Georg Kirner: Ein Rucksack voller Abenteuer durch Russland und die Mongolei is a collection of travel accounts by Georg Kinzer, written by Peter Puller.

Plot:
Kirner has travelled extensively. In this book are tales of three of his trips from the 90s. In the first, he travelled to Russia to cross it with his bike on the trail of his father who fought in WW2 and was in Russian captivity for a while.
On his second trip he went to Mongolia to look for the babas, a huge group of stone statues that more or less look like this, with a short stop in the so-called Valley of the Dinosaurs.
The third trip brought him to Mongolia once more to live with a nomadic tribe who range through the north of the country, at least for a while.

The book is a very quick read and Kirner definitely has a sense for adventure. While there are interesting episodes, the whole book suffers from Kirner trying very hard not to show any prejudice and therefore making his prejudices even more notable.

Puller’s writing reads, as we say in Austria, like the “Kronenzeitung” (the biggest newspaper in Austria that got its popularity by catering to people’s most base impulses): short sentences, nothing too complicated, you don’t really have to think about what you’re reading. It’s okay, but it won’t win any prizes.

I have to admit that the part about Russia generally left me pretty cold. Maybe because I just can’t identify with people who honestly choose to sit on bikes, not even mentioning the “for long stretches” part. [Seriously. Who’d want that?]

It gets more interesting with his two trips to Mongolia. Especially the first one was very interesting. Ever since I read this book as a child about a young Mongolian boy and his pony (I just needed all my google-fu to find out it was Gine Victor Leclercq’s Fast as the Wind. I recognised the dust jacket*. But it is absolutely amazing how many Mongolia-Horse-Books there are), I wanted to get on a horse and travel through Mongolia for a while. And Kirner does just that, which is pretty damn awesome. Also, who wouldn’t want to go to the Valley of the Dinosaurs and find their own dinosaur egg?

Unfortunately the third trip (the second to Mongolia) kind of ruined most of the goodwill Kirner amassed with his Horse-Dinosaur-Escapades**. Kirner is apparently one of those people who really believe that the “nature people” have a way of life that is intrinsically more awesome than the capitalistic western world. Or so. And while I could just smile at that up until that point, on his third trip he just crosses the line. It seems like he is completely surprised that an impoverished nomadic tribe at the border to Russia and always just the teensiest bit from starving does not have some supercool secret to life that grants them serenity.

And since he is so surprised, he has to harp on and on about how these people also have negative sides – though he wish it weren’t so – and that maybe they’re just humans, you know?! That just shows his own prejudices (even if they were prejudices that came from thinking too good) and gets exhausting.

Summarising: Unless you’re especially interested in Mongolia, I’d skip this one.

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*I wish I still had that book. Passed it on to a sibling, so it was lost forever.
**Now those are mental images… don’t tell me you’re not seeing them.