It’s become every travel blogger’s rite of passage: a review of Rolf Potts’ inimitable travel tome, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
It changed the way I think about travel.
It’s like he wrote the book just for me!
It belongs in every traveler’s pack.
It’s the feel-good hit of the summer! Sorry, this only applies to Julia Roberts movies.
Seriously though: it’s essential reading for all vagabonds and traveling hopefuls alike. For seasoned travelers, it will renew or revive your travel dreams and remind you of why you set out on the long haul in the first place. For desk jockeys and vagabond wannabes [ahem: me], it’ll undoubtedly light a fire under your ass and provide the inspirational jump start you need to shed yourself of material chotchke and set out around the globe with nothing more than a change of underwear and a backpack over your shoulder.
During our recent two-day hiatus in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, K and I stumbled upon an awesome travel book store – as in, a store that only sells travel books. Qua? Given Amazon’s firm stranglehold on every long tail niche market, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised that such a real world book retailer existed.
After letting Vagabonding languish on my Amazon wishlist for over a year, I decided: to hell with the $1.24 I’d be saving by buying it through Amazon and why not support a mom-and-pop shop in a small town that I love in the process? So I bought it.
It’s the best $11.95 I’ve ever spent on anything travel-related, let alone a book. It’s simple, accessible, and will no doubt change the way you think about travel and perhaps a few other facets of life as well. It’s relatively short and can be read cover to cover while you’re kicking around the house some weekend.
From the back cover of the book:
Potts gives the necessary information on:
- financing your travel time
- determining your destination
- adjusting to life on the road
- working and volunteering overseas
- handling travel adversity
- re-assimilating back into ordinary life
This isn’t a how-to guide outlining how to accomplish the above points in explicit, practical detail; but rather an inspirational springboard for how to think about travel. It’s filled with quotes and prose from other like-minded travelers and vagabonders such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.
The essence of Vagabonding encourages a fuller, more satisfying travel experience by slowing down and appreciating everything your new host culture and its people have to offer. Of particular note to me was the overall sense of simplifying your life, and thus your travels, to eliminate the unnecessary clutter and fluff typically synonymous with an average Western lifestyle.
As Timen points out in his review, the book is in need of some updating with respect to specific web links, etc. Given the transient nature of all things web, this is to be expected. However, the touchstone points Potts makes are, in many respects, timeless. Made obvious by centuries old quotes proving as relevant and inspirational today as they were several hundred years ago.
Though still a ways off from my own ’round-the-world journey, I can say that Vagabonding has given me a great deal to think about. And I have a feeling that I’ll be reading it again as my journey draws near.