Colin Thubron
The tale of his own trek forms the basis of his new book, To a
Mountain in Tibet. He talks to Olivia Edward about his reasons for going
and what he learnt about life in a land better known for its
preoccupation with death.
Travel became an important part of my life when I was a small child and my father worked in Canada and the USA. It wasn’t very long after the Second World War. England was really terribly poor and for a child to be suddenly travelling to the USA and Canada was a revelation – the enormous landscapes of Canada and the lights of Times Square in New York. I never lost that sense of excitement at being abroad.
My father was a soldier; logical, rational and very clear-minded. He liked hunting, and our house back in Sussex was covered in the heads of the animals he shot in India. Emotionally, I think I took after my mother. She was more obviously artistic. She was a descendent of the first poet laureate, John Dryden. She was very proud of it and liked to nurture the poetry in me. She made me feel that poetry was an important occupation.
To a Mountain in Tibet is the most personal travel book I have written. When my mother died in 2007, and with my father dead, and my sister long dead [she was killed in an avalanche near the Eiger aged 21], I felt I wanted to mark their departures. To go on with my life in a conventional way seemed wrong. I was changed and I somehow wanted to mark the change in my life. Being a travel writer, the thing I chose to do was travel.
I wanted to go to somewhere on the Earth’s surface that is meaningful in religious terms. I’m agnostic, so I didn’t want to go somewhere like Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. They would have carried too big a burden of dogma and history. Instead, I chose to go to Mount Kailas, a natural holy object sitting out beyond the Himalaya.
I don’t know what I was hoping for. I didn’t think Tibetan Buddhism would give me answers, I just wanted to travel in a culture that was obsessed by the afterlife (or at least, in the West, we’re very obsessed by their cults of death: the sky burials, the Tibetan book of the Dead). I thought of the journey as a kind of meditation on the afterlife, with Tibet as its natural backdrop.
We trekked up through the high passes of Nepal and Tibet and circled the mountain up to around 19,000 feet [5,800 metres]. It was fascinating and incredibly beautiful, but I think that on some sort of unconscious level, I needed the journey to be physically challenging. This sounds very Protestant, but I think there’s a feeling you should do penance for somebody’s death – put yourself through something in the hope of equating yourself with them in some way. I don’t really understand it, but I welcomed the physical effort.
The experience didn’t give me any hope for the afterlife, but it did perhaps reconcile me to death and the phenomenon of transience. Tibetan Buddhism is a very grand tradition. In the West, being Christian, we believe we have only one life. As a consequence, that life becomes absolutely vital to us: how we comport ourselves, whether we enjoy life, whether we’re successes or failures – it’s all desperately important. In the Buddhist tradition, people are believed to have endless incarnations of various kinds. It makes for a more relaxed and sometimes fatalistic attitude, and I think there’s a sort of comfort in realising your own individual unimportance.
I don’t think we should be under the illusion that there is a kind of truth hidden in another society. I think that if people imagine that just by crossing a border, they are going to have an epiphany, then they’re going to be disappointed. But I don’t think travel can be substituted by any amount of book learning. And it doesn’t surprise me how few of the senators in the Bush administration even owned a passport. If those decision makers had spent just a few weeks in a Baghdad café, they would have thought twice, or maybe even six times, before they did what they did.
People used to think that travel writing was about entering into the unknown. But in some ways, that was a Victorian (and pre-Victorian) privilege. At that time, explorers were sent to foreign countries and they returned with new knowledge. Travel writers today are deprived of that geographical novelty. What you hope to bring back now is news of what a society is feeling and how it has changed over the years. That ensures travel writing a future because the world is always going to be changing.
Curriculum vitae
1939 Born in London
1953–57 Attended Eton School, Windsor
1959–62 Apprentice and editorial assistant, Hutchinson publishers, London
1962–64 Freelance documentary film maker
1964–65 Copy editor, Macmillan publishers, New York
1967 Published first travel book, Mirror to Damascus
2000 Received Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal
2007 Made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
2009–present President of the Royal Society of Literature
March 2011
Travel became an important part of my life when I was a small child and my father worked in Canada and the USA. It wasn’t very long after the Second World War. England was really terribly poor and for a child to be suddenly travelling to the USA and Canada was a revelation – the enormous landscapes of Canada and the lights of Times Square in New York. I never lost that sense of excitement at being abroad.
My father was a soldier; logical, rational and very clear-minded. He liked hunting, and our house back in Sussex was covered in the heads of the animals he shot in India. Emotionally, I think I took after my mother. She was more obviously artistic. She was a descendent of the first poet laureate, John Dryden. She was very proud of it and liked to nurture the poetry in me. She made me feel that poetry was an important occupation.
To a Mountain in Tibet is the most personal travel book I have written. When my mother died in 2007, and with my father dead, and my sister long dead [she was killed in an avalanche near the Eiger aged 21], I felt I wanted to mark their departures. To go on with my life in a conventional way seemed wrong. I was changed and I somehow wanted to mark the change in my life. Being a travel writer, the thing I chose to do was travel.
I wanted to go to somewhere on the Earth’s surface that is meaningful in religious terms. I’m agnostic, so I didn’t want to go somewhere like Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. They would have carried too big a burden of dogma and history. Instead, I chose to go to Mount Kailas, a natural holy object sitting out beyond the Himalaya.
I don’t know what I was hoping for. I didn’t think Tibetan Buddhism would give me answers, I just wanted to travel in a culture that was obsessed by the afterlife (or at least, in the West, we’re very obsessed by their cults of death: the sky burials, the Tibetan book of the Dead). I thought of the journey as a kind of meditation on the afterlife, with Tibet as its natural backdrop.
We trekked up through the high passes of Nepal and Tibet and circled the mountain up to around 19,000 feet [5,800 metres]. It was fascinating and incredibly beautiful, but I think that on some sort of unconscious level, I needed the journey to be physically challenging. This sounds very Protestant, but I think there’s a feeling you should do penance for somebody’s death – put yourself through something in the hope of equating yourself with them in some way. I don’t really understand it, but I welcomed the physical effort.
The experience didn’t give me any hope for the afterlife, but it did perhaps reconcile me to death and the phenomenon of transience. Tibetan Buddhism is a very grand tradition. In the West, being Christian, we believe we have only one life. As a consequence, that life becomes absolutely vital to us: how we comport ourselves, whether we enjoy life, whether we’re successes or failures – it’s all desperately important. In the Buddhist tradition, people are believed to have endless incarnations of various kinds. It makes for a more relaxed and sometimes fatalistic attitude, and I think there’s a sort of comfort in realising your own individual unimportance.
I don’t think we should be under the illusion that there is a kind of truth hidden in another society. I think that if people imagine that just by crossing a border, they are going to have an epiphany, then they’re going to be disappointed. But I don’t think travel can be substituted by any amount of book learning. And it doesn’t surprise me how few of the senators in the Bush administration even owned a passport. If those decision makers had spent just a few weeks in a Baghdad café, they would have thought twice, or maybe even six times, before they did what they did.
People used to think that travel writing was about entering into the unknown. But in some ways, that was a Victorian (and pre-Victorian) privilege. At that time, explorers were sent to foreign countries and they returned with new knowledge. Travel writers today are deprived of that geographical novelty. What you hope to bring back now is news of what a society is feeling and how it has changed over the years. That ensures travel writing a future because the world is always going to be changing.
Curriculum vitae
1939 Born in London
1953–57 Attended Eton School, Windsor
1959–62 Apprentice and editorial assistant, Hutchinson publishers, London
1962–64 Freelance documentary film maker
1964–65 Copy editor, Macmillan publishers, New York
1967 Published first travel book, Mirror to Damascus
2000 Received Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal
2007 Made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
2009–present President of the Royal Society of Literature
March 2011
