Rolf Potts’ website states that he “has reported from more than sixty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, Slate.com, Outside, the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian (U.K.), Sports Illustrated, National Public Radio, and the Travel Channel. His adventures have taken him across six continents, and include piloting a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong, hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, traversing Israel on foot, bicycling across Burma, driving a Land Rover across South America, and traveling around the world for six weeks with no luggage or bags of any kind.”
I read Potts’ 2003 classic “Vagabonding” in just under 2 mornings. Here are some of the inspirational passages that might prompt one to consider long term travel:
- For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead—out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
- What nobody bothered to point out, of course, is that purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren’t looking into the mirror. All that is really sold is the romantic notion of a simpler life, and—just as no amount of turning your head or flicking your eyes will allow you to unselfconsciously see yourself in the looking glass—no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home. Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
- As much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.
- We choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
- From all your herds, a cup or two of milk, From all your granaries, a loaf of bread, In all your palace, only half a bed: Can man use more? And do you own the rest?
- This notion—the notion that “riches” don’t necessarily make you wealthy—is as old as society itself. The ancient Hindu Upanishads refer disdainfully to “that chain of possessions wherewith men bind themselves, and beneath which they sink”; ancient Hebrew scriptures declare that “whoever loves money never has money enough.” Jesus noted that it’s pointless for a man to “gain the whole world, yet lose his very self,” and the Buddha whimsically pointed out that seeking happiness in one’s material desires is as absurd as “suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.”
- As Laurel Lee wryly observed in Godspeed, “Cities are full of those who have been caught in monthly payments for avocado green furniture sets.” Thus, if at all possible, don’t let avocado green furniture sets (or any other seemingly innocuous indulgence) dictate the course of your life by forcing you into ongoing cycles of production and consumption.
- “The world is a book,” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page.”
- The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home – and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.
- “You can read everything there is in the world about a place, but there is no substitute for smelling it!”
- Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking.
- Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.
- I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. —ROBERT M. PIRSIG, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE
- “What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry.”
- Try to live it and experience it, not just gather stories for later.
- Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds.
- People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. Or, to paraphrase a joke from Seinfeld, many ethno-tourists aren’t traveling the world to interact with exotic people—they’re traveling the world to interact with exotic clothing.
- There’s nothing inherently wrong with extreme sports and organized expeditions, of course, but real adventure is not something that can be itemized in glossy brochures or sports magazines. In fact, having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment— not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one. Which experience, for example, will require more innovation and persistence: buying into a guided expedition up some Andean peak (where you can eat freeze-dried turkey tetrazzini along the way and call your family via satellite phone from the summit) or lingering for a few weeks in some Bolivian village to learn a local craft without fully knowing the local language?Indeed, what is the adventure in traveling such great distances and achieving such daring acts if (like any workaday consumer) you choose your experience in advance and approach it with specific expectations? The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.
- Isabelle Eberhardt, who explored North Africa in the nineteenth century, unapologetically summed up the logic that fired these pioneering women vagabonders: “The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.”
- “The traveler sees what he sees,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in the 1920s, “the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
- Thomas Merton retorted when asked if he’d seen the “real Asia” during his trip to India, “It’s all real as far as I can see.”
- Vagabonding is less like a getaway caper than a patient kind of aimlessness—quite similar, in fact, to what the Australian Aborigines call “walkabout.” Culturally, the walkabout ritual is when Aborigines leave their work for a time and return to their native lifestyle in the outback. On a broader and more mythical level, however, walkabout acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his or her true self. To correct this, one merely leaves behind all possessions (except for survival essentials) and starts walking. What’s intriguing about walkabout is that there’s no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.
- Listen: we are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different! —KURT VONNEGUT, TIMEQUAKE
- While wandering, you experience a mysteriously organic process. It’s like a tree growing. It doesn’t know where it’s growing next. A branch may grow this way and then another way. When you look back, you’ll see that this will have been an organic development. – Joseph Campbell
- We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. —PICO IYER, “WHY WE TRAVEL”
- People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE POWER OF MYTH
- Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by simple elimination: Without all the rituals, routines, and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you’re forced to look for meaning within yourself.
- Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you “find yourself,” it’s because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind—it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true Self.