with Rolf Potts

"Travel doesn't start when you walk out the door. Your trip starts the moment you decide to take that trip." - Rolf Potts

Vagabonding - noun. (1) The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, good humor and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes the freedom to travel possible.

There are two types of people: those who live to work, and those who work to live. Then there is Rolf Potts, who lives to travel and to learn. Potts is a veteran shoestring traveler with a decade of wandering the planet under his belt. In his book Vagabonding (Paperback - 224 pages 1st edition December 2002, Villard Books ISBN: 0812992180), Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel, which was once thought to be the sole province of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich.

Vagabonding gives information on such things as financing your travel time, adjusting to life on the road, working and volunteering overseas, and handling travel adversity. More importantly Potts shows that how you spend your time is what counts in life, as opposed to how you spend your money. With the clarity of a wise elder, Potts shows that despite how rich you are in material possessions, 'time is the only source of wealth that you really have." He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Michael McCarthy of The Intentional Traveler.

"I was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas and went to university in Oregon. After finishing college I worked as a landscaper in Seattle for a year, saving up money to travel the United States. A friend and I traveled the country in a Volkswagen van for eight months. I thought I was going to scratch my travel itch and get it out of my system but I just got it itchier.

I never hitchhiked stateside but I've jumped freight trains. We were trying one time to go to Vancouver, BC, from Seattle but none of the trains went north so we ended going to Spokane. We got arrested. It was sort of a three-day adventure, but as Tim Cahill once said: 'Adventure is something that you recall in the comfort of home. It's not actually fun while it happens.' When you're a hobo, you're sort of the scum of the earth. People drive by the rail yards and they look at you and they think: 'This guy is a loser.'

I guess I've always been obsessed with possibility, and the possibilities that the world possesses, and the different directions I can go. I think Jose Ortega y Gasset said: 'The charm and the insolence of youth is that a youth sees himself as potentially anything and because he sees himself as anything potentially, he assumes he is everything actually. And so in choosing, you choose yourself.'

Growing up in a pretty provincial place like Kansas, going to Colorado and Oregon, and then going around the United States made me realize how many options I had in life. Traveling around the world just makes me realize how many other lives can intersect with my own and how much possibility there is in life. At the end, I can only be one thing, I can only choose one route, but my life route can be so much more deep and diverse from traveling. I'm sort of addicted to this idea of 'possibility.' Meeting new people and seeing new places enriches your life in that sense.

My parents were teachers and even though I may have resisted it when I was growing up I've always been into learning, and especially self-motivated learning. I took Spanish classes throughout high school and then I went overseas. I lived in Korea for a couple of years, started to learn the language and I realized that there's a reward for all that work learning another language. Education is a big part of why I travel as well.

That's one thing that I communicated in my book. My book is not about dropping out. Work is important, but make your work serve your interests instead of the other way around.

There's a lot of practical information in my book, a lot of philosophical and inspirational information, but the heart of the book is: 'The most important tool you have as a traveler is your attitude.' And even if you don't know a lot about your destination and your mission, if you have an openness to the things that travel presents you with, then that's the best thing that can happen.

Another idea that's central to my book is the idea that 'time is the only source of wealth that you really have.' How you spend your time is what counts in life, as opposed to how you spend your money. I think that's even biblical; if you read Ecclesiastes, it says: 'What good is wealth if you spend all your time worrying about attending to your wealth?'

I wrote the book in 2001-2002. I'd been living overseas by that point for five or six years but the ideas had been developing in my head ever since I took that trip around the United States in '94. Since '94 I've been keeping notes on everything I read, magazine articles, books. I sort of take it as a matter of personal pride that all the quotes and the ideas in Vagabonding didn't come from a compendium of quotes or an Internet quote page, but from stuff that I've read. And I not only know the quotes but I know the context in which the quotes came about.

You read Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain and he talks about how 'travel is fatal to prejudice and bigotry,' which is a great quote. I've read the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Old Testament, I read the New Testament in the Holy Land. For about three years I kept notes, and all my stories were written, on a tiny palm top. I was that nerd sitting at the table with a little tiny keyboard, transcribing page after page of notes.

When I travel I carry a pocket notebook. I stopped keeping daily diaries because I think when you do that you tend to structure your narrative on a day-by-day basis, but when you're doing a travel story maybe your narrative isn't a daily narrative. If you're always chopping your narrative into day chunks, then you're maybe missing out on the two-week resonance of a certain experience. So I keep notes, details that I might forget, little snippets of conversation.

Instead of writing stories on the same day, I transcribe these notes into a larger spiral notebook, sometimes through memory adding more details when I have more time. Usually when I read a book I'll write the title and a page number and sort of a catch phrase on the bookmark, and then I'll come back and I'll transcribe all the quotes that stood out to me.

I wrote Vagabonding in Thailand in eight months. I had this big sort of wardrobe thing, and on the back of the wardrobe I taped a page for each of the chapters of the book. And then I just sort of plotted it, which ideas are going into what chapter. I wanted to organize the book logically so that it takes people into the mindset of travel. Travel doesn't start when you walk out the door, it starts when you're working, saving your money. You can make a lot of progress, psychically, or with your attitude, before you ever leave home.

When I was working as a landscaper in Seattle before my first trip around the U.S. I can't overemphasize how much energy I got from thinking about what was going to happen to me six months, five months, four months down the line. I was mowing lawns, it was tough, it was very physical work. It was raining all the time, but I was so happy because that labor was earning me my freedom.

The book has done well financially, not earth-shattering. I think I made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list for a week, and the Book Sense bestseller list. It was released during the buildup to the war in Iraq when everybody was sort of scared about the rest of the world but it's been a great word-of-mouth grassroots book. I actually did get some nice press when it came out: USA Today and The Examiner, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. There's been some decent coverage for a mass paperback book. I think it'll have good shelf life too, because it's the kind of book that people will pass to their friends.

I keep the resources in the book up-to-date online so that even if somebody gets a hold of the 2003 edition five years from now they can just go to Vagabonding.net and all the resources will be updated. I've tried to keep that interactive element strong.
These days I'm writing full-time. I can do it because I spend very little money. In Thailand my rent was ninety dollars a month. So if you don't lead an expensive life then you don't need a lot of money to get by. I just interviewed Tim Cahill and he said: 'Look, a 23-year old kid out of business school is going to make more money his first year than I'm going to make on my best year.' And that's true. Travel writing is something you have to do because you love to travel and you love to write, because there is no financial reward. The reward is that you get to spend your time in this wonderful way.

Right now I'm part of the Drive Around the World (DATW) team, but I'm volunteering; this isn't a paid job. Of course I'll make a bit of money off what I write about the trip. I've already lined up a column with Slate.com.

After 9-11, it's been a tough time for me. Editors write back and say: 'This is a great pitch, this is going to be a great story, but we're just not doing Asia stories this year.' All these cool ideas would have been wonderful stories in 1999, when we had the economic surge and people thought Asia was the place to go. Islands Magazine, I did a story about India for them two years ago and they still haven't printed it yet because they've gone more Caribbean, more Hawaiian, since 9-11. It's sort of this big top-heavy trend. I've told people since 9-11or since Bali happened: 'Go to SE Asia, go to India, go to the Middle East, it's a great time to be there. You'll have it all to yourself.'

After DATW I'll probably be doing a fellowship in journalism, which would put me in Washington DC and in Cuba. Then I'll spend time in Kansas with my family. Do I have a home of my own? No, I don't actually have a place of my own to live anywhere. There's a trailer that I stay in that's parked on my sister's property. She and her husband and kids have renovated a farmhouse on eighty acres in northern Kansas, and I have a trailer that I can sleep in. Well, I have some stuff in storage at my parent's place down in south central Kansas too. I guess that's home.

I try to make it clear to readers of Vagabonding that they don't have to be a homeless wandering soul to be a vagabonder. Just because I personally have a vague idea of home, that doesn't mean that's is the ground rule. The fact is, now more than any other time in history, you have people who are uncommonly rootless and that can be a satisfying way to live. There's a 'cultural home.' I could travel, I could live in Asia for 40 years and still be as American as you can find. I'm thinking about going to Veracruz, Mexico, to finish my second book. I don't feel a lot of pressure yet to have a home someplace. Maybe if I have the time and money I'll build a little writer's cabin up in northern Kansas. But even then, I would like that to just be a seasonal home, maybe live there just a few months a year.

My next book is called Marco Polo Didn't Go There. I've been talking about it on my website since before I wrote Vagabonding. It's about my two and a half year travels throughout Asia. The subtitle is going to be something along the lines of A Grand Tour of Sorts Through Lands Formerly Known as the Orient. The Orient isn't place, it's an idea, and it's an old idea at that.

The word 'spirit' or spirituality is tied to travel, and travel can be very spiritual, but it's a hard concept to communicate. You can sort of sound flaky talking about it. I guess there's that old hippie stereotype of the spiritual quest that's really a thinly veiled quest for cheap drugs, but you realize when you travel how small your little corner of the world is. Travel reinforces things, like the teachings of the Buddha about non-attachment and knowing what's really important.

Peter Matthiessen talked about it in The Snow Leopard, and Walt Whitman wrote about it a lot. It's not nirvana. It's not like I'm in this heightened state. It's: 'I am where I am.' Anything good is an ongoing process of learning and relearning and staying true. So in a physical sense, I am where I am because there's no other place to be. You know, there's no other place that's going to be home. I guess everybody finds out where they are through different manners and travel is a great way to do that.

I have an Edward Abbey quote - I think this is in The Journey Home - he says: 'Wherever two human beings are alive together and happy, there is the center of the world.' You out there, brother, sister! You, too, live in the center of the world, no matter where or what you think you are."