He never loses his thread

After a year of research, Thubron took eight months to journey from Xian in western China to Antioch on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, retracing the steps of the merchants who knitted East and West together for millennia before Alexander the Great and Marco Polo.

Silk from China, passed from trader to trader along the skein of tracks across the deserts and mountains, has been found in grave goods from Iron Age Germany and braided in the hair of Egyptian mummies.

Building on the foundation of scholarship and connection established in his earlier works, Thubron began his journey by revisiting landmarks transformed in the interim and catching up with old friends to discover how their lives had worked out — the marriage of convenience, the accidental ambition, the career piloted through post-Maoist reconstruction.

He has become the ultimate backpackers’ icon, the gentle pilgrim for our times, treading the path towards tolerance and understanding, taking pains to learn Russian and Mandarin to better his bonds with fellow travellers, seeking a state of existential rootlessness, calling his girlfriend only fortnightly, drifting across the steppes of Central Asia to the door of a young donkey-herder who offers him “a spare yurt for the night”.

He eats at shepherds’ barbecues, village restaurants and caravanserai canteens: mutton stew in a million variations, pilau, naan bread, yak butter. He drinks tea, kumis (fermented mares’ milk) and on one occasion so much vodka that he tries to pour the excess into his socks and still gets legless in bad company.

We of the easyJet generation, whose linguistic expertise runs to no more than decoding ATM messages in the Romance languages and whose desire to encounter the unknown founders at the thought of cold-water hotels with blocked lavatories and walls smeared with dead flies, can only read and admire.

No matter that this is a 67-year-old Old Etonian, as diffident, blue-eyed and floppy-haired as Hollywood might paint him, who stubbornly calls the bag in which he puts his stuff a “rucksack”. One of the innumerable cowboy officials whom he encounters makes him turn out the bag, offering him the opportunity to answer the obligatory question — what’s in it? Language manuals, a notebook, “minimal clothes” and money concealed in a mosquito-repellent bottle. Good tip, that.

Note the complete absence of a camera, the better to see and record with the inward eye. More than once he notes his refusal to bribe some venally hostile policeman or border guard, reinforcing the sense that this is Indiana Jones as Richard Curtis might have scripted him.

What ultimately suspends all cynicism is his fine eye for the absurd. At the beginning of his journey, he notices that the giant sculpture of a camel train commissioned by the Chinese authorities to mark the Silk Road’s beginning has been relocated to a traffic island.

Not far from the Afghan border, finding that every peasant has a television set, he asks about their viewing habits and discovers that sports channels and kung fu beat coverage of al-Qaeda, whose terrorist targets mean nothing to this audience. Listening to Muslim companions of every degree of sophistication, he realises that some are reciting the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of the language.

His stated goal, conscientiously pursued, is to confront the stereotypes of the Russians and Chinese who, between them, have colonised most of the territory he covers. He is frequently frustrated by the hostility of the indigenous people who have suffered invasion and regard the Russians as chaotic, vodka-sodden brutes and the Chinese as cold-hearted perpetrators of “demographic genocide”.

Obliquely, he recognises the state of consciousness he seeks: “You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenutated . . . Dangeorusly, you may come to feel invulnerable. You fear only your failure to understand or to reach where you are going.”

Ultimately Shadow of the Silk Road satisfies the highest ambiton of a traveller. Crossing arbitrary national boundaries, encountering people whose ancestry blends so many tribes, countries and races — who adhere to so many splintered and traduced religions and are united, it seems, by their relative poverty and ability to visit Britney Spears’s website — he adds to our understanding a dimension of humanity that would otherwise have gone unrecognised.

Interview

Q From Xian to Antioch took eight months. Was this the original plan?

A Yes. I’d always planned to break the journey but this was done inadvertently by the fighting in Afghanistan.

You learnt Russian and Mandarin before leaving. How good did you get?

After 25 years I can blunder along conversationally in either, but the dialects in northwest China defeated me.

What is it like to meet people so cut off from world affairs?

These landlocked populations — inland China, Central Asia — strike me as vital to world affairs. But they are voiceless.

What was your most memorable meal?

In an Afghan tea house a mullah called the diners to prayer beside their tables. I was left alone with my mutton bones, hideously conspicuous.

Do you crave more luxuries as the years go by?

Not really. But I sometimes dream of my local Indian restaurant.

Why did you choose not to take a camera?

I’m obsessional, and if I had a camera I would become a manic photographer not a questioning writer. The absence of a camera also renders you wonderfully innocent to the local police.

What was the funniest episode of your travels?

When a Kyrgyz villager offered me his wife for the night. She beat him up.

And the most dangerous?

Wandering about Afghanistan alone was, I suppose, dangerous to the point of madness. But my only real brush with death was driving with a drunken farmer.

You describe the feeling of waking up thousands of miles from home. Do you enjoy being “cast adrift”?

Yes. It’s like shedding the past. A (foolish) illusion of rebirth.

What next?

A novel — set in England.

www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Colin Thubron appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival October 6-15. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com