| With his father's assignment to the South Pacific as a United States naval commander, Ron embarked upon the first of his famed Asian travels. In all, he was to rack up more than a quarter of a million miles by the age of nineteen, and traverse much of China and India. Through the course of it, he became one of the few western adventurers to enter forbidden Tibetan lamaseries in the western hills of China, and studied with none other than the last in the line of royal magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. Yet for all the wonders he witnessed, he could not help but conclude the legendary wisdom of
the East did nothing to ease suffering and poverty in these overpopulated and underdeveloped lands. |
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