 A fydd ymen nhw, rydym Collin Thubron, y cyd-ryg, ynglynch, ynglynch, ynglynch, i'r drwy hynny i'r cyd-ryger ynglynch, ac ygwyddoedd ym Mhrytus Gwyrddol Cresol i Llywodraeth. Yn ymddir ymddir yma ymddir yma, ymdryd, ymdryd, ymdryd, ymdryd, ymdryd, ymdryd. Yn 1982, yn oedd yn cyrchawch yn y Un cyflawni, yn cyflym hefyd yn ysgrifennu ynglynch. Felly, mae'n meddwl'r cyflwysau yn enw. Mae'r bwysig o'r ysgol, yn y gweithio a'r aesio, yn Cyberio, yn y sylch gyda Cymru, ac yn ymddechau i'r maen nhw. Mae'r llwyddoedd Cymru, y Mynedd Amor, bydd y Rysgol a'r Chynwy, dwi'n cymddiad am ysgol yng Nghymru. Cymru yn cael rydyn ni'n cael ysgol yng Nghymru, o'r 2010 ac o'r 2020, i'r pwysig mor 200. 100th birthday celebrations, he was named an RSL companion of literature, the highest honour we can bestow. Guiding tonight's travels through literature is Michael Palin, the author of ten travel books, two novels and a non-fiction work and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Michael's work has taken him across the globe, from the dunes of the Sahara to the heights of the Himalayas and retracing the steps of Ernest Hemingway across three continents. He has written and performed in the Monty Python series, which a few of you may be familiar with, ripping guns and numerous travel documentaries including Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole and Michael Palin in North Korea. Michael received a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award in 2013 and I'm now very pleased to pass over to him and Colin. Thank you. Thank you, Molly, for that introduction. I'm really so pleased to be here, especially with Colin, who's a writer I hugely admire, very penetrating, very pity, very clear, lucid, wonderful writing style, rather envy him. Particularly the Amor River book, which I like because it appeals to my sense of going off-peast. I mean, far as I know, no one knows anything about the Amor River, apart from you who know everything about it. But it's a wonderful, terrific read. But I thought that tonight we're going to have a sort of conversation, really, together. And I thought it would start off by both of us addressing the question, which was put to me by an eight-year-old boy in the event I did about four days ago. He said, how old were you when you first wanted to travel? I thought that was a good start. How old were you? I was excited when I was about seven or eight because my father was working in Canada and in the States. And I was sent back to school in England miserably, so I'd have holidays out there and school in England. It gave me a very early sense that school was very boring among the gorse bushes of Ascot. And out there was exciting, so abroad was exciting. And you can imagine a boy from war-torn England just after the war being in Times Square. I'd never seen a neon light in my life and the Great Lakes of Canada. So I got an abiding sense that travel was exciting. Well, you got that abiding sense. In fact, you had travelled a bit. You had seen these wonderful things. I mean, for me, travelling was entirely in the imagination because I was in Sheffield and nobody left Sheffield, really, apart from to go possibly to Nottingham or prison. No, I mean, no, that's my stuff there. So my interest in travel was purely a sort of imaginative leap into a world in which everything was possible. You could go to the North Pole, you go to the Gobi Desert, but only through books, through magazines. You would never actually go there. But certainly on the outskirts of Sheffield there was rather some wonderful crags, very, very dramatic scenery. I would sort of play out my fantasies of travelling in the American West or something like that. But I never really knew what travel was about until my books. Were there particular books a bit later that made you think? Well, yes, almost all the books I read from Biggles onwards were about distant places and Biggles was always going off somewhere, although I believe his creator, Captain W. Johns, wrote them all while sitting in the room in Twickenham. Anyway, well, good for him, imagination again. But also, I mean, stories, I suppose, Conan Doyle, The Lost World, you remember, books like that, Rider Haggard and all those. These were just books about people who went to places that you didn't really believe existed. Did you have to say, what were your sort of literary background at that time? Mine were late. I had rather predictable idols like Patrick Lee Firmer and Faire Stark. There were sort of moments in those books that made me absolutely tingle with the magic of them. And they were the ones really. And odd enough, well not really, well with the Thessager. And quite early ones, King Lake, Iotham, and some of these quaint 18th century travel writers. So there was quite a panoply of different influences. But actually, the main influence on me was Palgraves, Gildam, Treasury. I just read poetry. Well, the others were reading Bulldog Drummond. I was reading poetry. Was that an influence from your school or parents? It was a slight influence from my mother. Because her name was Dryden, her maiden name. And she was a collateral dissentant of John Dryden. And she thought this was hugely important. And I must have inherited everything from Dryden. In fact, I couldn't be more different from Dryden who was rather fine but slightly cynical, literary critic and satirist. Really? And I had... No, not that different, I don't think so at all. So that was an influence. If you see your influence straight away, more highbrow than mine, or maybe you just came later in life. I was a date developer. Even when I was developed later, I suppose I was quite influenced by people like Hemingway. I was influenced by him purely as a writing stylist. I couldn't believe when I was at school you were reading the kind of terse journalistic prose that he wrote. It seemed so different from what we were being taught. The Edwardian books and all that sort of thing. Rather sort of flowery prose and all that. So I fell for Hemingway and later I realised that Hemingway was a great traveller. He was a great traveller because he went off to different parts of the world to write. But lived there as well. For instance, he went to Cuba. Instead of living in the legations where and all that amongst all the other foreigners, he bought a house in the local areas. So he seemed to sleep himself very much in local people. I think from your writing and probably my inclination, we like to talk to people, we like to talk to the population rather than the politicians or the powerful peers. Well, it's a different take, isn't it? One's writing for a different purpose. In the Amor River book, although the heart of it was the relationship between China and Russia on the actual borders of the river where for a thousand miles they are facing one another across the river, actually what one wanted was to know not what Beijing and Moscow were saying to one another, but what people actually were feeling. Those sort of things are part of the movement. From the book, I remember you saying that these people were so far away from the centre of government, from Moscow or Beijing, that they didn't really know quite, they didn't interpret politics or see politics the way we in the west would, putting ourselves here and Moscow there, powerful place and all that. The Russians certainly in that area feel they've been abandoned by Moscow, that they've been left to face. Two million Russians on one side of the river and 110 million Chinese on the other in the provinces facing one another. No wonder they're worried. When you were there, were there hostilities between the two? I can't remember. There was a sort of balance, was it? There had been. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese had really almost insisted on the fact that the river belonged to them, which by treaty it had been. The Russians took it away from them in the mid-19th century and the Chinese had never forgotten it. All the other imperial powers like Britain, France, so on, gave back the possessions they had taken from China. Only Russia has never rescinded and they remember this. So it's a curious situation in which officially the border has been established, but in fact the Chinese have never actually rescinded the idea that the treaty by which Russia took it was, they say, unequal and they won't go back on that. Wow, they've seen that. You've got a certainty. I'm kind of interested in how you choose a place when you decide to travel. I mean you tend to go for places where, I say, slightly off-piste, but also you've been to Moscow, you've been to Russia, you've been to China as well. I mean, when you're thinking about a journey and the writing you've got to do for that journey, how do you begin to make judgments on where you go? Usually the itinerary is selected by the research initially, while I'm actually researching an area like this one, for instance. Certain places seem to speak to you because you feel they have a special influence or something that peaks your curiosity. For instance, when I went as in China, I went to Mao Tse Tung's home village which during the Cultural Revolution was covered in red guards marching and celebrating and I wondered what had happened in the mid-1980s, late-1980s to this place and of course you find it deserted and it was for those sort of reasons that I find myself choosing places. But for all sorts of reasons as you must. But the research, where do you begin the research? Is it in your head for a long time? Are you looking at other books and getting influenced by them or reading news reports? I just wonder where it all begins. I'm shamelessly reading other books. I'm here in the British Library or in the School of Oriental Studies. Good answer. Yes, and I'm trying to learn languages or to rush up languages, very bad Russian, even worse Mandarin but enough to converse with people. So quite a lot of the time goes to that. So you spend in my case a year and a half probably in research before you even go. And then there's this long period of writing afterwards which is at least a year and in the middle is this rather unhilaric little period of four or five months in which you're actually travelling and doing the important thing. Do you, when you travel, how important a sort of gathering material, how important is it to take notes, recordings? I mean obviously very important, but how do you deal with that? Do you have notebooks, recording, cassette machines, whatever? I like you, I'm sure, have technology. I have these miserable little notebooks. No, I have miserable little notebooks. Yes, all-witch, all-weather notebook I have, made in Glasgow and unfortunately they've now got out of business, which is a pity because they sell them on my website actually. I'll get you one. No sorry, so you keep notes. Luckily my writing is very small and miserable so that I can get a lot in a tiny notebook. I had an editor who accused me of owning a little matchbox of ants which I dipped in ink and ran over a page. But in fact my writing is naturally illegible, fortunately because the one time you get terrified, at least I do because there's no sort of backup, that they're going to be lost or confiscated because if the notes are gone then the book's gone because my memory is very average and if I let all the detail which makes for the life of the description, that will be lost to me. I remember nearly losing it on a journey in the Soviet Union. I'd been in by car, arrived at the customs post at a place with the sinister name of Chop on the check order and I'd been followed by the KGB and they took the car to bits and they took my luggage to bits. Then I was hauled down to the bowels of this customs office and the one thing they couldn't decipher was the notebooks and there was this heavy block of a KGB officer, sort of a pantomime KGB officer and he was going through them and he said, have you developed this writing specially? That's my writing. He saw a few headings, he saw a DASA, he said, read me out about a DASA. So I left out the dissidents and I said, how the birds were singing in the sun was barking on the way. After about half an hour he said, this is very poetic. You could publish this. I was sure as I was reading through that he was going to confiscate it and that would be the end of the book. I do know because I've been in that position. We were filming a New Europe series and we had been to the Three Baltic Republics, Stonir, Llaffby and Lithuania. All full of rich material and all my notebooks and the next place we were going to was Hungary and we were at the airport and it must have happened in a couple of minutes but my bag was stolen from the other thing. All the material on the Baltic Republics was completely gone. I really freaked out. I wandered around the airport looking and there was a kind of area just where they collected their taxes arrives and all that. We were all looking in the garden beds and things like that to see if someone had opened the bag, taken whatever money was it and thrown, hopefully thrown the notebook, which was completely useless away. But I never found it. I sat down in the hotel in Budapest and spent a day trying to remember what I've seen and what I've done. An extraordinary actually how much did come back. I mean I think I just had to bring it back but there would be many little moments and many little bits of detail which you write down, which had gone forever. Little things you see, writings on the walls and all that sort of stuff. One of the things about your books is that they're not just duplicates of the film. Of course they are in a way but they're those moments all the time where you are off camera and those things come into the books too where you're maybe not in solitude exactly but you're on your own and there's some other quite different material. That really goes down to my wanting to be a proper travel author like yourself. Actually travel writing, I remember asking Jan Morris about this and Jan Morris didn't like to be thought of as a travel writer. No travel writers do. No I don't think they do. Something you do for the Daily Mail sort of holiday supplement and that's about it. No we don't do that anyway, if only. But I think the point is I very much wanted to write well about the places I'd been to and like you, most of the time I was there with a film crew and we were there to deliver a sort of visual thing as well so there was a lot of sort of talking to people on camera, walking through markets, waiting to sort of be cued to go and do this, that and the other. Do the local dance Michael, go join in, which is really embarrassing. It's a dance they've done for 2,000 years and you've come into it. Anyway, so there's all that which I did for the camera and was very happy to do and yet in the evenings I always used to sit down and try and remember at my own head what I'd seen and the things that I'd seen. As you rightly say, the camera, I see things that camera man might have missed and the camera man similarly will go off and shoot cutaways of people which immeasurably enrich the series but it was, I did want to, right now, interesting because your books I never have illustrations of any kind, do you? Never had photos. Not the later ones now. And that presumably was a deliberate decision of your own because... It was a publisher's decision in a way. To begin with I thought they just didn't want to give me illustrations. They were being cheap but they weren't. In fact they had a rationale which was that with my sort of writing I suppose they feel that the reader is experiencing the place through my eyes rather than his own. And so they feel the illustrations restore to the reader's vision, the reader's perspective. And they didn't want that. They wanted a full immersion into my narrative, into my story. So that was the reason for it and Will, I don't object to that. No, I mean I think if you describe things so well so fluently you don't really need the lake or the mountain or whatever but I was doing my travels were for a sort of BBC books audience. And also I must say I was very lucky to have with me a guy called Basil Powell, Chinese working out of Hong Kong who had done various books and photographed John Lennon and people like that. And he came with me because he loved travelling. He was a wonderful, wonderful traveller, Basil. I would always try any local drink anywhere. And he was Chinese. He knew all about food wherever he went anywhere in Asia. He would go into a restaurant. We would sit there and say, this is really nice. Haven't you the menu? You don't need the menu. And he would go in the kitchen and there would be a lot of shouting and eventually he would say, I've got something. They're going to produce something special. They always did. So he was great. And he did all the photographs and actually they're wonderful photographs so I was pleased with that. So that, I mean it means we approach places from a slightly different way. And you of course are seen to be anyway largely a solitary traveller. I mean you meet lots of people along the way but you seem to want to be there in a very uncluttered way. You don't take too many people with you. You don't take anybody with you really. So explain a little of that. Well, nobody's stupid enough to go with me. Oh come on. But I do value. I seem to need the solitude and I think if you're on your own for one thing I would spend too much time worrying about the person I was with the more I liked them, the more I'd worry about them because of the difficult conditions. But mainly I think it's that I think if you travel with just one other person presumably of your own culture you make a little pocket of comfort together from which you look out and find the world odd or different or strange. If you're on your own you're the strange one and I think you're forced more quickly into some sort of attempted understanding of where you are. It's more uncomfortable. You're more vulnerable of course but you're certainly more sensitive in my case. Also being alone invites people to join you. I think if they see you with, certainly the Russians say see you with one other person they think you're a party. If you're alone they tend to think you're lonely and people will approach you more easily. I've found huge advantages to being alone and it seems to be sort of natural to me. I feel more excited by places if I'm on my own. So when you go you're in a town on the Amor River or somewhere where they're not familiar with foreigners do you go to restaurants and take a drink or to cup a tea or something like that? Do you talk to people? I mean do you presume you've got to at some point try to make friends with the local people or do you just wait? Take it easy and see. It seems to sort of happen. I don't have any technique for it. I've found most people are fairly friendly and probably rather curious about you. They wonder what you are and say they're sort of societal towards you. Often you can be overwhelmed by people occasionally racketing to have access to you. More often you have a quiet moment. A lot of it seems to be luck and fluke but I do occasionally go with somebody in the Amor River book. I have a lot of companions. On the Mongolian side I had to because that was a forbidden area and you had to have guides and horsemen and so on. But in other parts too I was lucky to fall in with local people, mainly Russians. Yeah, yeah. Nothing is how you sort of prepare for journeys and I was going to say, physically it's quite important to be in fairly good shape but in the Amor River of course in the book there you have a terrible fall from the horse. I mean you broke various bits of your body and then you were in the middle of oh you weren't near a convenient hospital particularly were you in the time? Well this was where the Amor River begins as the Onon which is a little the furthest sources in Mongolia. It arises an area of about 5,000 square miles on the Russian border so it's a restricted area. I got permission to go with a guide and two horsemen and the monsoons have been very heavy that year and it was a manass and we had 10 days of awful floundering the horsemen even said it was the worst journey they'd ever done and the horses fell and panicked and in the end the last straw was my horse simply disappeared into a bog and rolled on top of me and I had one foot out of the stirrup but the other was caught in an old trainer in the stirrup and it started to drag me through the marsh luckily my cheap trainer I managed to get my foot out of it and the horse went off with the trainer and I was left in the marsh it was my Monty Python mermen. There's a horse somewhere scampering around with one adidas left boot. But I did, yes I know I had a comfort. You laugh now it must have been at the time you must have felt like giving up did you? No not giving up really but I did persuade myself that my broken ribs were only fractured and my broken ankle was only sprained and so I went on but in a way I'd have had to come back to London I'd have been x-rayed they'd have said I'd have lost a whole year of life which at my time of life is too much can't afford a year so you just with broken ribs you can't do anything anywhere you just have to not cough and not laugh I didn't have a cough and there's nothing to laugh about That's when you don't want jokers I remember Don't want you Michael I was in hospital having my appendix out quite young at that hadn't even started doing Python and there's a wonderful ward my friends used to come I had one or two people and one of the patients in there had had something done to his backside and it'd been stitched very painfully and been told to do it don't cough, don't laugh, whatever and he had an enormous sense of humour he just found everything funny poor man so he'd say something and he'd go oh wow but I do know because what we were talking about because I actually when we did some filming in the Zambezi River there was a white water rafting that I'd never done before and it was just not far from the Victoria Falls there was a lot of water and a lot of white water but they said it'll be alright and it was terrifying but rather exhilarating we went through nine rapids at the end of it I was so exhilarated I let myself be persuaded by the other people in the boat in Balbuins actually to swim to the shore they said the nice thing is a lovely pool there swim to the shore and we'd just relax on the shore and you'd have a wonderful tear and we'd get you a beer and all that and I thought alright but aren't the rocks I mean we'd just come down and they'd say just drop off the back of the boat and float down it all sounded completely heavenly and wonderful and I dropped off the boat and immediately hit a rock and it was quite deep down and it came to the surface unfortunately the sort of the shouts of swear words were exactly the right thing to do because I expelled all the air before going down again hitting another rock anyway the end of the story was that I cracked a rib and we were going on to we still had about five weeks travel to the South Pole so I went to the South Pole with a cracked rib I don't talk about that much this is not on camera exactly that the director said to me the next completely unsympathetic next time you do that wait till the camera is running so I do know but anyway a few times I've done this the camera man would usually say you have to do that again it was a hair in my lens oh yes that's right of course you've got you have to work for the film crew only twice and not like you not with great success one was not a bad film I think he was a good director the other so so but I never I never developed a nice an attractive screen presence like you did I always seemed too intense or something they weren't I know all the best moments seemed to happen off camera I remember I was meant to go into the Tackler-McCarn desert with a train of camels heroically alone of course the huge camera crew behind me and the BBC had got in these camels ages in advance and they'd got the wrong camels they turned out to be herd animals not pack animals so the camera crew loaded all that stuff onto these camels behind all five went but the camels weren't used to having this stuff they simply took over the desert trucking a thousand pound lenses left and right to dry pods we spent all day picking these things out of the sand it would have been a wonderful bit of cinema but we couldn't film it because the camels had the cameras that's a problem yes there seemed to be we there's a sort of idea of the programme that I did that the camera would follow me everywhere so there wasn't really a sort of we did set pieces but it wasn't really set up it was like let's get into this let's see what happens Nigel Meakin as my camera man was brilliant at capturing a moment so generally speaking we we caught we caught a lot of moments and it was a relaxed into it around the world in 80 days I was very nervous because I didn't know what I was supposed to be was I supposed to be an actor was I supposed to be a journalist was I supposed to be me in the end it was me showing all my sort of confusion and all that but it was but there were things that we missed I mean one of my favourite just it's a most extraordinary thing because we filmed at the north pole as one does on this plane and flew we're going to fly to Svalbard and that's where we're going to stay the night but a big storm came and we had to divert to a Danish Air Force base at the very northern tip of Greenland utterly remote two Air Force base and it was the middle of the night and they allowed us to land and when we landed they just said well there's some huts down there I think they've got some accommodation just go down there and they'll give you a bed for the night and we went to this hut and knocked on the door and they said oh yes come on in come on and suddenly a man saw me and the blood drained out of his face completely and he began to sort of quiver slightly and he looked at me and that sort of edged in and the first thing I saw on the table was a tape of Monty Python and the Holy Grail which they'd been watching the night before and he just could not believe that this was a part of northern Greenland and spotted did this come on camera? no we didn't though that's the point of the story we missed that because of course the camera was all packed away some of your off camera things are wonderful I always remember in the Sahara book when you're following a caravan train you decide you're going to go on foot following a salt caravan and you're going too slowly and slowly this caravan is moving away from you and you're behind it and I think everybody can share that awful experience and you're just going to be left behind but in the middle of the Sahara it's not the process to be left behind I completely misjudged that I thought somehow camels walk quite slowly I'll walk slowly I don't mind I've got some water I've drunk all the water in the first five minutes it's so hot and the camels move slowly but very steadily they make hardly any mark on the sand well they have paused and they expand but that was a sort of moment that you off camera but it comes in the book that's nice that the book has different things I suppose we should talk a bit about the literary side of these things I was just reading we were going to talk about Richard Kapocinski he interests me quite a lot and I read a lot of his books and he was very much about the philosophy of travel and the idea of the other and that's something that we can't really understand because we always approach travel in a slightly sort of looking at them in a slightly superior way and he was saying how difficult it was for us to really understand the other something that is quite different It's an almost religious sense of that Do you know anything about him? Not much, I followed his footsteps in parts of Siberia and it's wonderful writing it's very evocative and very inaccurate it's extraordinary what he got wrong In a gulag in Fokuta I remember a gulag area I looked at the the regions that he had covered and he there's one in particular a part of exconvicts and on each grave there was a cross and I went round with somebody from a memorial the Russian institution memorising and documenting these things and they said yes they knew a few new things of people but Kapocinski described in his places where 100 or 1000 were buried in great pits under each cross it was sort of nonsense similarly he thought there were no shops in some Siberian towns and all shops in north Siberian towns have got padded doors they don't have windows or anything they were, you have to go inside and he made strange elementary mistakes like this but he was an awfully interesting writer It's alarming that, isn't it because he was an interesting writer and yet when you hear that it's just completely sort of made a lot up does that totally devalue his work I don't think so for some African writers in particular experts they ready to cry him for inaccuracy but still the potency of those and the book on Ethiopia of course they're very powerful I mean when you sort of take your notes presumably you, like me try to be as accurate as you possibly can but how do you replicate conversations that you have and I mean I've tried to do that it's quite difficult even just an hour or two afterwards and yet someone like Paul Theroux for instance it's got holeswath what do you feel about that does it worry you if you've got it mostly right it's okay it worries me I don't take a tape recorder which I've never liked the idea of formally interviewing somebody because they immediately become reticent or theatrical that is something almost unnatural almost always so I've tried to remember and I almost immediately after conversation if it's exciting I'll go off and remember which is usually all the sort of potent part of the conversation which I think usually I hope I've remembered fairly accurately anyway maybe not word for word but quite a lot of the expressions people use if they are unusual and of course an awful lot gets left out it's everything that gets omitted that is one's often unconscious choice so Venice was really the first book about a foreign city a foreign place which totally captivated me and made me feel that I understood what that kind of writing was about because because he had a way of sort of taking you with him to a place and being kind of taking out things quite emotionally every now and then not being afraid to disguise the sort of romantic side of what he felt about places so it wasn't just a description of a sunset it would be a description of a sunset and how you felt how he the writer felt as he saw that sunset I hadn't seen that much of that before how do you rate, Jan? and a lovely book on Spain called I think the Essence of Spain and again he would take subjects like Cethismar or certain Spanish characteristics and write about them with a lot of not embroidery but illustration because it is and landscapes and things in Spain and that was a lovely talent she had a touch of the melancholic liked the melancholic and you do a bit don't you you write so well about things that might have happened or places of what they might have been and what they are now which I think is just appeals to me greatly because there is a sort of melancholy when you travel anywhere I think I think I do travel to other melancholy places I have to say Do you choose them because you think you're going to maybe that's interesting I'm not sure why one chooses places in my case it's been very odd there's been a sort of transition from writing about small places in the middle east like Lebanon and Cyprus which are half the size of Wales and then suddenly I went off and started going to countries that you couldn't possibly encompass properly with the search like the old Soviet Union or China so that's complete vague which happened curious enough when I had a road accident in 1978 and I was lying in hospital with a broken spine and this was not in Outer Mongolia I had the accident in East Grinstead There's a melancholy place Yes, yes, yes and for some reason it made me want to do something or gave me some maybe feeling a mortality better go and visit somewhere less that I couldn't encompass really couldn't really completely understand with thousands of years of research but somewhere like Russia as it was then that I would just take the risk and see what happened You write so well about I mean the Russian China books I love both of them I can't remember what you said about Russia but the landscape was defined by an absence an absence you were able to make a lot of the fact that was really nothing particularly there and yet it was a very strong anyone has been to the Russian steps and all that, that's exactly what it is You know it I mean was that sort of I suppose what I'm trying to say is you don't mind when things aren't spectacular or there isn't a lot happening you actually find in your writing a sort of satisfaction of describing something where there is an absence of Yes, I often find absence in a way spectacular if there are many miles of it I don't I don't require I think that sort of drama in a landscape that Vince's Jan Marius loved and that you love You know I think but it's interesting talking to you because I really I do admire what you do because I quite like to do that myself I mean the way I travel tends to be for an entertaining television audience so one goes in there and you've got to you've got to balance up all the various elements a good interview with an industrial thing something about shipbuilding you just have terrible jokes when you travel but there's one director who loves shipyards so he'd go to a place and he'd say oh day off tomorrow nope there's a nice shipyard just been opened up here and I I would like to travel on my own and I would like to travel the way you do I couldn't do it because I'm no good at language I don't have I don't put the work in that you do and I think if you don't have the language you're really not going to get below the surface much are you really well it's mediated always you have an interpreter if you have yes I don't know about getting below the surface I never feel I have you know you go on digging and trying and you do your best but there's always that feeling that it's eluded you too much has eluded you you haven't understood and yet you keep that's what keeps you going is it something to try and find out to find something fresh if you felt you've got it then you know that would be the end of it I think you've got it you feel you've got fragments and in a way that's what our sort of books are they are fragments really they're a built up of chance conversations scenery incidents accidents which go in the end to you hope give a some sort of picture of a region or a culture that is not not so engineered as say an academic study you're not saying it is like this you're saying this is how I experienced it this is how it came to me so it's a sort of centuries a picture that you're building made up of all these things that you hope might give a reader an idea or a feeling of what it's like to be here in its smells and scenes and incidents of people I mean it's an awful lot of detail you're brilliant on detail you pick up a little bit of detail three or four things in a sentence whether it's when you know what someone looks like what they're talking about where they're sitting something like that it's terribly rich and I think that I sometimes do that and we do it with our filming it's a collage of images but you hope we'll gel together to get a feeling of what a place is like but I think when you're writing and purely without film and all that it's harder but more satisfying I'm not sure it's a different sort of satisfaction and there's a different sort of dissatisfaction too and you'll never really at ease with what one's done in the end do you bring Jan Morrison again but she said that all her books were really one long autobiography I mean do you feel that that your books are telling you a lot about yourself or you keeping yourself in the background I try to keep myself in the background but of course you fail to imagine that you can really lose your own culture is nonsense which brings one to the thorny question of what we're doing as learn male white intruders if you like from a post-colonial country what sort of right we have to utilise other countries and so on this can be taken to a great extreme and it can be very uncomfortable because one's aware that one I suppose it comes from Foucau perhaps that knowledge is power and the traveller has knowledge that those that have been travelled amongst don't have we're in financial position we're able to be and have some sort of access to their country that they particularly if they're from sort of developing countries don't have they can't have that knowledge so you travel with this sort of privilege if you like and you can just be accused of in some way utilising them and appropriating them and of course in the sense that Edward Said said that we are part of the or were travelled writers part of the colonial enterprise in fabricating an east in particular a middle east in Said's case that didn't exist and often denigrating it and all that and can understand as a sort of accusation against this but you take it to its logical alternative and and we wouldn't be travelling at all there would be no human connection there would be no effort at understanding or empathy and no no connectedness but I suppose that idea that that you can travel in a pure way so there's no superior or inferior you're just you're all inhabitants of the planet and I mean you're talking about knowledge is power and you go to some societies where they know things like where the water might be or how to make a boat out of reeds or something like that which we would never ever be able to do and we have never produced anything which is better than what they produce at the time and that is good to write about and that's good to write about and it's also good to tell people about that to make us realise that we're not sort of western centric we mustn't see it all from our point of view but that's a hard thing to do because you say we are western you and I western white males down there that's the way we are but I think one can still try and get beyond that to put across the idea that everybody is we're all part of the human race and one should see strength in everybody and I think if you always regard these relationships as being those of equal unequal somebody having power somebody not having power eventually all human contact descends into a kind of paranoia you wouldn't have so one has to do one's best I mean part of the problem when we were travelling was we moved rather fast and you would arrive somewhere say a year in Tibet and the yak herder had been told we were coming from the BBC and really come along and talk and that was wonderful because I was travelled on, dishevelled in my chinos and a t-shirt and he put a green suit on he was the yak herder but he got a suit from somewhere and tying all that and we had a wonderful conversation I mean he didn't speak the language I didn't speak his language but in the year we've just talked about two children there and the way they behaved exactly the way children behaved at home one would be saying all the right things and the other would be pushing the other one away and sharing the bottom and behaving generally badly and we had such a wonderful to find out that this is a universal relationship and his wife was making butter and all that and suddenly instead of me looking as though I'm doing all these things for the camera it was just the most wonderful sort of natural communication for about 20 minutes or so and those moments were and I felt so grateful to him for being prepared to take on this idiot from England who couldn't really stir butter and all that and couldn't speak the language but we've got something together There's our very special moments when they happen you can't rely on them but when you sort of feel you've crossed a political boundary a boundary of race and politics and poverty and everything and found some absolutely common element like a a sort of reaching of hands it's not too often but it happens and they are not to be too sentimental about it I think it's important but my real point was that we had this moment and then we just had to go and by that time we'd become friends because you have to have a friendship on camera and then you whiz off and off you go and wave goodbye and that's the end of that Do you ever keep in touch with people you have travelled with or do they get in touch with you? Very rarely but in the old days certainly in the Soviet Union because it was dangerous to make such and they weren't always aware of how perilous it might be to them to have a friendship with you but in general the most of the people I meet you wouldn't do that it's too complicated some of them are even illiterate but most are not you could sometimes the last two the last book I kept in touch splendid Russian it was your man who Alexander who was great and who I later saw on television needing a demonstration against Putin and Khabarovsky I recognised him even above his mask really, really well and my very sweet guide in Mongolia I was able to send them the chapters I'd written about themselves for their comments but it's pretty unusual that with me Occasionally I've gone back to families that I've known in Central Asia I remember I did it a certain amount but not much I remember going back there's one deeply embarrassing moment I'd written about an old lady whose husband and father had both been killed under Stalin and yet she was a ffervent communist it was not untypical absolutely she was a member of the communist party she it was part of her sort of honour and yet both these men she loved had been destroyed under Stalin and I wrote about this and I sent the book to her family and when I went back to see the family I thought I said she's not going to speak to you she's sitting out on the balcony there and she absolutely refuses to speak to you and I thought oh dear and eventually she came in and I thought she's going to say I found her callous and it was nothing of the sort I'd apparently written that she had had bandaged legs and she was very offended by this and nothing else mattered at all nothing else mattered at all I think just very quickly because of one wonderful python thing I think it's in your china book when you're talking to someone and she keeps she tells you you smell you smell, she keeps saying you smell describe what it was because it's a lovely moment I'm trying to remember she says you smell a lot and you're going to do I and it was her accent she was speaking English and she meant smile give us a smell I thought we should very very quickly because I'd be interested to know the future of travel and writing about travel where do you think it's going at the moment are we actually post pandemic going to be less comfortable with travel is it going to become more complicated is it the work that you do and I do going to be still sort of in demand or is it going to take a new form well it's nice to think that we still might be doing it I'm not sure is the answer I think it's going to be more complicated because of well for the obvious things the climate change carbon footprints above all the internet gives the illusion that you can go anywhere and do anything without going there it's a complete illusion I think there's no substitute for being in the place personally being vulnerable to it on the ground and I think it will affect people then people will be telling I wonder whether it will become more self-conscious about it it's dangerous I mean if you're sitting in the White House or 10 Downing Street and looking at a map and thinking well that place is like that and you begin to feel you can manipulate it understand it without ever going there and I rather think if Bush or Blair had spent a few months in the Iraq or Afghanistan they might not have done what they did it's it'll be interesting to see what happens to travelling I mean I do hope we and many others do travel and write as much as possible because it's so important otherwise we're all separating into our own little worlds and being driven by virtual travellers or virtual opinions of people who've never been to those places and I think that's going to be a great problem ahead but I do think travel writing is becoming interesting because it's giving in so many different directions there are plenty of interesting travel writers about now some of them of course are travelling for out of a sense of some sort of personal loss even others out of a more sort of concentrated fascination with a particular area like very interesting traveller I recently was judging the little award for the Stanford Book Awards and all of them were interesting quite different ways talented and some in large swathes, some entering countries with a particular bent in mind like Sophie Roberts The Lost Pianos of Siberia and others there's an interesting woman writing about what it means to be black and travel what you receive back and whether always the problem is to whether you're disliked, you feel for yourself or because you're of your colour and it's become very diversified I think that's encouraging I think so long as people want to travel and want to write about it they'll find an audience you want to travel one more book or two more books or just go on I mean presumably you have you want to go on somewhere usually I interspersed the travel books with a novel I know we haven't talked about your novels eight of them as well as all the travel books anyway that's great thank you we've got to now we're coming to now I think is our time and it's now time to ask for questions and oh here we are yes it's working very well I'm not very good on these things you're going to have a heart transplant very quickly done alright this one is quite interesting this is from Robert Fraser who says is the widespread use of the English language overseas an advantage or a disadvantage to the English travel writer quite a catch there well I would say for me it's an enormous advantage because I can talk to many more people but I suppose it's a question of whether the way people use English is in a sort of rather constricted way and they're not really saying what they'd like to say in their real language I usually find an advantage it can be a great relief but I wouldn't want to be confined to an English speaking part of a country obviously that's too restricting but I must say it's a delight to find a good English speaker and there are many more now it's becoming a lingua franca really let's have a look here yes here we are this is from Ruth McKee who says oh now here we are this is a good one sorry Ruth you've been bumped but we'll get back to yours so Judith Allnut writes from all your travels amongst different peoples with their varied beliefs and mores do you agree with Alice Walker that we're more alike than we are unalike ooh is that another thing we hope we are yes I think we're more alike than you would expect just from various moments I've had with people at the basic level the things people worry about all over the world are so fairly common the house, the food the children, the relationships whatever and I find that always surprises me I stick with that you're making it right let's see now okay we'll get Ruth McKee because Ruth will be on giving you a hard time have either of you ever been disappointed when you arrive somewhere you've read about only to find it's nothing like it's description in literature ah ah I always remember a wonderful passage in your Sahara book in which you're approaching Timbuktu and seeing the walls and it's by moonlight and their bats flying around and you just say this is why I leave home you say but then you enter Timbuktu and it's not absolutely east Grinstead it isn't no exactly so I think the answer is yes you can be disappointed I'm trying to think of places that have disappointed me but I mean that's I can't think of a specific place but Timbuktu was certainly so sad really it wasn't sad in an interesting another collic way it was just desperate and now of course I don't think we'll be able to go there at all the other two places I mean which I did disappoint me and this is relevant to literature one was the north pole and the other was the south pole and not the great deal of literature about the north pole but because it's on on ice flows and all that it's on water but the south pole certainly so much about Scott and Hammondson and Shackleton and eventually they are down there and we eventually got there in a plane landed in the middle of the night and there you were at the very sort of the tip of the world and all you could see were just pallets full of equipment trucks and lorries and things like that and underneath the ice just very close to where you could stand on the south pole itself a place that sort of that Scott had reached and found Hammondson's flag and little note saying we've been here already there was a a big American base or American run base underneath the ice where they were serving sort of blueberry muffins and all that sort of thing and everyone was walking around in their Muda shorts and then listening to Chicago you know I thought I've come all this way and this is the reality but the great thing is if you arrive in New York you're not allowed into a place like that there's special sort of protocols there you have to be a scientist and all that you can't just turn up as people do at the south pole and say you can't have a shower so I didn't just sort of change of tension because we were in the end allowed someone smuggler to have a shower and then we had to go out onto the ice again and spent the night on the ice so there you are Ruth that was a very good question now so questions from the audience because we've got a bit of time we've got another about five minutes from some audience questions a gentleman up there have you got a mic coming to you oh sorry it's been hijacked by somebody else okay sorry I was aiming at you it's very nice listening to you thank you so much both of you Michael would you be interested in repeating your around the world in 80 days and trying to complete it within the restricted Covid times that we are living in who knows the answer but I I must say the Covid period has totally disrupted all my travel plans I've been very strange because I had had a heart operation so I had to take six months off while that sort itself out then Covid happened and for 18 months I'd not mean anywhere outside my home in London and Hampstead Heath near where I live for walks and all that and after 18 months my first trip away from home was to Bradford so that's the travelling I do in our days I can't thoroughly recommend Bradford but no the answer is I don't think I'd put myself through that again yes the gentleman there just it was second time lucky so my question is for you Mr Thubron I was reading somewhere that you've been to Persia, Iran in the past so I was wondering what you make of it and if you've written a book extensively about your experiences in there thank you very much thank you I wrote only a little of it of Iran, Persia in a book called Shadow of the Silk Road which I passed through the northern part from Meshed across to Teheran and so it was a very limited experience of the country but very wonderful I travelled there earlier in the 1970s which was fascinating because it was before the Shah before the revolution and that was more interesting because one could see the tensions in the country even in Teheran you could see the northern part of the city occupied by a middle class and wealthy and in the south this great sweltering huge suburb in Teheran of the disenfranchised the rural poor who'd come in and you filter something brooding there even in the late 70s or mid 70s but it was a beautiful country I loved it and when I was last there there were no tourists and nothing and I had places like Meshed for instance to myself so it's a country I'd love to go back to because people seem to be in spite of being called the axis of evil and so on people were endlessly polite and friendly to me I just hitchhiked across the country there should be an axis of evil tours really yes I mean the axis of evil North Korea was terrific yes a total surprise really you were quite benignly about North Korea we weren't shown the nasty bits but again an example of people being like or unlike of people about once they were once they trusted us were extremely friendly any better one more question I think because we have to and well we'll have to anyone up there, the back there yes gentlemen there with the mask on well quickly take it off first of all thank you both very much indeed where let us see him travel becomes possible again as we know it and love it where would you each like to go where you've never been before hmm well almost anywhere really that I've never been before I think I haven't been to Central America Mexico very briefly and I quite like to go to Costa Rica because I hear interesting things about that country in the way they're sort of tackling the problems there and the environmental problems and I'd like to see just what they're doing and how they're dealing with it I still have a fantasy of going to Chile which I don't know at all that's a beautiful part in the south of Chile called the Torres del Paine which is a national park which is quite spectacular I believe and I'd love to go hiking there if I still can with my wife who strips me on the hiking and you can take a boat I believe on almost the whole coast of Chile from the Atacama desert down and these glaciers are falling into the sea I don't think disintegrating too badly yet and it's quite beautiful so I have an idea that that may be next if I'm lucky right very good choice one more sorry I know yes you're right there that's when the front good evening Mr Soobron good evening Mr Palin I've read books both of your works some of your works a very quick question just occurred to me addressed specifically to us Mr Soobron when you find yourself out on the road and I'm referring in particular having read the first book I read of yours was in Siberia and I know that you took the Trans-Siberian Express and I read sort of detours out into what was really quite remote wilderness in a sense what happens when you're on the road and you're not quite sure where you're going to be spending the night and darkness begins to fall how do you handle that because you're a lone traveller so probably my misplaced self confidence that it's going to be alright and it usually is it's going to be endlessly hospitable and in these rough places anybody will take you in I've been lucky I suppose I've been lucky but there's no planning for it you know you can't get on your iPhone and plan ahead so you really just have to trust maybe foolish but so far it's worked and I'm still here have you ever had so much vodka that you've not known where you are because you're talking about Russian hospitality it isn't cocoa and Horlicks is it several very strong vodka you're forced to if you if you don't drink with them then you're spoiling the fun if we drink alone we're drunks they say if we drink with two or more we're having a party and so I've been horribly drunk you've been to those tables where you have to toast and every time you stand up and there's 18 people that's 18 vodkas yes and then the toasts have gone all the way around and they've toasted everything from your dog to your country to your politics and then they start again we did that in Russia it was a film director I was making a film about crayfish I can't remember why and I was enrolled to act the hand that picked the crayfish out and this was of course a great celebration in the evening 18 of his friends came so we had 18 of these vodkas and as you say toast everything I remember getting up and this is on camera I'm saying I like to say how wonderful it is to be here and I like to toast my football team Sheffield United Sheffield United so it is you have to let go don't you don't you after that we got back to the hotel and we heard that one of the top vice presidents of Russia was going to be staying in the hotel that night and so Basil the photographer and I sat outside and said we're going to stop him and we're going to ask him a little bit about Russia and what's going on and of course it wasn't him at all and the next morning I woke up and I felt so desperate to throw up that I raced to the basin in the corner of my room stood over it and the basin came away from the wall it wasn't attached to anything it was just a pipe so I had to race round finding where I could throw up and by the time I'd done that I didn't want to throw up at all which I think is a suitable point to end this learning discussion on literature. Thank you and it's really been a joy talking to you thank you all very much indeed for coming around. Thank you so much Michael and Colin I'm going to hold you on stage for one second more actually I think we may let you escape so that you can go into the signing so you can run out while I do the boring bits but thank you very much we'll be applauding you from in here out to out there I'm very pleased as well that we'll be able to bring you even more in explorations of travel writing which will be a celebration of Jan Morris's work a year after her death Join us on Thursday the 25th of November to hear from Sarah Moss, Pico Iyer Cien Leicester and Shahidah Bari That event is going to be free online to RSL members and fellows Public tickets can be bought through the British Library Membership of the RSL starts at £40 per year and is open to all so it's a steal it's a steal As a member of the RSL as well as free tickets to our events you'll receive our Corsley newspaper our mutual friend and our annual magazine the RSL review both of which will be arriving with members in the next six to eight weeks I'm looking to the magazine's editor we're a mutual bonnet so please sign up today if you're watching at home and you want to come to all of our events online for free you can register for a digital event pass for £25 Still has come this season we've got events with speakers including Chris Riddell, Joyce Carol Oates Kit Deval, Val McDermott Patrice Lawrence, Jack Underwood Alex Weetall, Gwenad's Head and Irenaisyn Nakoji Our members, fellows and newsletter subscribers will also hear some more from us on the 30th of November with some very special announcements for our 200 and first birthday as part of our five year RSL 200 festival so you can join our newsletter mailing list on our website to hear some of the news of those Before you go to buy books from Colin and Michael which they're going to be signing outside or which you can buy online through bookshop.org and support independent bookshops I want to send us out to them with a huge final thank you and a round of applause for Michael