Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron&rsquos books have been translated into 20 languages, won heaps of awards, and he has been ranked among the greatest post-war British writers. It was Mirror to Damascus (1967) that set him firmly on the road to travel writing legends, and after The Hills of Adonis A Quest in Lebanon (1968), Jerusalem (1969) and Journey into Cyprus (1974), he forsook intimate accounts of small countries to demystify vast nations mired in incomprehension (notably Among the Russians in 1981 and Behind the Wall A Journey Through China in 1987). The &lsquolast of the gentlemen writers&rsquo, born 1939, is gangly, dapper and weather-beaten. Excerpts from a conversation.

&lsquoI am a writer who happens to travel.&rsquo

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&rsquos far from finished. It&rsquos 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 &mdash 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).

&lsquoI was keen on comprehending our inherited animosities.&rsquo

I began by travelling to the lands that were threatening to me &mdash 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&rsquo 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.

&lsquoIt&rsquos easy to travel poor.&rsquo

When I started out, I had hardly any money but I wasn&rsquot 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.

&lsquoSome journeys are not possible now.&rsquo

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 &mdash 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&rsquos again not possible for now because of the inaccessibility of some parts of it.

&lsquoNotebooks are tremendously important.&rsquo

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 &mdash but I do it in private. You think you&rsquoll remember but as time passes you don&rsquot, naturally. It&rsquos always the details that we forget &mdash a name, an expression, the furniture. I remember I once arrived at the Czech-Soviet border in Brezhnev&rsquos USSR to a town with the unpromising name of Chop. I was being followed by the KGB and subjected to the full scrutiny &mdash body search, panels of the car removed, film developed. They finally got to my notebooks and the guard on duty couldn&rsquot decipher English. &ldquoRead it out&rdquo 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, &ldquoThis is very nice. It&rsquos like poetry You should be published.&rdquo