Dedicated overland traveller Michael Hodson’s blog Go See Write is one of the most popular and established in the travel blogging firnament.With his gentlemanly southern drawl, erudite and forthright opinions and hankering for a crazy travel challenge, Michael also cuts one of the more charismatic figures in the blogosphere.
Michael’s well known for his regular Lucky 13 Questions feature, in which he entertainingly interviews other bloggers and travellers on everything from their favourite James Bond film to the most embarassing artist on their I-pod, so we thought we’d turn the tables on him for a change and quiz the quizmaster himself.
1. Tell us a bit about yourself & your blog
I was an attorney in Northwest Arkansas for about ten years before I shut everything down and started out on a quest to circle the globe without getting on an airplane in late 2008. Sixteen months, six continents, forty-four countries and countless buses, trains, cars, boats and freighters later, I made it. Now I am a permanent traveler, writer, photographer and social media consultant having the time of my life on the road, usually without ever leaving the ground.
I tweet at www.twitter.com/#!/GoSeeWrite
My Facebook Fan page is at www.facebook.com/GoSeeWrite
And I am a recent Pinterest addict at pinterest.com/michaelshodson/
2. You’ve been travelling continually for 4 years now. When did your ‘eureka moment’ come, when you realised you could travel full time and leave your old life behind?
I’m not sure there was a eureka moment exactly, more like a combination of things. When I got home, I still had some money left in the bank, so that helped. I also had less than zero desire to go back and do any sort of normal work (though my solo law practice wasn’t exactly a 9 to 5 work grind). There was also a ton of travel I still wanted to do.
And to be blunt, there wasn’t much left at home for me. One of the sad realities of taking off on a very long trip like mine is that most of your friends back home move on with their lives and you really aren’t part of that anymore. I love my family and the few really good friends I have back home, but they are spread out all over the place. There isn’t any place back in the States that feels like home for me anymore.
3. What is it about overland travel that you love?
The size of the Earth. It is immense. I hate being one of those people that says inane stuff like, “until you do what I did, you just won’t understand,” but there is a basic truth in this case. Until you do some overland travel over a good portion of the planet, you simply can’t have a full comprehension of how big this rock we live on is. Every time I do a few weeks of overland travel, I just have that same thought running over and over again in my head. That’s either early onset dementia or something really important. Most days, I think it’s the latter.
4. What’s your favourite train journey?
I don’t know if I have a true top favorite, but right up there near the top of my list was the train from Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia to Dar es Saleem, Tanzania. The trip is supposed to take 48 hours and get you into Dar in time to catch the last ferry to Zanzibar, but like most things in Africa, reliability is not the primary reason you take this train. My trip took about 55 hours and we missed the ferry, but it was no big deal and it was a wonderful journey.
The train stops in various small villages along the way to allow people on the train to buy food. The stops are long enough where you can hop off the train and get mobbed by dozens and dozens of kids who want you to take their photo. The route also goes through the largest animal reserve in Tanzania (Selous Game Reserve, over 50,000 square kilometers) and you will be sitting in the bar car sipping on a lukewarm beer when you look out the window and see herds of elephant or giraffe. It is a unique journey and as I sit here right now on the south coast of Spain typing this in a pretty idyllic location, I want to be back there right now.
5. Strangest person you’ve met – or encounter you’ve had – on a train?
Pretty much any Russian guy on any long-haul Russian train. The rumors about bottles and bottles of vodka? They are true. Enough said.
6. Why don’t more bloggers cover train travel, in your opinion?
I’d like to think there are two basic reasons. First, most of the trains in the world are in Europe and a lot of bloggers consider Europe too “boring and easy” so they don’t do enough here. Frankly, I find that attitude particularly thoughtless and ill-conceived, but whatever. As a result though, I think you don’t get a lot of writing about trains because they aren’t overwhelmingly common in large parts of the world.
Secondly, not enough bloggers actually enjoy the act of travel itself. I have an upcoming post on this, but I bet if you polled 100 travel bloggers and asked them if they had an option to never take another mode of transport in their lifetimes, and just be able to magically transport themselves to the final location, that somewhere around 95 or so would take that option. For me, the act of travel is actually the best part of it all. Not so for most of my friends.
7. Who are your favourite travel writers, beyond the bloggodrome?
All my favorite travel writers are outside the blogosphere. I think the writing on the internet, wholly and completely including mine, can’t remotely compare to the great book authors in the travel world. Of those, I simply eat up anything by Pico Iyer, Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Tim Cahill, Jan Morris and many others. I always open up (or in my case, Kindle-up) a real book when I want to get inspired by great writing.
8. If you could charter an entire train – or just a carriage on one – anywhere in the world, who would you take with you & where would you go?
I’d take some of the people on the list above, like Pico Iyer, Jan Morris, and Bill Bryson (though not Paul Theroux, who just is transparently a complete ass from his writing — then again, he’s my favorite complete ass writer). Let’s toss in some other great travelers that seem cool, like Michael Palin and Ewen McGregor. And for interesting stories, and for someone to buy the really, really expensive wine to take on the trip, let’s invite Richard Bransen. The route? Let’s charter a classic old-school carriage on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.
9. I know that you’re a big fan of vintage travel poster art, but aesthetics aside, do you think that the ‘golden age of travel’ is behind us or that the best is yet to come?
The Golden Age of Travel is definitely gone. Long gone. For the most part, travel is pretty simple these days. When I read books about travel from the 19th century, or hell even the 1960s or 70s, I am amazed at how easy we have it today. Think about Paul Theroux and his famous (mostly) train trip from London to Toyko in the early 70s that reinvigorated travel literature (Great Railway Bazaar).
No cash machines, no internet, no real quality guidebooks, very few people that spoke English, no iPod or Kindle to keep you entertained, and so much more. To think that was only forty years ago is astonishing to me. Travel is wonderful, amazingly, fulfilling and the only thing I want to do for the next few decades of my life — but anyone thinking that the best of travel, actual traveling, is yet to come is deluding themselves.
10. How did you amass such a huge twitter following?
LOL. A lot of them hate me, so I have no idea why they follow me. I wrote a fairly controversial post at the end of last year about the “New Natural Seven Wonders of the World” where I said that a couple of the choices from the Philippines and Vietnam were horrible, though that wasn’t the brunt of the post. It turns out that those two countries are pretty internet savvy and for some reason a bunch of them followed me. A bunch of them also commented on that post, which was interesting. I’m always glad to have the readers and followers but I doubt any of them pay any attention at all. Then again, I am writing a follow-up post on that New Seven Wonders soon…
11. We loved the first Ultimate Train Challenge and hear that there’s more good stuff to come. Can you tell us what phase two involves?
We are excited about turning the Ultimate Train Challenge into an annual event. I partnered up with a much more organized friend of mine to handle the logistical side and we plan on having out new website up by mid-June. We are going to have an actual race this year and people can choose to go either way — Lisbon to Saigon or Saigon to Lisbon.
I am looking for sponsors to give the winners of that race some great prizes and to make everything interested for those that want to have a slightly more mellow 10,000 kilometer train journey, I am also doing to get some sponsors to give away prizes for things like Best Photo on a Train, Best Video from the Journey, Most Interesting Non-Train Adventure on the way and so forth. Our Facebook fan page is https://www.facebook.com/UltimateTrainChallenge and we will be releasing loads more details in the next few weeks. Everyone is invited, so make plans to do it — we are pointing to October right now, assuming we can get everything organized in the next month.
12. Give us your favourite Southern expression/saying
I don’t understand how people live without using the term ya’ll. Important sidenote, it is actually spelled y’all, but I’ve always typed it ya’ll, so that’s what I go with. It simply is the plural form of you and it perfectly fits a hole in the English language.
A better expression for your readers might be “If you can’t run with the big dogs, don’t get off the porch.”
13. If I met my younger self tomorrow (from, say, 20 years ago) I would tell them that….
Get off your ass and get on the road while you are still young enough to have some of these amazingly cute backpacking girls possibly attracted to you, instead of usually thinking you are the creepy old guy at the end of the bar.
13.5 Since you’re an ex-attorney, can you tell us… – NO MORE QUESTIONS YOUR HONOUR!
My license is currently in the inactive/suspended status, so how about I just close this out by opening up a bottle of wine and lighting a cigar and telling all your readers — if anyone runs into me on the road and mentions they read this article, I’ll buy them a beer. Then again, I am getting old and senile, so make sure you also remind me that I made that offer when you meet me.
The pleasure was all ours Michael! 
