Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a restless traveler whose every journey is accompanied by words.

He absorbs the countries he visits and then writes about them in a way that has delighted thousands

of readers.

He began as a young man with books on the Middle East, but it thousands of

readers. He began as a young man with books on the Middle East, but it's his descriptions of his travels through Russia and China that have won him greatest acclaim.

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss him simply as a narrator, albeit a stylish one.

When alone, relaxing in his Welsh cottage, he writes novels.

His body may rest, but his spirit, it seems seems never does.

He is Colin Thubron.

Colin, is that restlessness, that inability to settle a fundamental requirement of the

travel writer, do you think?

It certainly is in my case.

I think it expands both to the novels and to the travel books.

Why it's there, I'm uncertain, but I think in many travel writers that it is sitting there as the

basic reason why they go even if they don't acknowledge it.

But is it a desire to travel or is it a desire to arrive?

I think in my case it's more desire to arrive.

I have a dream of a place, an idea of a place which I want to go and corroborate or find a difference in. I think the love of simple movement may be there as well,

but the ultimate thing is the realization of a destiny.

...