Author Brandon Wilson’s Tibet travel adventure book, Yak Butter Blues: A Tibetan Trek of Faith, is the recent recipient of an international literary award. This true story about a couple’s courageous quest for survival and enlightenment during their 650-mile trek across Tibet has received a 2005 “IPPY” Award Honorable Mention in the Travel Essay division.
Yak Butter Blues: A Tibetan Trek of Faith is an inspiring new book of Tibetan adventure. It exposes the raw challenge of traveling deliberately, one-step-at-a-time on an incredible 650-mile (1000-kilometer) trek across the unforgiving Himalayan plains.
Join this determined man and woman, along with Sadhu, their Tibetan horse, as they set off to attempt to become the first Western couple to trek this ancient trail across the earth’s most remote corner.
What begins as an adventure, quickly turns into so much more. Discovering that Tibetans cannot trek this same pilgrim’s trail of faith from Lhasa to Kathmandu, they decide to walk it in their place-and prove to the authorities that it can be done without repercussions in China.
Their true story is a riveting tale of human endurance. The Wilsons face Tibet’s ruthless environment head-on: the blistering winds, extreme temperatures, sandstorms, blizzards, high altitudes and the thinnest of air-made all the more challenging by exhaustion, hunger, illness, inflexible bureaucrats and implacable, trigger-happy Chinese soldiers.
Yak Butter Blues is a story of faith and the kindness of strangers. It provides a candid first-hand look at the lives of the Tibetan families who secret them into their homes-and at a culture teetering on the edge of extinction.
Yak Butter Blues is a tale of personal enlightenment, as the couple discovers a sense of greater purpose, wonder, a renewed faith and ultimately what it takes to endure.
Wilson leads you along on their physical, spiritual and emotional pilgrimage, through the highs and lows, across this startling land in this colorful, candid, caring and classic tale, Yak Butter Blues: a Tibetan Trek of Faith.
Yak Butter Blues is an exceptional travelogue, richly illustrated with the author’s photography, and destined to become a Tibet travel classic.
The 2005 Independent Publisher “IPPY” Awards attracted nearly 2,200 entries from over 1,500 publishers worldwide, including all fifty U.S. states and eighteen foreign countries.
According to Independent Publisher, the “IPPY” Awards “are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers that are produced each year, and reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing.”
The awards will be presented at BookExpo America in New York City on June 3rd.
