Best travel website
seat61.com
My favourite hotel...
Is the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria. Opened in 1909, it was once one of the most famous hotels in the Middle East. For $55 you can sleep in a hotel where Agatha Christie and TE Lawrence stayed. I love the bar - the floor tiles are cracked and stuffing is coming out of the armchairs, but I feel right at home.
My favourite rail journey...
London to Fort William on the Caledonian Sleeper. I love going to sleep on a main line through mundane places like Watford, and waking up in the Highlands doing 30mph behind a diesel, with deer bounding away from the train.
Even the worst rail trips...
Can be fun. I remember being on a filthy Egyptian train from Aswan to Luxor because I couldn't get on the air conditioned express. Schoolchildren peeked round the seat, then crept over and insisted I read their English books to them.
I always take...
A good book and a corkscrew.
I always bring back...
Experiences. I know that sounds trite but I'm appalling at buying souvenirs. Photographs, tickets and passport stamps make better keepsakes.
My most memorable meal...
Was at the Train Bleu restaurant at Paris's Gare de Lyon. The surroundings are sumptuous and the food is incredible. I had the rarest lamb ever - any rarer and we'd have been chasing it down the platform.
My longest rail joyrney...
Was from London to Tokyo. It takes two weeks, via Brussels, Moscow and Vladivostok. It's seven days non-stop from Moscow to Vladivostok, and even I tire of birch forests. On the boat from Vladivostok to Japan, I was the only European, and after the tannoy announcements in Russian they would do them again in English, just for me.
I gave up my job...
In September last year. I worked for the Department for Transport, managing train fares and ticketing. Now I run the website and look after my son. I've written a book about European rail travel and am researching a worldwide version.
I'd love to go...
To central Asia - I've wanted to go since reading Fitzroy Maclean's book Eastern Approaches. The trains are easy (sleeper to Moscow, then to Tashkent and Samarkand), the pain in the neck is the visas.
Going to the Isle of Wight...
At the age of 13, on my own, was my key formative train trip. I'd saved my pocket money, all of £2.73 (I've still got the ticket). My parents thought I was going to my grandparents, but when I returned my mother was too relieved to scold me.
• Mark Smith's book, The Man in Seat 61, is published by Bantam Press at £12.99.
