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

by Rolf Potts

Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.

vagabonding is not an ideology, a balm for societal ills, or a token of social status. Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking—and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself.

many media outlets (especially television, magazines, and the Internet) are more in the business of competing for your attention than giving you a balanced picture of the world.

nothing stifles your vagabonding flexibility quite like the compulsive urge to stay connected to your life back home.

At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

I simply find it easier to keep a habit of caution than to continually try to guess when things are and are not safe.

You can try to make vagabonding conform to your fantasies, of course, but this strategy has a way of making travel irrelevant. Indeed, vagabonding is—at its best—a rediscovery of reality itself.

“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.

One of the most prolific travelers in the time of Pax Islamica was Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish rabbi whose twelfth-century adventures took him as far as the western border of China.

The Snow Leopard (thought by many to be the best travel book of the last century),