Travelling with Pico Iyer

"I've become a bit of an evangelist for travel in the past couple of years," Pico Iyer admits. "Especially in America, where I sense that my friends and I know far less about the world than the world knows about us. Insofar as we all now live in a global neigbhourhood," he adds, "we should at least go meet the neighbours."

Iyer is being typically self-deprecating. The celebrated travel writer has been going out to meet the neighbours his entire life. Iyer was born in England to Indian parents and raised partly in Cambridge and partly in California. 'Home' for much of his adulthood has involved a commute between the family house near Los Angeles, an apartment in suburban Japan, and the various monasteries where he retreats for periods between the epic wanderings that have produced a body of work already the match of his more senior influences and models, Jan Morris and Paul Thoreau.

This late March afternoon, the forty-six-year-old Iyer is in Montreal for the Blue Metropolis literary festival. He has risen at dawn, as is his custom, to experience the city while it awakens. He is equally keen on a nocturnal stroll up St. Laurent, especially with the promise of being shown the house that another of his mentors, Leonard Cohen, still keeps on a square a few blocks below Mount-Royal. Iyer is all social graces and enthusiasms, his preternatural eloquence rendered less intimidating by the curiosity of the lifelong apprentice and the humility of the eternal pilgrim.

'Evangelical' isn't a word that comes naturally to mind when describing his travel writing. But the affluence of United States in the late 1990s, and then the shock of September 11, 2001, combined to press Iyer into a more ardent relationship with the form. Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign, his new collection of profiles and pieces, elevates his craft to the level of literary art, where, as he puts it, the travel writer doesn't "lead the reader by the hand," as he would in a conventional narrative, but rather walks on ahead, back turned, in the hope the reader will follow him.

"I was worried about the complacency in both American culture, and in me," he says of the period preceeding 9/11. "Prosperity was leaving us ever more impervious to the fact that a large percentage of the world still lives in great poverty." Concerned that he was too "cocooned with my consciousness" as a privileged westerner, Iyer embarked upon travels that were intentionally difficult and disconcerting.

"I wanted to challenge and unsettle myself," he says in Montreal. "To topple myself, in effect." Destinations like Ethiopia, Cambodia, Yemen, Bolivia and Haiti were chosen both because those societies observe "a different kind of logic," and are in distress. "We travel most, I mean to say, when we stumble," Iyer writes in the introduction to Sun After Dark, "and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need."

In Haiti, for instance, Iyer meets a resident Frenchman who admonishes him to remember that "this place, it is not Cartesian." Even in the capital, Port-au-Prince, he is warned not to venture out of his hotel. He is as dismayed by the $100-a-plate dinner he attends, with the city's haut-monde in their "backless dresses and diaphanous scarves," as by the "men who walk around the central square with bloodshot eyes." TOMORROW BELONGS TO HAITI, a sign reads, "unanswerably."

But Iyer is no longer content, as he might have been earlier in his career, to simply record and remark the strangeness. Swirving away from reportage, he offers a meditation on the West's fear of the proverbial "Other." "Alienness," he writes, "inheres not in a place or object, but in our relation to it. Our fears – of course – are as private, as unrational as our dreams."

"When I go to Paris," Iyer says in conversation, "I come back untransformed and unchallenged, with, if anything, some of my misconceptions confirmed. Whereas a few days in Yemen shook me up in ways that still haunt."

Those Yemen days are chronicled in "The Khareef." Arriving in August, 2001, Iyer finds the capital Aden, once a major city, "a biblical wasteland." There are no shops or restaurants and the pristine beach is empty, aside from patrols of armed soldiers. "Time slips away in a place like Aden," he writes, "as if the whole city is drifting away on the narcotic qat that everyone chews."

Though he can find little to appreciate, his stay is extended, courtesy of a cancelled flight. Unable to abide the wait, Iyer charters a car for a nightmarish race through the desert. "The night that followed never happened, I tell myself now," he says in the piece. But it did, and it haunts him still, as do the assaults on New York and Washington that occured six weeks later, whereupon the "bored soldiers" he observed in Yemen "began streaming towards Afghanistan, to fight." Osama Bid Laden, Iyer notes, was born outside Aden.

A clue to the rigor and occasional surrealism of Sun After Dark lies in Pico Iyer's embrace of what he calls "nighttime" travel. "I live in the daytime world and I wanted to explore the nightime world," he explains. "It is, after all, where we all spend a third to a half of our lives." He puts it succinctly in one essay: "I know a trip has really been successful if I come back sounding strange even to myself."

Equally important to the book's scheme are the pieces that open it. They include profiles of Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama, and a literary study of W.G. Sebald. Iyer's admiration for Sebald, whose books defy categorization as travel, memoir or fiction, is telling. "The classic travel writer takes us on a quest," he writes of the German, "even if he doesn't know exactly what he's after." True of Sebald, whose work is fast gaining canonic status, especially in the wake of his untimely death three years ago. True as well for Sun After Dark, a book the more powerful for the complexity of its quest.

As for the Canadian poet and songwriter and the Tibetan Buddha, both are "exemplary travellers of our time." "In their own ways," Iyer says at the Blue Metropolis, "Cohen and the Dalai Lama interpret travel as imaginatively and constructively as anyone I know." He visited Leonard Cohen in the mountains above Los Angeles, observing the seventy-year-old sitting 'rohatsu,' the Zen retreat that involves meditating for seven days and nights without rest. "Cohen is an advertisement for the virtue of travelling by sitting still," Iyer says. "The real adventures of life are inward."

The Dalai Lama, meanwhile, a man Iyer has known since he was a teenager, and with whom he spent the spring of 2003 in Dharamsala, India, has suffered exile from Tibet for nearly a half-century and travelled almost without stop for the last two decades. "Like any model traveller," Iyer says of him, "he asks two questions wherever he goes: What can I learn from this place, and what can I give to these people?"

For Pico Iyer, that degree of civility is a condition of enlightened travelling. It is, needless to say, a state of grace he is too modest to ascribe to himself. "It's what many of us in our loftier and self-important moments hope to achieve," he says.