The Long Road to Mount Kailash (The Garden of Kathmandu Trilogy, Quadrolgy, Pentalogy)

This is Dominic's fifth novel about the adventures of Carl Brecht, an anthropologist, who lives with his wife, Barbara, in an Illinois suburb. Their relationship becomes strained when Carl's Nepalese colleagues from the University of Chicago invite him to go on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet during the month of August in 2013. Barbara is disturbed by her dreams about Carl travelling to Nepal and trekking in Chinese occupied Tibet during the monsoon season. Her fear escalates after reading in the newspaper that 60,000 Hindu pilgrims from India were stranded in the Himalayas due to the monsoon. She was also worried about Carl flying from O'Hare on Qatari Airlines because the Taliban had recently opened an embassy in Doha, where the plane would have a six hour layover. Barbara was also concerned about their son, Mark, getting a divorce from Corrine and the future of the grandchildren, Sammy and Emily. At the last minute their daughter, Kathy, a medical doctor doing residency at Rush University Hospital, was selected to do an International Rotation in Nepal. She joined her father on the flight with his friends. Challenging adventures take place on the twelve hour flight to Doha and again after their arrival in Kathmandu. Carl noticed that several roads were rutted and unpaved due to the slow recovery of the country after the Maoist Revolution, the removal of the monarchy, and Royal Palace being turned into a museum. While Kathy went directly to work at the hospital in the nearby city of Patan, Carl toured Hindu and Buddhist temples with his friends for a few days before departing for Tibet by bus. On the nine day trip to and from Mount Kailash in land cruisers, be prepared for landslides in the Himalayas, the meeting of outlaws, spending the night with Tibetan nomads, and more adventures while trekking up and down Mount Kailash and before returning to Kathmandu. The biggest surprise takes place at the end of the novel in the garden of the Kathmandu Guest House.