For the traveller, Kazakhstan offers more than just a staging post for the Silk Road, as is often perceived, and there is more than just steppe.

My three-year ride by horse from Mongolia to Hungary was the most difficult, most revealing, and interesting of any of my travels. Travelling by horse, you're far more engaged and dependent on the land and other people than by any other means.

I think in our society we too often choose the people we associate with based on our own hasty judgments.

I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.

Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.

You can?t just be the one who criticizes; you have to be the one who offers a new road.