For those who haven’t read your books, please briefly describe your journeys in the footsteps of Ibn Battutta, the 14th century adventurer who travelled for 29 years and 75,000 miles from Morocco to China and back again before writing a book about his experiences.

So far I've followed IB from Tangier almost to the southern tip of India – admittedly with some big gaps, but I'd never planned to track him slavishly – via Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, Turkey and the Crimea. IB's Indian travels I followed pretty closely, and they took me to some really out-of-the-way places. The next instalment will take me to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Sumatra, Vietnam and China. And there's another volume after that . . . High points of the journey: LOTS of them, but I could single out the KuriaMuriaIslands off Oman and the possible site of IB's hermit's cell there…

Why, because of the cell?

The Kuria Murias are just one of those places . . . islands have their own obvious mystique, and these are some of the least visited (by outsiders) and most intriguingly named. Another high point must be visiting the very definite site of the sati ceremony IB saw in Madhya Pradesh.

Why?

At the sati site, I was walking into IB's description - into his book. Nothing had changed. Even some of the trees were the same one's he'd seen: I don't just mean the same type of trees, but the SAME TREES. As for low points…they become less low with time, but maybe discos in Alanya, Turkey, were a bit of a nadir.

You’re quoted as saying you don’t like travelling in itself. Now, since you seem to stay in relatively nice hotels when you go, and thus miss out on joys such as having your clothes stolen from the communal washing line by students, I take it you mean the hideous long train journeys, bus plunges, etc?

The main reason I say I don't like travelling is because I prefer sitting in my house in San'a, Yemen, and chewing qat (which I'm doing now).

Why travel from Tangier to Constantinople to India and now to China in the footsteps of anyone else, why not just do it for yourself?

Trail-breaking suggests exploration, and I'm no explorer. I'm a traveller, and travellers inevitably follow in their predecessors' footsteps whether consciously or not. I did it consciously, and in the footsteps of the man I think is the greatest traveller ever.

You talk in your book of there being no set boundaries of space and time, that all things that have ever happened and will happen are doing so at this very moment. In effect, you are travelling 6 centuries after Ibn Battutta, but also alongside him. D’you ever feel like people from the future are walking, nose deep in one of your books, following the fragments of your life around the world, as you did Ibn Battutta?

Predecessors and successors are all part of the travelling continuum, so yes, I can hear those ghostly footsteps from the future, following in mine.

You travelled to India, and now to China, knowing that you are writing a book. Does this knowledge change the way you travel/see things?

Knowing that you're writing a book makes you look hard and record minutely. Perhaps it also gives you a sort of tunnel vision; but you see down the tunnel in v. sharp focus.

At a Sufi gathering in Delhi you were given scented earplugs, traditionally reserved for the dead. Did this concern you?

The earplug connection only occurred to me later. It gave me a frisson, but didn't disturb me: we're all going to die at some time.

I only ask because the one thing you do not explain in any great detail in the book is the way you feel. Why’s this?

For me, observing the past and present around me are more important than my own reactions to what I experience: I'm a recorder. People can read the feelings between the lines, if they want to.

You express surprise when you come across Hindu or Christian images in Mosques. Why? Surely, for a scholar with access to a wide range of information, it’s all the same?

We're all heading towards the same spiritual goal – what I think of as the convergence of parallel lines at the vanishing point. But it's usually been in the interest of religious groups to keep those parallel lines separate, at least in the here and now. Hence my surprise at, e.g., a Shaivite trident on a mosque.

I’d like you to expand on some snippets you give in the book…

You ate raw goats kidneys, warm from the body. Where, what situation?

I ate the raw kidneys in the mouth of a cave-house overlooking the Nujad Plain in the south of SocotraIsland. I was with the Yemeni-British film maker Bader Ben Hirsi, who was making a documentary on the island. I went along for the ride. Bader had been filming the cave-dweller making fire in the old-fashioned way, with a couple of sticks. Being a hospitable type, like all Socotris, he killed a goat for us - normal practice.

And the fricasseed bulls rectums, and deep fried locusts?

The bulls rectums I had in place not far from San'a called Shibam. I was in a carnivorous mood, and they were all the restaurant had left (give them their due, they were apologetic). The locusts I had here in San'a.

Wrestling in the dark with a gunman…?

The gunman story is a long one . . . it's enough to say that he was drunk and pulled a pistol on me, and I grabbed it.

And reeling from the blast of a scud missile…?

The missile blast was here in San'a during the 1994 War of Unity: the scud came courtesy of the secessionists (who lost).

When you have finished following Ibn Battutta, will you go on in your own footsteps, or another’s? Bruce Chatwin or Axel Munthe, among western authors, seem prime candidates for your style - polite, romantic, good humoured, flexible with ideas of time, space and truth.

I've got a fat file of book ideas, enough for several lives. The contents are Top Secret.

If Ibn Battutta is, as you say, the prince of travellers, who reigns alongside him, as fellow princes, royal cousins, king and queen?

Not in any order, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ibn Jubayr and Mr and Mrs Theodore Bent come to mind. They're all travel writers like IB.

You travel in a world, it seems, where memorable people talk wisely and quote old poetry and never, ever do anything as distasteful as talk about money. Those who have visited India will no doubt recognise the wisdom shown to you, but the omission of hustlers and con artists from your narrative…why?

I'm a lucky traveller, thank God, and seem to bump into interesting people everywhere. Con men flee at my approach and, unlike some writers, I don't go looking for them.

You write a chapter on Aligarh, in India, making it sound like one trip, then admit later that it was three. Now, I understand why you admit to it, but why do it in the first place? Continuity?

My writing has a lot to do with arrangement, editing, pacing and, yes, continuity. In a sense it's quite a filmic process. What to leave out is sometimes difficult, but you can't put it all in and do three journeys to Aligarh along the Grand Trunk Road.

Kerouac used Benzies, Bukowski Red Wine, you Qat. How does it aid you in your work?

Qat is a bit like Dumbledore's magic bowl in Harry Potter – it helps you pick out strands of memory and thought and see how they weave together.

You’ve lived in Yemen for twenty years. What originally attracted you to live there and what, now you know the place, keeps you there?

Reading Freya Stark and wanting to learn good Arabic brought me to Yemen. Friends, qat, climate, food are a few of the things keep me here. And San'a isn't only a beautiful city – it's the nearest thing I've got to a muse.

Describe your perfect day in Yemen.

In San'a: a good morning's work, saltah for lunch, chewing good qat in good company (whether of people or books), a good evening's work (or, on Thursdays, giving a good piano lesson), beating the computer at Scrabble. In the country: driving along a long, long road – e.g. Aden to Hadramawt – with (again) some good qat, or walking down a wadi with flowing water and Goliath herons.

You live at 7,500 feet in, you say, the most vertically interesting corner of the Arabic speaking world. Can you tell us a little more about what it perhaps has to offer?

Read my ‘Yemen: Travels in DictionaryLand’. It's impossible to say a little about Yemen . . .

In Yemen, how close is the silence of the desert to being crushed by the void of the dollar, as it has been in other Arabian states.

The desert rarely comes into my life in Yemen. But Yemen's urban culture is too ancient and deep-rooted to be crushed by upstart dollars.

What 3 books would you recommend any Western traveller to Arabia to read?

Thesiger's ‘Arabian Sands’, Freya Stark's ‘Southern Gates of Arabia’ and (I blush) my ‘Yemen’.

If you had to be confined to carrying 3 books yourself whilst travelling, what would they be (irrespective of your destination).

A Patrick O'Brian novel, the works of Sir Thomas Browne, and Patrick Leigh Fermor's ‘Mani’.

You admit to being dizzy with hunger after having missed lunch once. I like the honesty, but the Bedouins I know would call you a big girl’s blouse for saying that. D’you get any jibes at home in Sana’a for that trait?

No jibes about being hungry in San'a. San'anis are huge eaters.

Ok, is there any object you wouldn’t be without whilst on the road?

I'd never be without my silver 'Lifelong' propelling pencil (and a supply of leads) – property of my grandfather, my father and now me.

Whats the most memorable man made sight you’ve witnessed?

Petra, empty of people, in the dead of winter with snow on the tops above the valley.

Ditto the most memorable natural sight?

Ditto my last answer, as Petra's both man-made and natural. Being face to face with a whale off the coast of Oman would come a close second, though.

Any advice for budding travel writers?

Budding travel writers should read the masters, never lose their diaries, and always do their first draft in longhand.

Where are you off to next?

I'm travelling next from Morocco to China with a film crew, to present a series on IB's travels for the BBC.