Ocean Beach, San Francisco. The book roams — Dharamsala, Indonesia, a Franciscan friary in New York, Jerusalem, a beach in Mexico — but it lands at Ocean Beach, where he settles into a working life as a journalist and keeps paddling out. That’s the end point and the home water.
Latitude 37.759400, Longitude -122.510700. Place name: San Francisco, California.
Yogis follows Saltwater Buddha here, picking up in his early twenties with a broken heart and no direction. He goes to a monastery in Dharamsala and meets Sonam, a Tibetan refugee, and hatches a half-baked plan to get him to America and back to his family. It fails, and watching Sonam absorb that failure teaches him more than the meditation does. From there he surfs Indonesia, sits with Franciscans in New York, walks Jerusalem, and stalls out on a Mexican beach where good waves, tacos, and nothing to do turn out not to fix anything either. The two friends meet again by a coincidence he couldn’t have engineered. It’s a surf book and a religion book at once, and honest about how little he arrives at.