Best-selling travel writer William Dalrymple talks to FOOTNOTES about the life-changing effects of travel, and some of the issues currently affecting backpackers.

FOOTNOTES: After five best-selling travel books; what do you prefer, the writing or the research?

William Dalrymple: The research. Definitely the research. Writing has its pleasures, which are largely centred on having got it done (laughs) rather than doing it. To be a travel writer is fabulous. Maybe less so if you're Roman O'Hanlon going through some jungle with leeches clinging to your arse, but the kind of places I go to... It's fabulous, the best part of my life, just get up and go off to some amazing new part of India I haven't seen or some exciting part of the Middle-East.

What does the phrase 'travel broadens the mind' mean to you?
WD: I think it's a very, very important concept because when you look at nationalists and right- wingers they have, almost in common, whatever their particular prejudice and nationality, the fact that they haven't travelled. If you look at the right-wing commentators in our press today, the Niall Fergusons and Andrew Roberts, they're the guys who worked in banks in their year off, they're the guys who never got out of Europe. Travel does not necessarily broaden your mind but, given half the chance, it should do. If you put yourself out on a limb, if you go on your own, or maybe with one other person, and put yourself in situations where you have to be challenged by what goes on - it can lead to periods of confusion and loneliness, and it can lead to trouble if everything goes badly wrong - but it almost always, particularly somewhere like India, almost always does lead, can lead, should lead to a measure of broadening of the mind. I had a particularly sheltered and un-cosmopolitan background. I'd hardly travelled at all in Europe when I arrived in India and it was like a stick of dynamite underneath my life and everything changed; my political views, my attitude. Of course it's an ongoing proces...

But it's the catalyst.
WD: Definitely the catalyst that began everything and I'm enourmously grateful for the chances it gave me. I don't think everyone does necessarily gain from their travels and it is possible to gain very little from a journey. There's no necessity that a journey will broaden your mind. In fact, conducted with a group of like-minded people, with a closed mind, it can enforce your prejudices rather than broaden your mind. But I think done well, done open-mindedly and intelligently and enquiringly it should have a revolutionary effect on you.

Page 1 | 2