Speedy Boarding with M. E. Rothwell
M. E. Rothwell talks ancient polymaths, football-themed hotels and dodgy headgear
Welcome back to Speedy Boarding, a bi-weekly series on Not That You Asked that is great news for those of you who are getting sick of me. That’s because it’s a series where I ask some of my favourite writers on Substack eight quick-ish questions about travel. So, the vast majority of the words you’re about to read weren’t written by me but by someone else.
This week the questions are being answered by a man who is the head honcho at not one, but two publications.
writes where he whisks readers off on journeys to faraway lands and cultures, and , a community Substack where writers share the books that made them who they are today.Both publications are well worth your time, M. E. Rothwell is doing really exciting things on Substack.
Now, let’s get to the questions.
Where is the best place you’ve ever been and why?
I think I have to say the Serengeti. There is something about the African plains: the great swathes of straw-yellow savannah, the splayed branches of a lonely Acacia, the wandering beasts of the bush; they slowly draw you into the unshakeable feeling that you’ve arrived home.
Where is the place you most want to visit?
This is a tough question as it changes all the time, but recently I’ve been dreaming of crisscrossing the old Silk Roads of central Asia. I’d love to see the Shah-i-Zinda of Samarkand, the bazaars of Bukhara, and the steppe grassland that covers much of the area between the Black Sea and Beijing.
Who’s your dream travel companion?
Alive or dead? If dead is permitted, I’d say Ptolemy, the ancient Alexandrian polymath. I’d love to travel across all the terrain he mapped, remarkably accurately for his time, with him, so we could discuss all the ancient myth and legend he associated with each place.
If my companion has to be living, I’d quite like to travel with the travel writer Sophy Roberts. She manages to combine the stories of her travels in a particular place with a deep understanding of its literary history. She’s an incredible storyteller, and I’d love to watch her in action, putting the bones of a book or an article together as we travel.
Great news! I’m going to buy you a hat. The catch is that you have to wear this hat on every future travel trip at all times. What kind of hat would you like?
Back when I lived in Zambia, I visited Victoria Falls – the largest waterfall in the world. For some reason that I can’t explain, I decided that would be the day I would wear a propeller hat that my brother had bought me as a joke gift. All the photos I have of myself standing next to one of the natural wonders of the world, I’m wearing this preposterous hat. I’d choose that in homage to the idiocy of my younger self.
Where is the place you never want to go back to?
Perhaps the Manchester City Hotel in Tanzania. Back in 2017, I was working all across East Africa. For one particular trip, I had to travel from Kigali in Rwanda to Kigoma in Tanzania. This was an overland trip that not many people apart from truckers make, and involved passing through an area that I can only describe as the most rural of rural Tanzania. There were no paved roads, no phone signal, and very few English speakers.
Without any means of contacting the outside world, and probably the only foreigner for hundreds of miles around, I had to stop at the Man City Hotel for a night en-route, as the journey was too long to make in a single day. The room was a corrugated iron box built on top of concrete on the roadside, beyond which stretched seemingly endless African bush. The bed was partially collapsed and I’d rather not mention the toilet situation. It was an experience that I’m glad I had, but one I perhaps don’t need to repeat.
You’ve been given a million pounds to live your best life in one destination for a year. The problem is - you’re trapped there and can’t leave. Where would you go?
The Moon. Imagine spending a whole year on another world, staring back at the Earth, and the darkness of the cosmos beyond. I’d give up ever visiting anywhere else for the rest of my life in exchange for visiting the moon, even for a short while.
How do you decide where to visit next?
My girlfriend and I are digital nomads (I hate this term, it sounds so pretentious!) and we’ve been travelling around Europe for the last 18 months or so. When we come to choose our next host city, we essentially need to find somewhere we can both agree on, will have what we need to work online (fast Wi-Fi, local amenities etc.), is not too far out of the UK time zone, and enough to do to keep us occupied and not murder one another. Apologies, this is quite a boring, pragmatic answer.
And finally, what’s the one thing you never leave home without when travelling?
My journal. As Bruce Chatwin said, “to lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”
A huge thanks to
for agreeing to be part of Speedy Boarding. If you liked this post please do consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Not That You Asked. Paid subscribers get two free travel guides a month for just £4.99, which is way cheaper than Netflix. If you’d like to support my work there’s a button in the top right corner that will either say subscribe, or upgrade.The next Speedy Boarding will drop on the 8th of February, next up is
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Thanks for having me, Tom! Hope it’s at least mildly interesting to your readers
It’s almost as if you knew that one day you’d be asked a very specific hypothetical question about traveling with a silly hat...