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Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel Paperback – December 24, 2002
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There’s nothing like vagabonding: taking time off from your normal life—from six weeks to four months to two years—to discover and experience the world on your own terms. In this one-of-a-kind handbook, veteran travel writer Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Now completely revised and updated, Vagabonding is an accessible and inspiring guide to
• 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
Updated for our ever-changing world, Vagabonding is an indispensable guide for the modern traveler.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVillard Books
- Publication dateDecember 24, 2002
- Dimensions5.21 x 0.5 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-109780812992182
- ISBN-13978-0812992182
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Review
“I couldn’t put this book down. It’s a whole different ethic of travel. . . . [Rolf Potts’s] practical advice might just convince you to enjoy that open-ended trip of a lifetime.”—Rick Steves
“Potts wants us to wander, to explore, to embrace the unknown, and, finally, to take our own damn time about it. I think this is the most sensible book of travel-related advice ever written.”—Tim Cahill, founding editor of Outside
“A crucial reference for any budget wanderer.”—Time
“Potts has synthesized more than six years’ worth of road experiences into an unusual travel guide that’s much more than a how-to manual for open-ended journeys. With wit, insight and flair, he has created an inspiring philosophical handbook about living life as an adventure. . . . Vagabonding is an inspiring read for anyone who has ever contemplated taking an extended break.”—The Globe and Mail
“Vagabonding [is] chock-full of tips and first-person accounts about how to journey frugally and well.”—National Geographic Traveler
“Potts makes a valuable contribution to our thinking, not only about travel, but about life and work. And he leaves us with a prescription for making our lives more meaningful and more fun.”—The Boston Globe
“Vagabonding packs a serious philosophical punch and has a cult-like following among independent travelers. I’m warning you, though: This book may well inspire you to quit your job, sell the house and leave on an extended adventure.”—The Oregonian
“Recommended reading.”—The Washington Post
“For those who just want to enjoy the journey, Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding combines practical tips for getting happily lost with a genuine love for life on the road.”—Toronto Star
“In Vagabonding, Potts lays out an easy-tofollow yet philosophically deep approach to achieving the travel dreams so many of us assume we have neither the time or money for.”—Philadelphia Weekly
“Vagabonding is one of the best books out there to think about travel in a whole new way. Rather than going to places for just a few days and cramming in seeing all the sights, it suggests that if we can we should spend weeks or months rather than days in a place. That way we can get to know the culture and people or even become part of it.”—Business Insider
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
-Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"
Declare Your Independence
Of all the outrageous throwaway lines one hears in movies, there is one that stands out for me. It doesn't come from a madcap comedy, an esoteric science-fiction flick, or a special-effects-laden action thriller. It comes from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, when the Charlie Sheen character - a promising big shot in the stock market - is telling his girlfriend about his dreams.
"I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I'm thirty and get out of this racket," he says, "I'll be able to ride my motorcycle across China."
When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat in astonishment. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for eight months as a toilet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Even if they didn't yet have their own motorcycle, another couple months of scrubbing toilets would earn them enough to buy one when they got to China.
The thing is, most Americans probably wouldn't find this movie scene odd. For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead?out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. 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.
Not long ago, I read that nearly a quarter of a million short-term monastery- and convent-based vacations had been booked and sold by tour agents in the year 2000. Spiritual enclaves from Greece to Tibet were turning into hot tourist draws, and travel pundits attributed this "solace boom" to the fact that "busy overachievers are seeking a simpler life."
What nobody bothered to point out, of course, is that purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren't looking into the mirror. All that is really sold is the romantic notion of a simpler life, and - just as no amount of turning your head or flicking your eyes will allow you to unselfconsciously see yourself in the looking glass - no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.
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.
In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics - age, ideology, income - and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn't about being a college student; it's about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society; it's an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn't require a massive "bundle of cash"; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.
This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to the time-honored, quietly available travel tradition known as "vagabonding."
Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life?six weeks, four months, two years?to travel the world on your own terms.
But beyond travel, vagabonding is an outlook on life. Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions. Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude?a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.
Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life - a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time - our only real commodity - and how we choose to use it.
Sierra Club founder John Muir (an ur-vagabonder if there ever was one) used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. 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. One of Muir's Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias, "It's a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more." When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen the trees in the first place.
Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir's example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society. "Freedom as John Muir knew it," he wrote in his 1956 book Autumn Across America, "with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude of choice . . . such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation."
But Teale's lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow a generalization in 1956 as it is now. As John Muir was well aware, vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.
This is a book about living that choice.
Product details
- ASIN : 0812992180
- Publisher : Villard Books; First Edition (December 24, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780812992182
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812992182
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.21 x 0.5 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #50,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #51 in General Travel Reference
- #68 in Travel Writing Reference
- #125 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Rolf Potts is the author of five books, including Vagabonding (Villard Books, 2003), and The Vagabond's Way (Ballantine Books, 2022). His adventures have taken him to six continents, and he has reported from more than sixty countries for National Geographic Traveler, The New Yorker, Slate, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Sports Illustrated, and the Travel Channel. His stories have appeared in numerous literary anthologies, and more than twenty of his essays have been selected as “Notable Mentions” in The Best American Essays, The Best American Non-Required Reading, and The Best American Travel Writing. He is based in north-central Kansas, where he keeps a small farmhouse on thirty acres with his wife, Kansas-born actress Kristen Bush.
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Top reviews from the United States
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The author describes several different approaches to travel and refrains from passing judgment on any of them. He lays out the pros and cons of each style and lets you decide what's right for you. He provides dozens of resources and is continually adding to them on his website. Somehow, he passes on all of this information without making the book feel like a typical travel book.
I took six months off after college and traveled around the U.S. with my then-toddler son. Sustained travel can be difficult even in this country. When my son graduates high school, I plan to try long-term international travel. This book was a great jumping off point for me. I was surprisingly impressed.
I cant say that for this book. About a third of this book is filled with never ending quotes from Muir to Thoreau and others less well known.
As well as every agency and travel organization you can think of. Examples Multi Cultural Travels, Family Travel, Ethical Guide, Nat Geo,
Rainforest Alliance, Peace Corps, Cross Cultural Solutions and even Religous groups.
THe best part ofthe book are the listings of all these groups, Agencies and Organizations.
I will not reference the book for his story but I will save it for the listings of all these orgnizations.
It's the most complete listing with addresses and web sites I've ever seen in one publication.
For me, vacations are not so much time to get away and relax, but more of a time to explore and have memorable and meaningful experiences in life.
This book does a fine job pointing out many do’s and don’ts when it comes to traveling, and it also introduces us to different attitudes to enhance our holiday experience. It’s one of those, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
This book is one of those books, that you’ll say, wow I wish I would have read this years ago, but beware it might spoil your traditional vacation spots forever.
So when I was working and listening to the Tim Ferriss podcasts and how he sounded so passionate about travel, it rekindled that fire. I picked up a couple of other travel books and it seemed, no matter what or who, this book was mentioned. I hesitated because I couldn't explain the price when so much is free on the net. However, I finally did it when I realized it wasn't a simple purchase but an investment to my desires and dreams.
I regret not buying this sooner! It was multiple times more useful from it's impressive amount of knowledge and links and book names to further enhance one's study to wherever in the world one wants to go! For the first time since the Corps, I'm looking at long term travel again - but on my terms! Thank you Rolf, for this work of art, and to all those who helped push this book. I add my name to that list proudly! Again, this isn't a simple purchase of fancy, this is a great self-investment with huge returns!
Top reviews from other countries
The quality of the paper and the cover is not what i expected to be honest, it’s a low quality.
Delivery was perfect, before expected, perfectly protected.