What do you think about modern backpacking?
WD: (banging the table for emphasis) My life was completely changed by my year off. I would not be sitting here talking to you now were it not for my year off in India and with that change in my life has come a complete change in who my friends are, what my interests are, who my girlfriends were, my religious views, political views, everything was completely changed by my year off. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that. Nine months around India like everyone else; a little bit of teaching, a bit of working in a Mother Theresa home and a little bit of travelling. If you use it well, it can be the greatest time of your life. It can be the most fun time. It can be the time of your life that does change everything, that completely revolutionises your view of your life, because most people, when they go on their year-off trip inevitably have no experience of life beyond school and where you're brought up, and suddenly you're cast into a completely different world. I quite seriously would have ended up a dentist, or a chartered accountant, or a banker but for my year-off. So I can't imagine that a year-off can, in any way, however badly things go wrong, be a bad thing because of the sheer richness of the experience that's available to you and the contrast with everything that will have gone before. There are, clearly, years off which are better used than others (laughs), and if you spend your time in the bars of Goa and never go further than that you'll have missed a chance than if you go to some really out of the way places and let it change your life.

What do you think about the effect that such vast numbers of backpackers have on places? Would you be an advocate of limiting the number of visas made available as they do with work permits in Australia?
WD: No, I wouldn't be an advocate of that because for a start it's wonderful for the Indian economy to have people going in. It's great for the British to see another culture and it's good for people from around the world to see each other. It's true that backpackers can wreck a place. You see it in Manali. You see it in Goa. But, I think backpackers travel more lightly on the world that most, and they mess the world around less than package tourism does. It's fun to be a student backpacker occasionally, to stop by Pushkar or Goa, but for God's sake get off the route. Your guidebook's 800-pages long, don't just go to Rajasthan and Kerala. There's the whole of the rest of India out there. I think most intelligent people do make their own way off the beaten track at some point. You have to be pretty dim and un-enquiring to go to the same place as everybody else; Jaipur, Jodphur, Goa, Kerala, home. Some of my happiest memories of my year off were in Goa doing the whole backpacker thing, staying in a backpacker hostel, with a group of unbelievably beautiful girls from South America. Everyone was smoking drugs I'd never heard of before and staying up all night and listening to wild music and naked bodies on the beach and that was very exciting at nineteen - but then you go off somewhere else. Go to Bijapur. It's a day's journey from Goa and you'll see one of the world's great city states, on a par with any Tuscan town like Sienna or Florence, with its own school of art and no other single backpacker there.

You began your career about the same time as Nick Danziger. Do you think he puts himself in unnecessary danger?
WD: I do. I have quite a clear idea in my own mind what I'm prepared to risk, and I've done some quite dangerous things, often inadvertently, but I'd never knowingly go into a shooting war, I'd never cross Afghanistan, for example, at a time when it was full-scale war like Nick did.

A lot of people might be worried about attempting a lot of places at the moment.
WD: There's always some danger somewhere along the way but I can't think of many places that you couldn't do now. Afghanistan you wouldn't do willingly I don't think. You can do Pakistan perfectly safely and the silk route in China is a complete motorway now. Daniel Pearl was done in because he was representing an American paper and was trying to interview members of Al-Qaida. Don't go around looking for Al-Qaida, it's fair to say, and take advice from people about where to go.