A wise man once said that "You have to have lived it to write about it." Author Kirk Stephan has lived it, having spent a year a year on a vision quest, wandering about India, followed by several years exploring the pre-Colombian temples of Latin America and studying Mayan Hieroglyphics and learning the secrets of the shamans in the rugged mountains of Mexico and Guatemala. In this book, Kirk recounts his nautical adventures navigating the islands of the Indian Ocean aboard his sloop Zephyr in the year 1965. In this epic adventure, he gets his first taste of Chinese traditional medicine, hops a French freighter to Singapore, where he buys a sloop from a British Colonel, learns to sail it and ultimately shipwrecks on a desert island in the Indian Ocean.