Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 4 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

When they had finished their lunch the two pilots left abruptly and hurried across the dusty courtyard to a couple of aircraft that had just been refuelled by a man with a lighted cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

How could it possibly be, I wondered, that the Soviet Union, which was responsible for all this, had managed to send manned rockets into space?
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Jim was a Scotsman, whose job it was to get the first satellite ground station installed. He was a sort of telecommunications troubleshooter, who sat at home in Milton Keynes waiting for the phone to ring and tell him where he was off to next. He thought Mongolia was about the weirdest place he had been in, and Jim had been in a few weird places which he was apt to tell you about.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The trouble here was that hard currency did not buy a lot. No currency did. There simply was not much available in Mongolia.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

These tantric practices were accepted without much comment by the practitioners of the dominant religion of the time, Shamanism. Shamans were a laidback pantheistic lot who simply interpreted these new Buddhist deities as special manifestations of Shamanic gods.

The net effects of the two approaches were very similar. Both aimed to put the practitioner in touch with the gods by inducing a state of trance. The Shamanic path to assimilation with a deity was usually to get high on hallucinogens whereas the Buddhist reached the same state through meditation and reciting holy texts.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia