Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

by Rolf Potts

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. With this kind of mind-set, it’s no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich.

Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure.

Muir called these folks the “time-poor”—people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness.

We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.

Keeping this in mind, don’t worry that your extended travels might leave you with a “gap” on your résumé. Rather, you should enthusiastically and unapologetically include your vagabonding experience on your résumé when you return.

The short answer to this concern is that traveling around the world is statistically no more dangerous than traveling across your hometown.

Despite several millennia of such warnings, however, there is still an overwhelming social compulsion—an insanity of consensus, if you will—to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well. And, in spite of the fact that America is famous for its unhappy rich people, most of us remain convinced that just a little more money will set life right. In this way, the messianic metaphor of modern life becomes the lottery—that outside chance that the right odds will come together to liberate us from financial worries once and for all.

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.

Indeed, the surest way to miss out on the genuine experience of a foreign place—the psychic equivalent of trapping yourself back at home—is to obsessively check your e-mail and social media feeds as you travel from place to place.

All of my ensuing vagabonding journeys, however, have been solo—which I’ve found is a great way to immerse myself in my surroundings.

I remember a conversation with a college professor on the train to Sicily, discussing the need to travel. He said, “You can read everything there is in the world about a place, but there is no substitute for smelling it!” He was right! So make plans, but be happy to abandon them, if need be. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” I like that. Do as much research before leaving as possible, but certainly don’t let fears keep you away. On a given day, Los Angeles is far more dangerous than anyplace I’ve traveled. Take normal precautions, use common sense if you have any, and you’ll be fine. I’ve eaten street food everywhere I’ve gone, and the only time I’ve ever gotten food poisoning was at a McDonald’s in my hometown (no kidding). —BILL WOLFER, 60, MUSICIAN, CALIFORNIA

Over the years, family and friends have said to me, “I’m living vicariously through you.” Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.

you’ll start your travels by doing the things that you dreamed about when you were still planning your travels: You will stand in awe of the ancients at places like Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, and Machu Picchu; you’ll wander amazed through the exhibits of the Smithsonian, the Louvre, or the Hermitage; you’ll stare in reverence at sunrise over the African Serengeti, sunset on the Australian outback, or high noon in the steamy jungles of Borneo; you’ll listen, rapt, to the otherworldly whistle of Mongolian throat singers, stare in amazement at the swirl of Turkish Sufis, or stomp along madly to Irish drinking songs. You will shop for Mayan weavings in the markets of Chichicastenango; haggle for damask in the souks of Damascus, or bargain for brocade in the merchant alleyways of Varanasi. You will bungee-jump into the canyons of New Zealand, climb the slopes of Kilimanjaro, or windsurf the Sea of Galilee. You will have impassioned one-week love affairs (with natives and fellow travelers alike) along the Adriatic coast of Croatia, the cobbled streets of Havana, or the neon avenues of Tokyo. You will sip cappuccino in the cafés of the Italian Riviera, eat fresh fruit in the Sri Lankan highlands, or stare blissfully into space along the clean blue waters of the Costa Rican coast. You will quaff ouzo all day on the islands of Greece, dance to techno all night on the shores of Goa, or lose a week’s sleep in the Carnival madness of Rio de Janeiro.

In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.

“We see as we are,” said the Buddha, and rarely is this quite so evident as when we travel.

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“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness, and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem.

What if I get tired of meeting so many people as I travel? If you’ve had your fill of local company, take a break. Hang out with other travelers, or bury your nose in a book for a while. Meeting the locals can be rewarding, but that doesn’t mean you have to compulsively seek friendships wherever you go. Let things happen. Keep your human interactions on a direct, person-to-person level, and don’t “acquire” these experiences like souvenirs. Even if you find yourself in a positively extraordinary social situation (be it breakfast with Bollywood film stars, lunch with Congolese guerrillas, or dinner with Papuan subsistence hunters), try to keep yourself in the moment instead of thinking about what kind of story it will make when you get home.

Know that enthusiasm and wonder are your allies on the road; suspicion and anxiety will siphon joy. People are mostly good everywhere, and the world will dazzle and astonish you. Traveling solo is one of life’s most liberating, empowering, enriching acts. So go. Book a ticket. You won’t regret it.

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.

There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

These are the kinds of humble choices—each of them as bold as bungee jumping—that lead not only to new discoveries but to an uncommon feeling of hard-won joy.

Adventure is wherever you allow it to find you—and the first step of any exploration is to discover its potential within yourself.

you’ll have friends for a lifetime and threads of their culture woven into your own life’s tapestry.

The thing is, few of us ever “are” where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of a moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere—obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations. At home, this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; on the road, it’s a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something.

Thus, as the initial days of your travel experience stretch into weeks and months, you should let go of your pretrip stereotypes and exchange two-dimensional expectations for living people, living places, and living life. This process is the only way to break through the static postcard of fantasy and emerge into the intense beauty of the real. In this way, “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

“While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past,” he wrote in Tristes Tropiques, “I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment…. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.”

Once you have learned the basics, though, it becomes clear that having less work is easy. It’s filling the void with more life that is hard. Finding excitement, as it turns out, takes more thought than simple workaholism. But don’t fret. That’s where all the rewards are.

In this way, you’ll find that you’re not just exploring new places but weaving a tapestry of life experience that is much richer and more intricate than you could ever have imagined while you were still at home.