Welcome hobotraveler.com junkies

Railay Beach East
Krabi, Thailand
2.55pm

Welcome hobotraveler.com junkies

Andy Graham of Hobotraveler.com graciously did me a favor and linked back to my blog with this link. He did me a favor because links to my site from a very popular site such as his increase my readership and also my google search hits and thus ad revenue.

I just saw Andy a couple of week ago in Bangkok (Pantip Plaza, technological supermall in Bangkok). We were at his stomping grounds of Khao San Road, kind of his home base, and he told me a lot about it. We also talked a lot about travelling and travel blogs.

I too am a Hobotraveler junkie, and I have been for a number of years. I spent several years whiling away the hours in a cubicle developing software and secretly "planning my escape", as Andy puts it. So I had plenty of time to read Andy's blog and see what he was up to. What I took away from it mostly was that all of my doubts and fears about being able to afford to travel cheaply were answered by various tips of Andy's, from how to get cheap airfares to how to find the cheapest guesthouse. If you really want to travel cheaply you can. So he helped me get out and get going.

Andy has a directness and friendliness that I admire. It must be his Indiana country boy genes. The last thing he told me to do was to write a blog entry about whether I was addicted to travel. Then he went ahead and wrote his own entry pondering whether I was addicted and encouraging me to keep going!

My natural inclination is to duck such a question. I certainly like travel a lot - but I'm not prepared to say I'm addicted. In addition, deep down I am a practical person, and I'm very conscious of what I had to do to finance this spurt of travel. I have also had ideas in the past about how I'd like to earn my living -- possibly a vocation -- and I've pursued these ideas.

This website has been an experiment for me in many ways. First and foremost I wanted to capture my travel in my own way. I wanted to portray it from the perspective of a geographer and perhaps as a social critic -- but I didn't want to try too hard to fit it into an academic framework. I found that there were immediate demands of what people wanted: photos of what I've seen; maps; itineraries; descriptions of places; stories of incidents; and my personal impressions of people and places colored with opinion and how I felt at that particular moment. I've tried to do all of these things -- in essence, throw a little bit more of myself into it and not be a dispassionate third party recording his experiences.

I'm still discovering more things I can do with the website: I just figured out a great way to make maps, for instance. (Railay Beach is Resorty). In short, I'm getting better at creating stuff for this website. And I'm starting to make a little bit of money, but not enough to travel on. So I'd like to keep working on this project, one that I undertook purely because it was something I wanted to do and create.

So am I addicted, Andy? I'll not say that yet. But I am enjoying myself and seeing places and meeting people I never would have met. For now I'm just living in the present, paying attention to the people and places that are around me right now.

Welcome hobotraveler.com junkies