ABSTRACT
Colin Thubron is one of the most important contemporary travel writers who have roamed over, much on feet, the most varied regions of Asia, from Jerusalem through Russia, Tibet and the Central Asia republics, alongside and outside the Silk Road, up to Siberia and China. While his travel experiences, just as these lands, were most varied, they can be organised around the single, though almost impossible question: how it is possible to pin down the specificity of Asia, especially in contrast to Europe. A central part of the answer concerns the single most important term in Thubron’s accounts of Asia, the void, extending to all its modalities. The void is pervasive in the landscape of Asia, just as in its everyday life, in its people, including their faces and also most prominently in their religion. Another central concern is the omnipresence of the absurd, offering further support to Havel’s term ‘Absurdistan’.
