But their yaks or yore are gone so Somerville-Large takes it on himself to transport 2 females from Whipsnade - a nightmare tale of paperwork and shipping problems but one with a happy ending. The author also wrote To the Navel of the World , The Grand Irish Tour , Cappaghglass and Skyiing .