Yak butter & black tea

Wade Brackenbury never meant to get into trouble. He'd been raised to respect the law. But he was born with a hankering for adventure. He'd come to China to climb mountains, to lose himself in the strangeness of a different culture, to try something extraordinary before returning to the U.S. to settle down.

Then, in a restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of southwestern China, Wade met a charismatic French photo-journalist named Pascal. Pascal needed a skilled climber. Wade was hoping for an adventure. The next day the two of them set out on what would become the journey of a lifetime.

Pascal was searching for the Drung people, a dwindling minority said to live in an obscure valley in southern Tibet near the Burma border. Cut off from the rest of China by 20,000-foot mountains, accessible only when the snow in the high passes melted, forbidden to foreigners by a suspicious Chinese government, no Westerner had been there in over a century. The valley was only a few hundred miles from the parts of China open to tourists. Getting there would take them three years.

Wade Brackenbury's Yak Butter & Black Tea is a story of daring and adventure. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into a little-known corner of contemporary China. Through it all, however, is the engaging account of a young man, driven by a compulsion he doesn't fully understand, testing himself against unforgiving authority and discovering the dark parts of his own heart.