An Illustrator’s Travel Blog: Interview with Mike Smith
Mike waking up in New ZealandSince TravelBlogs launched in September last year, I’ve had the opportunity to discover many great travel blogs. Without fail, the bloggers behind these blogs have one key characteristic: they are all excellent storytellers.
Mike Smith is up there with the best, but his approach is unusual. A graphic designer and illustrator by trade, Mike decided the best way for him to share his travel tales was by doing what he does best: drawing. His blog, Blogshank, features illustrations he drew while travelling with his girlfriend from London to Singapore and through to New Zealand late last year.
In this interview with TravelBlogs, Mike shares why he decided to blog through illustrations and what the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are. He also tells us more about travelling overland through Europe, Asia and New Zealand.
Using illustrations to document your trip is a really cool idea. Why did you decide to do document your trip with illustrations?
Two reasons really. Firstly, I was always going to do some sketching on my travels, as I enjoy it and do it whenever I can. Secondly, I’ve been doing an illustrated blog since January 2007, when I bought a pocket diary and drew a few idle sketches as well as writing my appointments. For some reason I thought it’d be fun to post them online. Then when my girlfriend and I decided to go on our travels, I was determined to keep it going. I was never going to lug a laptop and scanner around so I photographed the diary pages and emailed them via internet cafes to my brother, who resized and posted them.
So I had my diary which I used as a sketchbook, and I also carried a sketchbook which I used as a diary! This is full of notes and other drawings to remind me of some details. At the moment I’m in the process of typing this up and scanning some illustrations for a separate little web account. This one will have some more practical information in case someone else wants to do the same journey.
What I find interesting about using illustrations to tell the story of your trip is that you’re limited in how much you can depict: for any given day, you can only draw one or two scenes. As a storyteller, do you think this is more of an advantage, or a disadvantage?
I found the most interesting moments were brought out in the things people said, and I tried to grab those.
In some ways it’s an advantage because as you say, I’m limited in what I can describe. This means I can try and cut the fat and make a single point. Otherwise I might be tempted to do what many blogs do, and say ‘and then we did this, and then we saw this, and then we went here…’
On the downside, the way I was doing it, I couldn’t go into the kind of depth that a good writer would, and this has been something that’s been on my mind since I started blogshank. It’s tough to tell a story in pictures without some kind of introductory text. I suppose I used other methods to do the same thing: maps, signs, conversations etc. I found the most interesting moments were brought out in the things people said, and I tried to grab those. Such as the English couple we met in New Zealand who’d been disappointed to find that a restaurant named ‘Punkawallah’ served Indian rather than traditional Maori food! I think exchanges like that can say a lot without one having to spell it out, and this is the key to good writing too, I guess.
There were some long and complicated situations on our trip, such as in Irkutsk the sheer frustration of sitting in a taxi on the way to the station in the pouring rain, caught in the gridlocked one-way system which took us within 100 yards of our destination but the driver refused to let us out, preferring instead to be deaf to our pidgin Russian and take us miles around so that we missed the train and then he wouldn’t take us back… those kinds of situations are quite easy to describe in words but take very much more time and space to draw. In a future trip I would take the trouble to tell this in comic strip style. Artist Craig Thompson has done this by turning his sketchbooks into a graphic travelogue called Carnet de Voyage, about his trip around Europe and Morocco.
On the other hand you don’t have to tell a story — you can just paint a picture. I tried to drop in the odd simple drawing of a scene, which may not have been as ‘correct’ as a photo, but, I hope, has something else. A friend of mine who works in a geological survey company told me that back in the Fifties their expedition team used to include an official diarist/sketcher who would record the data and draw. I’m trying to get hold of these diaries as I’m sure they would tell fascinating stories in a way that a camera can’t.
At the end of the day, in such a tiny format it’s difficult to do subtlety on one page, but I hope that anyone looking at the drawings long term would pick up a sense of how I see the world.
Now a bit more about your trip… What were some of the advantages of travelling overland from London to Singapore, instead of flying from place to place?
There are the obvious things like the landscapes you see and the sheer number and variety of the people you meet. We shared cabins with Dutch, Polish, French, Aussies, Canadians, Kiwis, paralytic Russian businessmen, a Mongolian Lama (or so he said), a load of chatty Chinese who went into hysterics at my attempts at Mandarin and a dour Icelander who poured us the last of his Icelandic vodka. To name a few.
When my girlfriend was little she used to point to a world map on the wall and joke with her dad that they would one day visit Omsk and Tomsk. As we trundled across Siberia it was amazing to think that we were going to those very places on a continuous set of tracks from London. It was, I guessed, about a fifth of the planet’s circumference with the scenery barely changing! I got a sense of the scale of the world and an idea of just how isolated and self-reliant some people are.
From the train, there is also a change so gradual that I barely noticed it: Muscovites turned into Buryats who become Mongolian… While the language flipped completely as we crossed the border, people changed gradually. As we left Ulaan Bataar and headed south, things grew hotter of course, but little by little. Sweating in Kuala Lumpur it was difficult to believe that we were on the same land mass as frosty Tomsk. By contrast, flying into New Zealand was like being teletransported: walking out of Christchurch airport, it was the first time in weeks that my glasses hadn’t steamed up when *leaving* a building!
Because, on the train, you’re not catapulted from one tourist honey-trap to another, it can be a good way of escaping the Lonely Planet bubble and wandering to places that on the surface seem to have no attractions. We could, for instance, have taken a flight from Laos to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but it would only have been so we could say we’d ‘done’ Angkor Wat, and that didn’t seem right.
You travelled by train through Europe, Russia and Asia. Which country had the best trains? What about the worst?
The most cheerful train was probably the sleeper from Beijing to Guilin. We were the only tourists, and it was like being on a school coach to Disneyland. Oddly the most uncomfortable was also Chinese: the double-decker train onward from Guilin: we were stuck at the back on benches next to a reeking toilet with a bunch of yelling, chain-smoking, hacking Chinese.
We spent one night on a German train from Brussels to Berlin, and this was the most luxurious. Only two of us in a second class cabin containing a shower and a piece of complementary soap that made it all the way to Hanoi.
The Russian trains were remarkably punctual, despite travelling perhaps five hundred kilometers between stops. The most annoying thing about them was that they were too bumpy to draw on, so I rushed to the window with my sketchbook every time we reached a station. Hence loads of pictures of guards and food vendors!
Crossing into Belarus it was pretty interesting to be in the carriage as it was lifted into the air while the wheels were changed for the different gauge. Although not so exciting if you forget to use the toilet before they’re locked. The Russian and Chinese trains were also blessed with samovars on every coach — good for tea but it also meant the place soon stank of pot noodles (as well as farting Russians).
Travelling by train from China to HanoiAfter getting to Singapore, you flew across to New Zealand. Why did you decide to go there?
Getting to New Zealand was the original purpose of the trip: we have two sets of friends who have emigrated there — one in Wellington and the other in Greymouth on the South Island. As we’d planned to spend six weeks there, which meant giving up our jobs, we decided we might as well take the scenic route, hence London to Singapore. In fact we’d hoped to catch a container ship from Singapore, but this proved too expensive and we would have been at sea for a month.
Because we stayed with friends, borrowed cars and camped, our stay in New Zealand was relatively ad hoc and untimetabled compared to the first part of the trip. Just for a sense of symmetry we took the famous Greymouth to Christchurch train as our final journey before catching the plane back.
Do you have any future trips planned?
Well, we’re skint now! Luckily however, we live on a boat, so we can move from place to place and it feels like we’re permanently camping.
We have two dogs, and we missed them enormously while we were away, so they’ll come with us on the next trip. Most likely we will buy a van and tour Europe. In Malaysia we met a Fin who promised us the use of his couch, so a trip to his country to see the Northern Lights is most definitely on the cards. Between now and then I still have a diary to scribble in every week. Next time the drawings will be the central point of the journey rather than something I fit in when I’m sitting between trains.
To enjoy more of Mike’s illustrations, check out his blog: Blogshank.
Subscribe to TravelBlogs
Posted by Eric Daams on February 12th, 2008 in Interviews.
