I read To a Mountain in Tibet, your new book, last night. It’s a different sort of travel book for you – a journey to Mt Kailash in western Tibet that was inspired by deaths in your family. What did you want to achieve with this book?

That journey, in part, was a kind of secular pilgrimage after the death of my father, mother and sister. One can’t explain why someone with agnostic tendencies such as myself should go to a mountain which is holy to others outside his tradition – moreover, all of the comfort that those in mourning are offered in the Christian tradition is denied in Buddhism and Hinduism. So it’s a very irrational journey, if one thinks of it as seeking intellectual or emotional comfort. I simply wanted to walk to an object of holiness in the landscape, and it seemed to me that Kailash was holy in itself, whatever that means.

In your previous travel books the attention is more simply focused on where you are. But is there a theme that ties them together?

Retrospectively, the recent ones have all been about the countries that we have been brought up to be afraid of. The first one being Among the Russians in Brezhnev’s Russia in the early 1980s, then the China one [Behind the Wall], then central Asia [The Lost Heart of Asia] and Siberia [In Siberia]. My parents were brought up to feel that Germany was the enemy, but my generation felt that the Soviet Union was the enemy. It was very forbidding and impenetrable, much more so than Nazi Germany to my parents’ generation. The Soviet Union was kind of occluded, and there were journalistic clichés about what it was, but they didn’t conform to the other Russia I knew from reading Dostoevsky or Tolstoy – these incontinently human people, all drunk and melancholy mad. Similarly, China was pretty enigmatic. When I went there [in 1986] it had just opened up, it had only been possible for a few years to go more or less where you wanted.

And so I had the instinct to understand these two great ogres of my childhood, the great bear of Russia and the yellow peril of China. I think it is cliché that understanding dispels fear – maybe it exacerbates it – but I wanted to humanise the map. That’s why I chose those places. It wasn’t a conscious, evangelical programme. I wasn’t going in thinking, “Ah, now I’m going to explain and humanise Russia and China to the West.” It was a self-centred instinct of my own, that this is worth doing for me. I’ve always needed challenge in my books. I’ve always needed to define that what I’m doing is difficult, and therefore that what I’m bringing back has the value of something that’s extracted from difficulties of culture, even geographical difficulties.

Do you travel, and write, for your reader or for you?

For me, I’m ashamed to say. Although the reader is always in my head. I say that rather self-scathingly, but I don’t do them consciously for the reader. I’m not setting out to explain a culture. Cyril Connolly said, “It’s better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” I have to feel it’s right for me, even if it’s not a very promising book in other ways. The publishers weren’t keen on the Silk Road book [Shadow of the Silk Road], for instance, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to do it. I feel that I’m doing what I love, and what’s meaningful to me.

What then is the function of travel literature?

The function of the travel book is not that of an academic treatise. It’s not saying, “This is how the world is, this is my theory about it.” It’s building up experience. It’s not the intellectual understanding about the subject, it’s the emotional experience of it. Experience not of any specific aspect of the culture, but a bit of everything. So you get history, landscape, chance conversations with people – a smell in the back of a train, the way people feel about their lives, even in some trivial fashion, plus a chunk of more serious politics. All of these things can follow on from one another in a travel book. By the end of it, you hope the reader has a kind of mosaic of what this country is, or what it was to you. It’s an accumulation of data of every different sort, such as no other genre is. And I think that’s what a travel book has to give, a sort of smell and feel of a culture – or how it was in one instance. It’s not going to be like that in 10 years time, or even five, but you’re catching the moment on the wing and saying, “This is how it was to me”.

Outside autobiography, travel literature is the only genre that invites the first person singular. You’re in the landscape, and dependant on the people (in my case, at least) for your survival and hospitality. You’re up for grabs. I think the personality of the writer in travel books is very exposed. And that’s good. In a way it’s an acknowledgement that this is a subjective experience. The moment you decide to write about one thing rather than another thing on your journey, it has become your account. When you talk with someone, what strikes you about the conversation is what goes down in the writing. So to pretend that it’s objective is ridiculous, more so than in most genres. Some writers write a great deal about themselves – that they had toothache and so on. To intrude yourself too much may be absurd. But personality comes through in a travel book. It’s a sort of tacit acknowledgement that we can’t be God. We can’t say, “This is how it is”. We can only say, “This is what happened to me. This is what I felt. This is what I thought. I may be wrong.”

Do you think you can really get to know a country by travelling in it?

That’s the hardest question. You mentioned you lived two years in China. I just went through it in four months. Always, I think, the travel writer feels that those who inhabit the land, the culture – whether they’re visitors or natives – know and experience things with greater depth and sophistication than we can possibly have. Travel writers can make horrible mistakes because of lack of knowledge. But often I feel that people who live there can’t see the forest for the trees. As a travel writer, you come, you see something, and it’s usually striking. You’re recording the superficials but hoping that they leak in, that they have a penetrative quality.

So someone passing through has that valuable freshness of impression.

Yes. I often find that after a few months in a country I’m already accepting so much which no longer seems strange or striking to me, so the moment I’m in a country I have to pour down impressions much faster than I can develop them later. I couldn’t write a book on London. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I would always be interested in someone from, say, Czechoslovakia coming and spending a couple of months here, and giving their impressions.

How do you take notes on the road?

My writing is very small, it’s crammed into thin-lined notes, and the notes are very full. There are two types of notes that people take – those that jog the memory, and those that almost take the place of memory. Mine are the second. They’re very full of detail, because my memory is not particularly good, and I would forget everything within a month or two of travelling. You think you’re going to remember it and that you just need a few trigger words, but you don’t. I have to put down everything. Particularly things that give life to a detail – the texture of a rock, or the particular expression somebody used. A high percentage of the words that arrive in prose in my books are there in my notebooks.

What is travel literature, as opposed to travel guides?

I think it’s the personality of the writing which is crucial. Travel writing should be like travelling with an interesting person, whereas with a travel article or guide you’re not partaking of someone else’s vision (to use the pompous word). With a travel writer you’re travelling with this individual, which is why I think so many people buy travel books without actually going to the places – just seeing it through the eyes of a companion whom you like. So you’re going with the author’s knowledge, his particular sensibilities, sensitivity to landscape or his way with the people he meets. You’re seeing not through your own eyes, as you would if looking through a camera lens, but through someone else’s.