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

by Rolf Potts

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.

no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.

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.

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

Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but 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.”

“Vagabonding,” as Ed Buryn bluntly put it forty years ago, “is not for comfort hounds, sophomoric misanthropes or poolside faint-hearts, whose thin convictions won’t stand up to the problems that come along.”

On a basic level, there are three general methods to simplifying your life: stopping expansion, reining in your routine, and reducing clutter.

The discoveries that come with travel, of course, have long been considered the purest form of education a person can acquire. “The world is a book,” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page.”

The gift of the information age, after all, is knowing your options—not your destiny—and those who plan their travels with the idea of eliminating all uncertainty and unpredictability are missing out on the whole point of leaving home in the first place.

Fortunately, you don’t ever need a really good reason to go anywhere; rather, go to a place for whatever happens when you get there. And as cheeky as that may sound, it’s the way vagabonding usually works.

Whatever the original motivation for going someplace, remember that you’ll rarely get what you expect when you go there—and this is almost always a good thing.

Once you’ve chosen a vagabonding region, don’t get too ambitious just yet about what you want to do there. For all you’ve studied and anticipated about a place, you’ll find twenty times more after a few days of experiencing it.

Similarly, don’t plan to “do” Central America in six weeks; you’ll have a much more vivid experience if you limit yourself to a country or two.

And—even if you have two years to play with—trying to cram five continents into a single vagabonding stint is a sure path to jadedness and exhaustion.

Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: 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 th...

resist the temptation to purchase your specifics in advance. Indeed, as wonderful as that Ugandan safari looks in the promotional literature of a Dallas-based travel company, shopping for the same experience when you arrive in Africa will be infinitely less expensive—...

The same goes for air travel. Despite how tempting a discounted “around-the-world” flight ticket might seem, it’s generally better to buy a one-way ticket to your first destinatio...

With this in mind, pack a dozen or so extra visa-sized photos of yourself, just to avoid the hassle of getting mug shots overseas.

Thus, the biggest favor you can do for yourself when trying to decide what to bring is to buy—and this is no joke—a very small travel bag.

This small pack, of course, will allow you only the minimum: a guidebook, a pair of sandals, standard hygiene items, a few relevant medicines (including sunscreen), disposable earplugs (for those inevitable noisy environments), and some small gift items for your future hosts and friends. Add a few changes of simple, functional clothes and one somewhat nice outfit for customs checks and social occasions. Toss in a small flashlight, a decent pair of sunglasses, a day pack (for carrying smaller items when you leave your hotel or guesthouse), and your smartphone. And then—looking down to make sure you have a sturdy pair of boots or walking shoes on your feet—close the bag and affix a small, strong padlock.

“Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain,” wrote Dhammapada scholar Eknath Easwaran, “are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm—which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.” Vagabonding is not Nirvana, of course, but the egg analogy can still apply. In leaving behind the routines and assumptions of home—in taking that resolute first step into the world—you’ll find yourself entering a much larger and less constrictive paradigm.

In the planning stages of your travels, this notion might seem daunting. But once you take the plunge and get out on the road, you’ll quickly find yourself giddy at how easy and thrilling it all is. Normal experiences (such as ordering food or taking a bus) will suddenly seem extraordinary and full of possibility.

Life on the road, you’ll soon discover, is far less complicated than what you knew back home—yet intriguingly more complex.

If there’s one key concept to remember amid the excitement of your first days on the road, it’s this: Slow down. Just to underscore the importance of this concept, I’ll state it again: slow…down.

Stay organized and interested, but don’t keep a “things to do” list. Watch and listen to your environment. Take pleasure in small details and differences. Look more and analyze less; take things as they come. Practice your flexibility and patience—and don’t decide in advance how long you’ll stay in one place or another.

And, as much as anything, you’ll find yourself abuzz with the peculiar feeling that you can choose to go in any direction (literally and figuratively) at any given moment.

Early on, of course, you’re bound to make travel mistakes. Dubious merchants may swindle you, unfamiliarity with cultural customs may cause you to offend people, and you’ll often find yourself wandering lost through strange surroundings. Some travelers go to great pains to avoid these neophyte blunders, but they’re actually an important part of the learning experience. As the Koran says, “Did you think you should enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?”

“One of the essential skills for a traveler,” noted journalist John Flinn, “is the ability to make a rather extravagant fool of oneself.”

The practice of soulful travel is to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life, the way to find the essence of every place, every day: in the markets, small chapels, out-of-the-way parks, craft shops. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil of tourism.

“The anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler,” wrote Fussell in Abroad. “His motive is not inquiry but self-protection and vanity.” Ostentatiously dressing in local fashions, deliberately not carrying a camera, and “sedulously avoiding the standard sights,” the antitourist doesn’t have much integrity or agenda beyond his self-conscious decision to stand apart from other tourists.

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

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

If there’s a rule of thumb for conscientiously spending money on the road, it’s to watch what the locals do.

Useful starting phrases include hello; please and thank you; yes and no; the numbers one to ten, plus one hundred and one thousand; How much?; Where is it?; and No problem! Additional useful words to learn are those for hotel, bus station, restaurant, toilet, good, bad, and beer. Any local idioms and slang you can pick up will delight the locals (so long as you aren’t learning something profane or offensive). And, of course, improvised sign language and face pulling can go a long way toward getting your point across.

so be ready to laugh along!

It's The most important part in ife always have joy and laug along. Love laugh share have fun

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.

“We know from the first step,” wrote Tim Cahill, “that travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling—of the rooster’s head in the soup, of the raggedy edge of unfocused dread, of that cliff face that draws us willy-nilly to its lip and forces us to peer into the void.”

“Explore your own higher latitudes,” wrote Thoreau in Walden. “Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”

With this is mind, you should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure. Learn to treasure your worst experiences as gripping (if stressful) new chapters in the epic novel that is your life.

“Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences,” wrote Bertrand Russell. “They say to themselves, for example, ‘So this is what an earthquake is like,’ and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.”

Seeking a more nuanced definition of adventure can lead to unforgettably rich travel experiences. Can’t run with the bulls? Can’t cross the Sahara? Try doing something that you may find every bit as daunting: Making friends out of strangers, connecting with the locals instead. Open your mind to the possibilities of a new connection. You’ll be rewarded with a much deeper perspective of the culture you came so far to experience, and long after the adventurers are nursing their sunburns and snake bites, you’ll have friends for a lifetime and threads of their culture woven into your own life’s tapestry.

“The traveler sees what he sees,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in the 1920s, “the tourist sees what he has come to see.”

If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband is more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world so much as giving you an opportunity to see hers. If a Paraguayan barber insists that dictatorship is superior to democracy, you might just learn something by putting yourself in his shoes and hearing him out.

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.”

In knowing that so many destinations were cheaply accessible at that very moment, I suddenly feared I would never again get the chance to see them. Travel, I was beginning to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice.

Ultimately, I learned to stop looking at my journey as one final, apocalyptic chance to see the world, and started enjoying it on its own, esoteric terms.

I still haven’t been to Australia or much of Africa, I might add—but my explorations in Asia gave me the patience and confidence to know that I will see those places in time.

And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

If travel truly is in the journey and not the destination, if travel really is an attitude of awareness and openness to new things, then any moment can be considered travel.