Key Takeaways
- When I first started thinking about traveling the world, I bought a book most of you have probably heard of: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art
- It was a treatise on the personal and world benefits of travel, especially long-term travel. That book put into words all the thoughts and feelings I
- In my view, if long-term travel and backpacking had a bible, this would be it. No book has ever come as close to expressing the philosophy of long-ter
When I first started thinking about traveling the world, I bought a book most of you have probably heard of: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts.
It was a treatise on the personal and world benefits of travel, especially long-term travel. That book put into words all the thoughts and feelings I had about travel at the time and helped ease a lot of the fears I had about my decision to quit my job and travel the world.
In my view, if long-term travel and backpacking had a bible, this would be it. No book has ever come as close to expressing the philosophy of long-term travel as this one. I still have my original copy and occasionally thumb through chapters.
Since starting this website, Rolf and I have become friends (it’s cool being friends with someone whose words changed your life) and this month marks the tenth anniversary of his book.
Rolf is re-releasing the book in an audio format (it’s also the first book in the Tim Ferriss Book Club) and, to celebrate the book turning ten, I wanted to bring Rolf back on the site to talk about the fine art of vagabonding (I first interviewed him in 2009).
Route for Less: O.K., first question: How do you feel that your baby is ten years old? What kind of emotions does that make you feel? Rolf Potts: It feels great. Especially when, so far as I can tell, more people are reading it ten years on than did when it first came out. I had high hopes when the book debuted, but the response continues to exceed my expectations.
How do you feel about creating a book that people view as the bible of long-term travel? It’s humbling. I remember all those months I spent alone in a room in southern Thailand, putting the book together sentence by sentence. In that situation it’s hard to know what will come of your labors, even if it feels like you’re creating something special.
The initial response to the book was encouraging, especially considering that it came out around the time the U.S. military was invading Iraq and most news outlets were shying away from travel. It wasn’t until a couple of years after the book’s debut, when vagabonders started telling me about pirated copies for sale in the backpacker ghettos of Vietnam, that I knew it had caught on at a grassroots level.
When I first interviewed you in 2009, my site wasn’t even a year old and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When you started writing this book, did you have any idea it would take you in the direction it has? I think it’s hard to ever really know where you’re headed when you undertake a project like that. When I was first approached about writing the book I didn’t have grand ambitions to become a travel guru. The travel stories I’d been writing for Salon were reportorial and narrative, and rarely offered much in the way of travel advice.
But Salon readers kept emailing and asking me how I was able to keep traveling for so long, and the suggestions I posted on my website tended to be philosophical in nature. At the time it didn’t occur to me to post budgeting strategies or packing tips, since I figured readers could figure that out on their own.
The most important motivating factors in my long-term travel career had been existential ones — factors that were rooted in cultivating a mindset that made vagabonding possible — so that’s what I detailed on my website, and that’s what caught the attention of an editor at Random House.
Once I began writing Vagabonding the book took on a broad practical component, but its philosophical core is what resonated most with readers.
How did the success of the book shape your desires for being a writer? And is it hard to live up to the expectations such a big first book can create? Because from the outset I was more vested in reportorial-narrative travel writing, Vagabonding has ended up being a nice complement to the rest of my career. In the introduction chapter of the book, I poke fun at the idea of creating a “Vagabonding publishing empire,” before going on to declare that I planned to write the book in such a way that it didn’t require sequels or spinoffs.
So it’s been nice not to have to compete against myself. My second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, won lots of awards, but it hasn’t sold nearly as many copies as Vagabonding — and that makes sense, because it’s a more specialized, narrative book, less given to broad advice.
Vagabonding is for anyone who’s ever dreamed of travel, whereas the Marco Polo book has been embraced by a more specialized readership, one that is already interested in travel and travel writing.
So, while my public speaking gigs still tend to focus on vagabonding, I’ve taken my creative life in new directions. Instead of trying to live up to in-the-box expectations, I’ve taken on video and graphic narrative projects, I’ve done long-form reportage for Sports Illustrated, I’ve taught writing at Penn and Yale and the Paris American Academy.
I may never write a book that proves as popular as Vagabonding, but I’d reckon that allows me to follow my heart and do what interests me rather than try to re-create it.
