Though still quite active, as evidenced by this book, Colin Thubron seems to belong to an earlier generation of British travel writers, the one that included Norman Lewis, H.V. Morton, Freya Stark, and Patrick Leigh Fermor (who also is still living, age 95). They wrote with grace and erudition, and with compassion, about exotic foreign places that were not served by any travel agencies. Take, for example, Thubron's latest book, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET.
The principal subject is a trek Thubron made to and around Mount Kailas, in western Tibet, in 2009. Accompanied by a guide and a cook, both Nepalese, he hiked from Simikat, Nepal to the Tibetan border, then took a Land Cruiser to Darchen in Tibet, from where he set out by foot on a kora, or circumnavigation, of Kailas. The trip was at altitude - from 8,000 feet to 18,600 feet - and much of it was along narrow trails perched hundreds of feet up the walls of sheer river gorges or up and over landslides of jagged scree. Thus, it met the criterion of old-fashioned travel books by being physically demanding. (And Thubron did it at age 70!)
Mount Kailas is "the most sacred of the world's mountains". It is holy to Buddhists and Hindus and a host of related and precursor faiths or ways of life. It stands by itself, in splendid isolation and over 22,000 feet high, next to Lake Manasarovar (equally holy and where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were scattered). It has never been climbed - due in part to technical difficulties but more to its remoteness and the reverence with which it is held by those who live in the area. But a circumnavigation of it is for many Hindus, Buddhists, and Tibetans what a pilgrimage to Mecca is for Moslems or to Jerusalem for Jews.
Along the way to Mount Kailas, Thubron encountered plenty of exotic sights and experiences, more than enough for a classic travel book. For example: Tibetan monks watching a soccer game on television and rooting for Manchester United and becoming enraged at the referee; caravans of goats, each carrying on its back a saddlepack filled with salt from Tibet, which will be exchanged for grain on the return trip from Nepal; a monastery in a stone hut, where pilgrims crowd in and leave behind money, which a novice collects in a box labelled "Budweiser"; and sky burials, where master corpse-dissectors render the body into pieces, which are tossed on to a platform for the vultures (after all, "A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead.").
But, like the best of travel books, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET transcends its subject or "travel destination". Interlaced throughout Thubron's narrative of his trek are his reports and reflections on the region's religions and ways of life and thought. Thubron is empathetic, but he does not engage in any phony or pandering attempts to become what he is not. In connection with a discussion of "tulkus" or reincarnations that he has with an abbot of a monastery exiled from Tibet, Thubron writes: "But I belong helplessly to another culture. He is focused on spiritual continuance, while I am overborne by individual death."
For Thubron in this book, the mortality that weighs on him is accentuated by the recent death of his mother, leaving him the last survivor of his family. Again and again on the trip, he is haunted by memories of his father, his mother, and his sister (who, ironically, died in an avalanche in the Alps). Those memories do not overwhelm the book, but they do give it a poignant, personal dimension which, when added to the travel adventure, the history, and the religious ethnology make TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET a special book.
