Colin Thubron’s books have been translated into 20 languages, won heaps of awards, and he has been
‘I am a writer who happens to travel.’
I fell in love with the beauty of words and then discovered travel so the two coalesced. Travel writing, along with the epic poem, is one of the only two genres seen around the world. It has been through its medieval, imperialist and post-colonial phases but I think it’s far from finished. It’s a very flexible genre and the best travel writers have gone off to do their own thing. The British people have considered themselves pre-eminent in the genre — for some reason, they have done a lot of it. It may have something to do with the English public school, which hardens its wards and inures self-sufficiency (smiles).
‘I was keen on comprehending our inherited animosities.’
I began by travelling to the lands that were threatening to me — countries of the Middle East that were closer to England, and then Russia, and China. Our generation grew up believing them to be contentious and dangerous. In my parents’ generation, Germany occupied this space. It was the challenge of the forbidden and difficult that made them alluring, and the desire to understand them afresh.
‘It’s easy to travel poor.’
When I started out, I had hardly any money but I wasn’t looking for comfort and sightseeing, or any form of a traditional vacation, and buses and trains were quite inexpensive. I earned what I could, spent what I had, ate frugally, lodged cheaply, and frequently relied on the incredible hospitality of the people I met. After my first book, for which I stayed with a wonderful family for the duration of my days in Damascus, things got better and eventually, well-paid. I was lucky.
‘Some journeys are not possible now.’
I drove down to India on my first visit from England via eastern Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass and down to Peshawar. As you can imagine, this route is now lost to political boundaries. When I started, I looked for the comfort of cultural ties — in Syria, for my first book, it was the coexistence of urban life in very old cities that drew me there. When you walked around, you could look through the door to a marble courtyard with a lemon tree and a home that hinted at elements from the west. This mix of cultures has always fascinated me. I would love to write on the journey down the Amur, which flows on the borderland between far eastern Russia and Northeast China, but that’s again not possible for now because of the inaccessibility of some parts of it.
‘Notebooks are tremendously important.’
My habit is not to tell the people I meet that I am going to be writing about them because it seems impolite. I note everything down as soon as I can — but I do it in private. You think you’ll remember but as time passes you don’t, naturally. It’s always the details that we forget — a name, an expression, the furniture. I remember I once arrived at the Czech-Soviet border in Brezhnev’s USSR to a town with the unpromising name of Chop. I was being followed by the KGB and subjected to the full scrutiny — body search, panels of the car removed, film developed. They finally got to my notebooks and the guard on duty couldn’t decipher English. “Read it out!” he said. I read out the parts about the sun sparkling on the waves and the birds singing in the trees but I left out my conversations with dissidents. He let me go with my notebooks, thank goodness, after telling me, “This is very nice. It’s like poetry! You should be published.”