SINGAPORE — You’d be forgiven for thinking that Pico Iyer is a Luddite. The acclaimed travel writer doesn’t own a cellphone and his most prized high-tech gadget is a fax machine. He doesn’t have a bicycle, a car or a television set. The only time he plugs into the world (aside from the occasional email correspondence with his editors) is when he steps out from his apartment in Nara, Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife — and flies off yet again.

But that’s more than enough for fans and admirers of the 55-year-old’s writings and books. Video Night In Kathmandu, Falling Off The Map, The Global Soul, Sun After Dark — Iyer belongs in that rarefied list of modern day writers whose musings about places have captured the public imagination.

Iyer was in town last weekend for the Singapore Writers Festival and he shared with us his thoughts regarding travel writing, the best cure for jetlag and why you should never fly business class.

Do you think there’s too much travel writing around?

No, because I don’t think there can ever be too much of the encounter with the other. And the nature of the world is constantly changing. It never gets stale and it’s always in need of people thinking about it.

What about the Internet and blogs, social media and Instagram?

It’s nice these are available now. When I wrote (Video Night In Kathmandu in the late ’80s) there was none. If was describing Tibet and the Philippines in this book, I figured that most of my readers barely had a visual sense of what those places looked like, and now thanks to YouTube and many others, most people know what Tibet looks like. There’s no harm with having the surfaces recorded but one doesn’t want surface without the depth. Travel writing is a good way of ensuring that there’s some depth beneath the flood of images. But sometimes, I do worry that images will replace thoughts and we would be the loser then.

Do you think of your books as travel guides?

Not as guides, actually. I think anyone who’d follow my travel-related pieces would end up in the wrong place and angry and disappointed. (Laughs) When I was in graduate school 32 years ago, I wrote parts of several different guidebooks and the one thing it taught me was never to trust a guidebook. (Laughs) I wouldn’t trust me to tell the reader where to stay or eat because I wasn’t really paying much attention. I’m an anti-guidebook writer.

What’s your default state of mind when you’re travelling?

I probably always am in that travel writing mode. And a part of me can’t switch off and say this is just a holiday. I don’t like taking it easy. Like in coming to Singapore, the one thing I don’t want to do is relax and sit by the pool and have a good time. I just want to walk and walk. And I also find that every now and then, when I take my wife or mother for holidays, I tell myself this is a pure holiday. And as soon as I do, I turn all my senses to off and actually don’t have a good time. I sleepwalk through this, I sit in a hotel room watching CNN and I realise when I come back that I really haven’t been anywhere at all. I haven’t been stimulated, challenged or moved. So even when I took my wife to Hawaii a few months ago, I deliberately made it an assignment for myself to do a piece. As soon as I do that, I’m taking in much more.

Travel has been equated with discovery. Do we need to rethink this?

Discovery is just as alive as ever. There’s never a time when we know it all. (But) for me, the other entry point is to look at travel as challenge. I’ve always lived in relatively comfortable societies — no war, no poverty — a privileged gated community in England or America or Japan. And probably 94 per cent of my neighbours on the planet live in different circumstances. So I think it’s really important to see what humanity is facing. I try to go to places as different as possible to California or Japan. If a Singaporean would ask me where to go for a holiday, I’d say Phnom Penh or Lhasa or Hanoi or Beirut or Kathmandu — somewhere difficult and different. And maybe they would get as much from it or more than say, Paris or Venice or Hawaii.

Do you think there’s anything else left to see that hasn’t been seen?

I used to love to go to Burma in the 1980s and if I were to go to Burma next year, I’d think there’d be a huge amount of discovery at every point — if only because maybe Starbucks is arriving there or Godiva chocolate, or things that are as miraculous to the Burmese as if, say, the Shwedagon Pagoda suddenly arrived in the middle of Los Angeles or New York and we would be stunned by it. Exoticism really likes in the eyes of the beholder.

Where does one get the best glimpse of a destination?

The streets itself. A city should define itself by its streets more than its statistics. I love sports, so wherever I go, I’d often go to a baseball or soccer game or whatever, because it shows me people at their most uninhibited and passionate. And actually for me, it’s often the time of day. For many, many years, every time I flew from California to Japan, because the first week I’d be jet-lagged, I would always spend my first week in an Asian country and just walk through the night. I used to walk down Orchard Road at two or three in the morning. And of course see a different kind of Singapore.

Any cardinal rules of travel?

Leave your assumptions at home. Never, never fly business class — because it’s a scam! I don’t drink, I don’t eat very much, I’m fairly small and somewhere like Singapore Airlines has more than enough movies on economy… And also, if you choose economy class on a good airline, it’s much better than business class in a poor airline.

My main principle of travel is try and not to exclude any kind of experience. If I travel somewhere I would often want to stay for some time in really cheap guest house, for some time in a really nice hotel, and for some time, in the middle. Because there are some who only stay at 5-star hotels and they’re really screening out a lot. And a lot of backpackers who only stay in Khaosan Road and they’re screening out the other treasures of Bangkok. I try to remain mobile.