Pico Iyer - Travel Writer

How did you get started traveling?

I think I was lucky enough to be a traveler from birth, as a child of Indian parents born in England (and an England where I never saw an Indian face), and then moving to California when I was seven and beginning to go to school, three times a year, by plane. And once the movement was in my blood, I could never get it out!

So as soon as I finished high-school I worked in a Mexican restaurant in Southern California, and saved up enough money to spend three months traveling by bus from Santa Barbara down to La Paz, Bolivia, and then flying up the western coast of South America, through Brazil and Suriname and the West Indies, up to Miami, where I took the Greyhound home. (After which, college itself was nothing but a sorry anticlimax).

And as soon as I went to graduate-school, I signed up to spend my summer vacations writing for the Let's Go series of guidebooks, covering 80 towns in 90 days while sleeping in gutters and eating a hot dog once a week. And as soon as I joined Time magazine two years later, I took three separate vacations in Asia in the space of a year.
At every point, travel taught me that everything else paled by comparison.

How did you get started writing?

I think being an outsider, as I always was, proved to be a perfect background, and launching pad, for writing (and for traveling). Wherever I was, I was on the outside, taking notes, as it were — even when I was just walking down the street where I was born to the candy store. And I quickly found, too, that traveling quickened my longing to write; usually I never keep a diary, but as soon as I'm on the road, I find that all that I want to do is scribble and scribble and scribble in a somewhat quixotic attempt to catch all the experiences and impressions and feelings that are flooding through me. At some point I thought, "If I'm doing all this writing for myself, I might as well inflict it on some friends."