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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rolf Potts
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January 5 - January 7, 2020
Avoid compulsive whiners, chronic pessimists, mindless bleeding hearts, and self-conscious hipsters, since these kinds of people (who are surprisingly common along the travel trail) have a way of turning travel into a tiresome farce.
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations.
The problem with marijuana, however, is that it’s the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn’t force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life.
Indeed, just take a modest, nonheisted sum—five grand, say—to a quiet, inexpensive beach in Guatemala, Greece, or Goa and see what happens. In all likelihood, your enthusiasm for sitting around smeared in cocoa butter will run out before your money does.
When I checked into my Khao San Road guesthouse that night, I could hardly sleep. Had I really made the right choice in coming to Southeast Asia? Hadn’t I, after all, always wanted to see Australia? Might Africa have provided a wilder adventure? Didn’t Europe promise more romance?
Once this begins to happen—once you feel yourself getting jaded to the long haul—it’s time to mix your travels up a bit. How you choose to do this will depend on how you’ve already been traveling. If you’ve mainly been visiting cities, for example, perhaps it’s time to hit the countryside. If you’ve been spending most of your time in the backcountry, try a taste of city life. If you’ve been traveling alone, seek out new companions. If you’ve been traveling with a partner, split up for a while. If you haven’t done much recreation yet, rent a kayak, take an open-water scuba course, or learn how
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In Laos, I bought a local fishing boat with some other travelers and drove it down the Mekong River for three adrenaline-filled weeks.
Of all the adventures and challenges that wait on the vagabonding road, the most difficult can be the act of coming home.
As for the practical challenges of “reentry” into your home life (moving in, finding a job, starting a routine), confront them all as new adventures.
Rediscover your work, and do it well. Redeploy your simplicity, and make it pay out in free time. Emulate the best of people who themselves were at home when you met them on your travels. Pinpoint what you learned from them—hospitality, fun, reverence, integrity—and incorporate these things into your own life.
Integrate the deliberate pace and fresh perspective that made your travel experience so vivid, and allow for unstructured time in your day-to-day home schedule. Don’t let the vices you conquered on the road—fear, selfishne...
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But most of all, keep living your life in such a way that allows your dreams room to breathe. Because you never know when you’ll feel the urge to hit the road again.
