Tündük

In 1977, I walked into a Bedouin tent in the Sinai desert and understood something I hadn't been able to put into words before. The richness of a life built from almost nothing. The oneness with the wind, the earth, the mountains, the sea. Not poverty — a different kind of wealth entirely.

I have been chasing that feeling ever since. Through the Amazon, where I spent three years living with the Uchupiamona tribe in the Bolivian jungle. Through thirty years of sleeping in tents on rooftops and in backyards, on every continent, no matter where I live. Since 1995, I have not spent a night under a solid ceiling by choice. My tents are famous among those who've seen them. They make the house redundant. The romance of it is overwhelming.

After five years living in a Mongolian ger, I found my way to Kyrgyzstan — to a craft that had never been interrupted, in a village that still builds the way it always has. There I met Nura.

Joel Nurgul — Nura — is a proud Kyrgyz woman who grew up in a landscape where boz üy dotted the hills like giant mushrooms rising from the earth. She is a keeper of the tradition: running our Boz Üy camp on the banks of Lake Issyk-Kul, raising three children between Bishkek and the water, actively sustaining the craft her people built. Tündük is her inheritance. We are simply taking it to the world.