Readers and writers blog

Don Croner, a travel writer and author of the weblog Don Croner’s World Wide Wanders, has taken what once was a synonym for the middle of nowhere, Outer Mongolia, and made it a center of his universe.

And a center of ours, thanks to writing that, while often voluminous and detail-laden, is invariably excellent. Which is why his is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

Inner Mongolia, as you may know, is a province in northeastern China, and Outer Mongolia has been an archaic term for nearly a century since most of it became simply Mongolia, a separate nation, on the northern border of that Chinese province. Croner has a residence in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaan Baatar, when he isn’t flitting around the rest of the region.

Some of his travels may be short ones, but with their hazards, as he describes in his Aug. 4 entry:

I have moved from my penthouse apartment in the exclusive Sansar District of Ulaan Baatar to a hovel in the howling wilderness beyond Zaisan Tolgoi, on the wrong side of the Tuul River (and the railroad tracks) from the city. This area is not yet on the phone grid so I cannot get dial-up internet service. (Getting to that service) entails walking from my hovel into town and thus risking attack by the packs of ravening wolves that periodically pick off the unwary pedestrian around Zaisan Tolgoi. Until I get regular internet service, I have therefore decided to go into occultation.

This passage illustrates several features of Croner’s writing that we find fascinating: For one thing, he never explains why he is moving from his penthouse to a hovel. For another, his use of ‘occultation’ is just the right word for being blocked from the Internet — not really hidden but out of sight as one celestial body would shield another from view. And finally, we’re not really sure about all those wolves.

There’s a mystery — no, an exoticism — in Croner’s writing that applies equally to himself. Despite the extensiveness of his writing, he discloses very little about himself. And despite the numerous photographs on his weblog, he’s always behind the camera. We know he’s an American, and the only two photos we can find on the Internet, both fuzzy, show a tall, slender man, 40- to 50-ish, once in a Central Asian blouse and fedora, the other time in a greatcoat, same hat, standing beside a camel.

His writing has a British cast to it, but we don’t know where he was educated. What we do know from his intelligent discourse about the history and culture of a large part of the world unknown to most Westerners is that he is profoundly studious. Besides English, he speaks Chinese (not sure which dialect) and probably French (most of his May 13 entry is in French) and has a separate blog in Mongolian, a language written in Cyrillic but definitely not Russian.

What better person to be telling us about exotic peoples and places, even those that, like the mystical kingdom of Shambhala, one of Croner’s favorite subjects, exist only in spirit? Even his everyday observations are flavored by this mystery and exoticism, as in his April 22 entry from Gansu Province in China:

The day up till now had been warm with a solid dome of cobalt-blue sky overhead. No sooner did we arrive at the river than it very suddenly clouded over and a ferocious wind starting howling out of the north. Then it started snowing, huge snowflakes the size of half dollars driven almost horizontally by the wind . . . Ms. Chan (his guide and driver) laughed uproariously, as if this blizzard in the middle of what had been a warm spring day was the funniest thing she had ever seen in her life. As soon as the snow slowed down a bit, we headed back to my hotel . . . Despite my protestations, she insisted on carrying my bag into the train station and then waited with me until I boarded the train . . . It was a bit of a mystery to me why she was being so solicitous. I am almost tempted to think that she was an emanation of White Tara, the Protectress of Travelers. I even felt a pang of guilt about not giving her a tip, but I reasoned that Tara would not expect one.

We find that kind of writing irresistible. We hope you do, too.

– Sid Leavitt