I started travelling in utero - my parents were diplomats, and although I'm Canadian I was born in Spain. When I was very young we moved to Portugal, then Alaska, British Columbia, Ottowa, Costa Rica then France, Mexico, Paris ... Change became a habit and I've travelled constantly ever since.
In my early twenties I travelled for the sake of it - it really didn't matter where I went. One of my most memorable trips was to Turkey. It's a crossroads of civilisations; Ararat is supposedly where Noah's Ark landed, Santa Claus was in fact a Turkish bishop, Greek philosophy began here, Troy was in Turkey. It's an amazing country. The second most amazing country I've been to - after India.
In my early thirties that kind of travel felt too much like drifting and so I started travelling with a purpose, such as research. I knew India was cheap, varied and beautiful and I thought I could settle for a while to write a novel, but that novel fizzled out. I was 32 or 33 and felt I'd done nothing with my life. Then I thought of Life of Pi and found a reason to be there. The rest of my trip was broadly for research. I had a reason to go into Hindu Temples, to spend days on end in Indian zoos, to listen to how people spoke, to observe things and spend time in certain places.
When I'm writing I need to be in a stable setting. After the research in India I started Life of Pi in France and wrote most of it in Montreal. For my next novel I'm thinking about settling in the Azores to write - they're supposed to be beautiful islands and not too touristy.
Pi has taken me now to roughly 20 countries. We were invited to a literary festival in Iceland for a week, which was great. We spent time in Reykjavik, borrowed my publisher's car and went to see a volcano and explore the island. I've been to Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, Italy, Greece, Mexico, US, Canada. Sometimes it's ridiculous: I flew from Montreal to Greece, had 36 hours in Greece then flew to New York. That's a different kind of travel altogether - that's jet setting, and the country really is a backdrop. It was exhausting but thrilling.
The foreign wears you down eventually and I have to go back to Canada occasionally. It's the little things you miss: the accents, the attitudes. And I miss the variety of Canadian weather. When it's winter, it's really winter. When it's summer, it's hot and humid. Everything is green in spring and the leaves are a gorgeous colour in autumn. I spent a year in Mexico City once and it was 20C every day. It's ideal, but after a year it becomes boring and I missed the Canadian seasons.
My next novel will broadly speaking come from the Holocaust. I spent New Year's Eve 2002, right after winning the Booker Prize, in a hostel in the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz was the German name). I spent New Year's Day - this dazzlingly brilliant, but stunningly cold day - in Auschwitz which was covered with snow and was a beautiful, horrible place. I was trying to extract something I could write about, and I'll probably go back to Poland and maybe Israel to do more research.
You have to open your mind when you travel. I've met people who have travelled widely but it's clearly changed nothing. Travel for them has been nothing more than a movie in front of their eyes. For me, solitary travel is the pure travel experience, but there are as many ways of travelling as ways of eating; as many trips as there are foods.
· Yann Martel's collection of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (Canongate, £9.99), is out now.
