There is a telling moment in one of Colin Thubron’s early films. He is travelling with a BBC crew along the Silk Road in China when he professes that he is tired of filming and needs to be alone. He turns aside and enters the desert for a moment of meditation; a moment that is recorded by the film crew, who are presumably still beside him.
The tensions between Thubron’s natural tendency to solitude and the travel writer’s need to communicate and share experience are what give his books their strength. He is never garrulous and when he does reveal something about himself, the reader feels that these are confidences hard won.
Title: To a Mountain in Tibet
Author: Colin Thubron
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
ISBN: 9780060959296
Available from: Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.com.
To a Mountain in Tibet is one of his most personal books. He sets off towards Mount Kailas, the mystical peak in Tibet close to the borders with Nepal and India. For centuries, Hindus, Buddhists and their predecessors, the Bon, have worshipped this mountain, which lies remarkably close to the sources of all four major rivers of the subcontinent: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Sutlej and the Indus. Emerging abruptly from the flat western Tibetan plateau, over 1,000 miles from Lhasa, it is an iconic mountain of spiritual purity.
No one has ever climbed it – although Reinhold Messner made an attempt in the Eighties but was frustrated by Chinese intransigence. Instead, the devotees who come here circle around the mountain in what must be one of the toughest pilgrimages in the world, crossing a pass at 18,600ft and often enduring severe…