Anna Mundowdelights in meeting the travel writer Colin Thubron who, like his 19th-century counterparts, can sleep anywhere, eat anything, and react calmly to almost any calamity
The New Yorker magazine's most famous cover is Saul Steinberg's fanciful map of the world from Manhattan's 9th Avenue on which terra incognito begins at New Jersey. Expand that idea and here is how the planet might appear to the average American today. China: tainted pet food, contaminated toothpaste, farm animals raised on human waste, can you believe it? Russia: president looks like the new James Bond and just got all touchy about our missiles, lighten up will ya? Middle East: crazy Arabs, why can't they just get along? Afghanistan: sort of like the Middle East, with mountains, and every guy wears a beard. Iran: even crazier guys with beards and a president in a seriously bad suit. Meanwhile, as Joe Six-Pack surveys the world from Fortress America, his European counterpart flits around the old eastern bloc, having massages in Budapest and stag nights in Zagreb. Regions that once enticed the romantic traveller are either off-limits or on-sale, and travel writers have been transformed into commandos storming hostile territory or buffoons clowning their way through alien transactions.
Colin Thubron is a sublime exception. He travels as himself and writes books that remind us that the world is still there - whether we like it or not, whether we fear it or not. This unfailingly polite Englishman in his late 60s is like the quiet guest at a raucous dinner party who finally interrupts the blowhard at the table by saying, diffidently, "It's not quite like that, you know." He will then proceed to describe what it is like. Out there. Where he is often the only Westerner his hosts have ever met. "My travel books spring from curiosity about worlds which my generation has found threatening," Thubron once commented, "China, Russia, Islam . . ." He has written 11 such books, along with seven novels. His first travel book, published in 1967, was Mirror to Damascus and the latest, published last year, is Shadow of the Silk Road. It is hard to think of a writer in any genre who can match Thubron's descriptive powers or his sly wit.
Influenced by Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor, he is, as Jan Morris described him, a " . . . transcendentally gifted writer . . . one of the two or three best living travel writers, in some ways probably the best."
It all started, Thubron recalls, not with a sense of adventure but with books. "I've been a writer since childhood. When other boys were reading detective novels, I was reading Halliday's Golden Treasury of Poetry. I was given that when I was about nine and it had a lasting effect."
Thubron's father worked in the US and Canada, and much of the boy's childhood was spent crossing the Atlantic for school at Eton and holidays in the US.
"It was very soon after the second World War and I hadn't even seen a neon light before," he recalls. "For a seven-year-old child, being dumped down in Times Square was astonishing. I think that was a lasting stimulus to my imagination. In my late teens I really wanted to travel."
He worked briefly in publishing, then as a freelance television film-maker in Turkey, Japan and Morocco, before beginning what now amounts to 40 years of travelling, first in the Middle East and later in remote regions of the Soviet Union and Asia, worlds that continue to enthral him. "My books always come less through some rational decision than from some gut instinct," Thubron admits.
"Asia has fascinated me all my life and Shadow of the Silk Road draws together many of the most potent things for me: China, the ex-Soviet Union, Islam. The thing that connects them all is the Silk Road, and when I started to research that I became fascinated by its history."
He prepares meticulously for each journey - learning Russian, for example, or Mandarin Chinese, studying the region's history and planning detailed routes, invariably with a nagging anxiety that this will be the trip that will fail. "I always fear that my journey is going to yield nothing," Thubron laughs. "After all, the worst thing that can happen to you is that nothing happens. There's a lot of romanticisation of travel writers, but basically we're like journalists. You want to experience something, even something bad. It's almost as if there are two of you going, the one who's travelling and the one who will write about it. Just as the traveller is being mugged or shot at, the one sitting on his shoulder is saying 'What good copy'."
Plenty, of course, happens. In China, Thubron once consulted a chemist for a mild stomach ache and emerged with a bottle of frog essence. More recently, in northern Iran, he discovered an enormous abscess beneath "a wobbling tooth" and, after a lengthy train journey, found a dentist in the impoverished town of Maragheh. "I had hoped for an elderly practitioner, a leftover Armenian perhaps, who would probe tenderly into my mouth, disperse the abscess and send me away with an antibiotic. Instead the door opened on a stocky mechanic with a crew-cut. He gave no anaesthetic. Overhead a lamp shed a baleful pool. For two hours he drilled and dug and chiselled. From time to time he realigned my head left or right by pulling my nose." Finally, three female dentists in chadors are called in to complete the delicate task of filling the root canals.
Had the scene not been illuminating, it would not have been included. Thubron is less interested in himself - even himself in pain - than he is in those around him.
No detail is lost on him, and everything has to count. Birch woods near Moscow, for example, were once described as " . . . a dense audience of sliver trunks and thin leaves which dimmed and glistened under a filtered sun." In darker Siberia, he wrote of the haunted gulag: "You lose your own eyes here, and start to imagine through those of the dead. You have no right to this country. It belongs to them. Is it sometimes beautiful? You cannot say. You only see signposts to atrocious places: Shturmovoi, Urchan, Oimyakon . . . Man-made mounds and trenches heave and wrinkle under the snow, the colourless shrubbery."
It is surprising that such a passionate writer should be so self-effacing, and that quality may explain why the men and women that Thubron meets - the Russian beggar he has dinner with in Uzbekistan, the young Kyrgyz herdswoman who welcomes him into her cottage - reveal themselves to this solitary foreigner.
"I've always concentrated less on politics than on the impact of politics on ordinary people," Thubron observes. "It's interesting to me not so much what people materially have, but what they believe in, what they value. And that is most accessible to the traveller in chance encounters. It's these people who often upset the stereotypes we are given. Meeting so many people on the borderlands of Islam, for example, you realise that it is a religion and culture as varied and as complex as Christianity, perhaps more so."
Like his 19th-century counterparts, Thubron can ride, climb, sleep practically anywhere, eat practically anything, and react with aplomb whether he is being approached by an Afghan security patrol or, several years ago, by a Russian who wanted to buy his jeans.
"He seized them and dashed into a nearby camping hut to change. A moment later he emerged encapsulated in jeans and gasping with triumph like one of Cinderella's ugly sisters who had fitted the slipper. Where the jeans began, his whole body tapered away like a tadpole's, while above them his chest bloomed in a monstrous burst of held breath and pigeon ribs. He looked terrible. 'Wonderful,' he said, 'perfect'."
Today, a supermarket stands on the site of the western gate of old Changan where the ancient Silk Road started, and Thubron notes that the sculpture of a camel train, commissioned by the city of Xian to mark the historic spot, is now stranded on a traffic island. He doesn't travel with a camera, but records such details in tiny script and typically returns with four or five tattered notebooks that are his most indispensable tools.
"Losing your notebooks, that's the real terror," he concludes. "Only once were my notes almost confiscated, after a journey in the old Soviet Union. I knew that the KGB had been following me and I was stopped in a place called Chop, not a very encouraging name. They couldn't read my horrid little handwriting, so the officer pointed to the heading 'Odessa' and made me read aloud. I read out how the sunlight was dancing on the waves, how beautiful the Soviet Union was, and after about half an hour the officer said, 'This is very poetic. You could publish this', and handed my notebooks back to me. I could have kissed his boots. As I was reading, I realised what I would have lost, all the details that give a book life."
Shadow of the Silk Road, by Colin Thubron, is published by Chatto and Windus (£20 in the UK)