Vagabonding | Rolf Potts | Talks at Google

Hi everyone.

Welcome to another Authors at Google event. I'm really happy to be introducing Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long Term World Travel. Rolf has reported from six continents in more than 50 countries. He's written for channels as varied as National Geographic Traveler, The Guardian newspaper, Slate.com and NPR. He's won Noel Thomas Awards from the Society of Travel Writers no fewer than three times and been described as a Jack Kerouac for the Internet age. The San Francisco examiner said of him, he's been drugged and robbed in Istanbul, checked out brothels in Cambodia where prostitutes are identified by numbers, and shopped for donkeys in the Libyan desert. Rolf Potts usually has an interesting answer to the mundane question, so what did he do today? I'm happy to say that today Rolf is here with us at Google's New York office. So instead I'll ask Rolf, where have you been and how did you get there? Rolf's going to talk for a bit and then there'll be questions afterwards. And if you have any questions, please use the podium mic. So it's all recorded. Thanks, Rolf.

Thanks, Alexander. I actually have just been in Europe for the last six weeks. I spent the last month in France. I teach a little nonfiction writing class there. I was also in Russia and Prague. My parents came out to Paris to see me. It was their first time in Europe. So I sort of had that role reversal that happens when you 60 something parents are traveling for the first time. I was sort of in the parent role. I'm going to talk a little bit about my book, which is Vagabonding An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long Term World Travel. Vagabonding is about travel. It's about taking time off from your normal life to travel in earnest. It's not just a vacation, but it's deliberate time off from your life to travel slowly and deliberately and soulfully. And at the philosophical heart of my book is sort of the idea that time is all you really, really own in life and everybody's born rich in time. And unless you're spending your time in a way that is in tune with your dreams and specifically your travel dreams in this case, then maybe time is something you should reconsider. So I'm going to read a little bit from my book to sort of give you a context of what the book is about. I'm going to take you through a few slides from my own travels and hopefully that'll get you thinking about your own travels. And I can take some Q and A questions that you might have about travel or long term travel or things like that. So I'm going to read you from a chapter from the very beginning of my book. It's called Declare youe Independence and the epigram is by Walt Whitman from Song of the Open Road who says, from this hour I ordain myself, loosed 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 back. Of all the outrageous lines one hears in movies, there's 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, where the Charlie Sheen character, a promising big shot in the stock market, is telling his girlfriend about his dreams. He says, I think if I can make a big bundle of cash before I'm 30 and get out of this racket, 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. And if they did not 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 that movie scene odd. For some reason, we see long term travel to far away lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not as something that applies to the here and the now. Instead, out of our insane duty to fear fashion and monthly payments on things we really don't need, we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. And 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 in the same way that 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's 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 own freedom. With this kind of mindset, it's no wonder so many Americans think that 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 like age or ideology or 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. And long term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash. It only requires that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way. This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to a time honored and quietly available travel tradition called vagabonding. Vagabonding involves taking an extended time out from your normal life, be it six weeks or four months or 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 with an 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 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 that 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 we can see these trees and not wonder more. When Emerson scurried off a couple of hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen those trees in the first place. Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Wade Teal 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, and more remote with each new generation. But this lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow of 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. And this is a book about living that choice. I'll tell you a little bit about my own story, how I got into long term travel. Because I'm a professional travel writer, people tend to romanticize what I do. They sort of have this Indiana Jones idea of what I do, and they sort of romanticize how I could possibly have gotten into that. So when I was on my book tour, I always started by showing him this picture of myself. Whoops. From high school. So I grew up in Kansas and I was a standard issue dork, I think, with my preppy mullet and my Cosby show sweater. And it was about this age, when I was about 17 or 18 years old, that I started dreaming about travel. But in the context where I grew up, travel was something that's reserved for retired people. You know, we're hard working midwestern people in Kansas and there's this idea that travel is something you do when you turn 65 or something you do on two week vacations. My father was a grand. My grandfather was a. Was a farmer in Kansas. And if anybody had earned his retirement, it was him. He farmed since age 15. When he retired, my grandmother got sick and he really never left the county again. So I realized at a very young Age that if I was going to travel, I would have to do it while I was young. So after college, actually I worked for nine months as a landscaper in eastern part of Seattle, I think Microsoft. Mowing the lawns of Microsoft employees, I think is basically what I was doing. And I outfitted a VW Vanagon with a bed, which you can sort of see in there, and with a friend. I traveled around the United States for about eight months. And my idea was that I'm going to scratch this travel itch and then I can work my whole life and retire and I won't have to travel anymore. Well, I traveled for those eight months and I realized just how inexpensive and easy and really enjoyable it was to travel. So I decided that I was going to travel a little bit more. I was out of money, so I moved to Korea and taught English for a couple of years. That's a pretty common activity for college graduates these days, especially English majors like myself, which sort of render you otherwise unemployable. I actually don't have pictures from Korea since I was in Russia and France the last six weeks. I had to assemble this whole presentation from pictures that were available online. But I did work for two years and I learned a lot about sort of the gut level interactions of culture. And I also saved a lot of money and I was able to travel the world for two and a half years, starting in Southeast Asia. And this is a little village in Laos. This village is surrounded by mountains and you actually enter by going half a mile through a cave. And it's a very charming place, but a little bit primitive. The infant mortality there is like one in four. So it's easy to romanticize these isolated places. But there are some downsides to living in an isolated place. I spent about six months that year in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. And then I went up to China and took the Trans Siberian Express into Mongolia, where I learned to ride horses. I guess this actually looks like a. This looks like a pony, but all the horses are quite small. The Mongols conquered half the world on horses that were this size. And this is one of the very dilettantish things I did. Over the years. I've learned to windsurf on the Sea of Galilee and I've been scuba diving and surfing and I never did become a good horseman. But I got to experience in Mongolia. And the Mongolians are a really interesting and tough breed of people. It's one of my favorite places in the world to visit. After that, I landed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I hitchhiked my way across Eastern Europe, made my way down to the Middle east, where I hiked around across. This is the Great Sand Sea in Egypt. It's part of the Libyan Desert, which is itself a part of the Sahara Desert. And I just wanted that feeling of emptiness. So some of my best adventures had very vague, very vague inspirations. So I just wanted to walk out in the middle of nowhere. I also went to Israel. I walked across Israel and this was in the year 2000. And I wanted to sort of establish myself as someone who is like politically neutral, as someone who wasn't really pro Palestinian or pro Israel. And actually, believe it or not, in the year 2000, wearing a cowboy hat could infer that you were politically neutral in Israel. So I put on a cowboy hat to declare my neutrality and walked across Israel and had an amazing experience there. After that I took a freighter to India, took a freighter ship, stopped in Saudi Arabia and went to the Kumbh Mela, which was on Allahabad. It's a big Hindu pilgrimage. There were 70 million people who came over six weeks that year. It was the biggest gathering of human beings on the planet. It actually looks a little empty in this because There were only 10 million people when I was there. So this is like seven miles from the middle. And if you look behind me, it's just a. A big mass of humanity. I also went to Varanasi, which is the holy city in the Hindu tradition. And it's really amazing to visit because the religious tradition there goes back 5,000 years. And 5,000 years ago you had religious traditions that are in museums now, like the old Greek oracle gods and the Egyptian gods that you see in museums. But the religion they've been practicing in Varanasi hasn't changed that much in 5,000 years. So it was a really fascinating place to be. I travel alone and I actually recommend that you travel alone. So a lot of pictures I have of myself, I've taken of myself. This is a picture I took of myself in Bagan, which is in Myanmar or Burma. There's some old monuments there and really an amazing place. I actually bought a Chinese made bicycle for $40 and rode my way through Burma for a month. And here's some monks. Most Burmese people, most Burmese young men are committed to spending some time as a monk while they're young boys. And they didn't have movie theaters in this town. It's called Pkoku. It was a small town, but they have a little video room. So these monks are peeking in on Some sort of movie in there. Also while I was there, I volunteered some time teaching English. My students took me to the Buddhist monastery where they're having what was called a pui or a festival. And one of the things that happened during this pui was a transvestite cabaret. It was actually very strange to be sitting in this temple full of families and monks and to see these men come out and lip sync to Bahama Mama. So you never know what you're going to find when you slow down and travel that way. This is also in Myanmar. Beaches, I guess, are sort of idealized in travel culture. Everybody wants to find the perfect beach. And I found that you don't have to go very far to find a beach that you can have to yourself. I went kayaking in the islands of southern Burma and really had a great time. So that year I taught two years in Korea and that earned me enough money to travel two and a half years around Asia. And then I became a full time travel writer. And since then I've been to places like South America. This is Torres del Paine in Chile. I went there on a Land Rover expedition out of Mountain View, California, actually where Google is headquartered. This is Cusco in Peru, which is an amazing place. Cusco is very near to Machu Picchu. And some people talk about going to these vaunted wonders of the world and being disappointed. But Machu Picchu is one of those places where it's hard to be disappointed. It's a very amazing and beautiful and visceral experience which I enjoyed immensely. I also went to the carnival in Rio. That's me on the left with my friends from San Diego. And believe it or not, we wore these costumes and nobody looked at us because we were sort of in the drunk foreigners part of the parade. And we had the boringest costumes of anybody there. And of course we were surrounded by these beautiful women dancing on these parade floats. Carnival in Rio is another experience that some jaded travelers will say, oh yeah, it's over commercialized. But I thought it was just remarkable. The production value is just amazing and it's certainly worth attending. And we actually won, no thanks to the Drakken foreigners section. But we actually won the samba parade. We were the Beija floor, the hummingbird samba school. And this is in Greece. This is the Greek islands. I went sailing on magazine assignment there a few years ago. Last fall I went to Australia, where in South Australia I went kangaroo hunting with some aboriginal people, which is kind of interesting. I'm from Kansas. My uncles hunt, but there's something different about hunting like doves or deer and hunting kangaroos, which are these very anthropomorphic creatures. And so this guy actually shot him in the haunches and then he's actually holding a rock, so he killed him with that rock. And it was actually a little bit heartbreaking because these kangaroos look so human when you see them. But aboriginals have been living on kangaroos for 20,000 years. So this guy eats a couple kangaroos a week. And it's a tradition that's probably longer than any human culture in the world, where they've been living a steady lifestyle out in the outback for years and years and years and years. This spring, some of my more recent travels. Before I went to Russia and to France, I went to Cuba this spring, ostensibly to learn salsa. And I ended up learning the bagpipes. The Cubans told me I moved like the Terminator, so that didn't bode well for salsa, I think. And believe it or not, they have a bagpipe tradition in Spanish speaking countries. And this is an Asturian bagpipe. If you've seen the Highland Scottish bagpipes, they have three drone pipes and they're much bigger. But it was actually a really amazing experience. And actually the bagpipe players in the States are usually like middle aged guys or something. But like these are hipsters. These are like Williamsburg hipster kids who play the bagpipes in Havana. And I just had the greatest time. I hung out there for a month and learned to be to play a passable bagpipe. Anyhow, that's just a quick sort of overview of the travels that I've been to. But following onto my book, and I know that I think we ran out of books. If you go to bagobonding.net, you can find the website with more information about these. And I think most Borders have my book as well. But let's talk a little bit about your travels and questions you might have about your travels and let's do that right now. Does anybody have a question for me? Apparently we're supposed to use the mics in the aisles here.

Actually, I have several.

Okay, fantastic.

When you're traveling, what do you do in case you get hurt? What kind of documents do you carry? Stuff that makes really good sense if you're moving from place to place and you don't have a steady spot to roost at.

Right. Well, naturally you carry your passport and your basic forms of id. Believe it or not, insurance companies, they sell insurance for long term journeys. And the Main type of insurance you'll need is basically sort of disaster insurance. You'll want insurance that will get you helicoptered out of a place if you get in really bad trouble, believe it or not. Well, I guess now that we have this Michael Moore movie taking the rounds, health care is very cheap in other parts of the world. I was Deathly sick for 6 days in India and I was just dragging myself around and I sort of had this instinctive aversion to seeing a doctor because I grew up in the States. So I dragged myself to this. I dragged myself to this hospital in Pushkar just thinking I was going to spend all my travel money. The doctor just rolled his eyes at me, gave me some medicine, cost $1.35 and I was fine. So I guess don't be afraid. And in fact, I was sick in France last month and a doctor's appointment and medicine was about $60. That's including the doctor's referral and antibiotics and things like that. So for your basic healthcare medical insurance, specifics aren't even worth the deductible. The emergency evacuation type insurance. Did that answer your questions? Mostly, yeah. Okay. Can you talk about the language barrier.

When you're traveling for that long a period of time? And another aspect of that question, I'm.

Curious to hear about attitudes towards you as an American since 9 11. Okay. I'm probably the best example of how you can overcome the language barrier. Because of all my talents in the world, learning foreign languages is not one of them. And that was something that made me really nervous when I was younger. That's one reason why my first big journey was around the United States, because I was afraid of that language barrier. Fortunately, English is the second language of choice worldwide. And if you just learn to speak slowly and clearly, then many people can be understood. Young people around the world are learning English. So if you're stuck in some town someplace, just go up to a high school student or a college student and usually they'll know enough English to get by. And sign language and face pulling can get you a long ways. I just spent the last month in France. My French is not very good, and the French don't really like to speak or learn English. But we got by. And I encourage you. Even if you go to a place for six months, it's hard to become fluent in a language in that short of amount of time. But just get a phrase book and learn about 50 simple phrases. Learn the numbers, hello, goodbye, thank you. And remember that language is sociolinguistic. For example, in France, it's a much more formal culture. So saying hello and saying ma' am and sir is a lot more important. And the French people who have a reputation for being rude are actually very sweet and nice. If you just throw out some pleasant. And if you say a clumsy bonjour, monsieur, you'll say it bad enough that they'll understand you can't understand their language, but they'll appreciate that formality. So I encourage you all to just be brave with that and try your best. And people really enjoy you taking the effort. And if you can say hello in their language, you're doing better than the last nine tourists who came through, and they'll reach out to you. So. Oh, Ed, did you have another question? 9 11. 9 11. It's interesting. I haven't noticed, actually. I saw a big change in the attitude that people had towards Americans. Not so much after 9 11, which elicited a little bit of sympathy. But actually when George Bush took office, people were really nervous about him. People were somehow endeared by Clinton. I know that, you know, Clinton had a somewhat scandalous presidency here, but it somehow humanized him, this whole scandal. Whereas Bush was, from the beginning, you know, before 9 11, was such a. Such a bombastic guy. You know, he could have said the same thing in a gentler way, and he really made people nervous. But I think in general, anti Americanism is. It's a prejudice like any other prejudice. I mean, it's been exacerbated by a lot of the foreign policy and the things the United States has done. But people like to pick on Americans like they like to pick on anybody else. And I usually try not to be apologetic about it, but just sort of tell people what it's like to be American and listen and be humble. And usually that's done me quite well. Sometimes the worst way to react is try to preach at people, oh, you know, we're not that bad. But that's another way of being a loud American bully. So I think the best thing is just to listen and interact and sort of gently correct people's misperceptions about the United States, because they have a lot of misperceptions about the United States. You've been question.

I actually kind of took your advice before I even knew you were giving it. The last two and a half years, I actually have been vagabonding myself. I've been back in the States a couple months now, but I went around the United States for about four months.

Then I traveled around the world. I went to Australia Southeast Asia, Nepal, Philippines.

You know, got back in December of last year, and I guess. No, it was great. It was amazing. I mean, I don't have any logistical questions or anything like that. My question for you is sort of like, how do you, like, you go to a place, you know, you showed. Laos, right? You go to Laos and it's sort of on the backpacker circuit, and you go to these places and you end up in a place and you're sort of hanging out with Europeans and Americans and Canadians. Anyone who's rich enough to travel there, you're not. And, you know, you're just drinking. So you go to Laos and you drink with some, you know, some people, and you go to Vietnam, you drink with some more backpackers, you go there, you're not really experiencing the culture. How do you stop? How do you get away from, like, being a tourist? Is it even possible to not be a tourist? Not be like some kind of. I kind of felt like I was intruding almost. You know, I've been to some of those villages you showed where it was like 1 in 4 mortality rate. And you make enough in a day that these people make in a year. You get the other side of it. They're not exposed to you and your culture, and you're kind of bringing that to them and they're getting something out of that. But how do you find a place where you can actually feel like you're part of it, or can you even do that?

That's a good question. Actually. I completely agree. I talk about this in the book a little bit. There's this tourist and traveler distinction that we always talk about. But the people who are self identified as travelers have their own tourist cliches. I mean, they go to Laos and they go on a little opium trek and they'll smoke opium in the forest or they'll go to Thailand. And it's like everybody goes to these meditation retreats. And actually, near the place where I wrote this book, there's. In Surat Thani, there's a meditation retreat that was so popular with backpackers, and backpackers all wanted their pictures taken with these monks. I guess it sort of made them feel more hardcore because, yeah, I wasn't a tourist. I went hanging out with monks. But they all wanted their pictures taken. So as part of their little meditation program, the monks just got sort of used to getting their pictures taken. So backpackers and budget travelers fall into their own cliches of travel. And I agree. The simple answer to your question of how to get off the tourist trail is just walk five blocks in any direction from the tourist trail, which again, can include groups of European backpackers getting drunk and telling stories. That's a very comfortable bubble to be in. But just go to villages that aren't in the guidebook, take a map and go to a new town. The tourist trail is a pretty pinched line. And that backpacker hoard or that tourist bus hoard, they tend to go to the same destinations in every place. And I'm not going to knock that. I just travel with my parents, and they wanted to see the Mona Lisa, they wanted to see Versailles in France. But even if you are on the Champs in Paris, which is a tourist mall these days, walk for 15 minutes in some direction. You'll find a quieter neighborhood. So it's a lot about self initiative. It's about not being afraid to engage people whose language you might not speak and just sort of being independent, not only of tourism, but of independent travel culture. Is that.

Yeah, yeah. But then how do you, like, you're still the white guy? Well, I guess, you know, walking around.

I mean, you sort of have to come to terms with the fact that you are a guest. I mean, you could live in a place for 10 years and you're still going to be the white guy. And I mean, there's still. There's enclaves of cities in the Middle east where Armenians have been for 20 generations, and they're still, oh, the foreigners, they're the Armenians who are living in a Turkish city. So I think it's unrealistic to think that there's some sort of ideal role that you play. You're always going to be the guest. You're always going to be thankful for hospitality. There's always going to be a little bit of tension that you, by virtue of your birth, are wealthier than some of these people that you're with.

How do you reconcile that when you're gallivanting around and see these people who are in dire poverty?

I would just be realistic about your role. I think there seems to be this compulsion to feel guilty. And then there's also these little subsets of activities that you fall into when you feel guilty about going to a place. And you can make a small difference as you go into places, but people who worked For Peace Corps NGOs realize that you can't be too ambitious about saving the world. You have to realize the smallness of what you can actually do and just realize that interaction is good. These people have things to offer you from a poorer and more simple Perspective. And of course, you have things to offer them as well. And it's hard to idealize in one way or the other. Simplicity is a great virtue. I think we, as wealthy Americans idealize simplicity. But again, you have places where infant mortality is 1 in 4, and you would probably like some sophistication, at least in healthcare. So I guess there's no easy answer. I mean, I can't say this is how you should act, and it's certainly an individual thing, but don't get too caught up in the rhetorical act of things and just sort of enjoy the hospitality and the new experience. And I think people will learn from you as you learn from them.

Hey, can I see something else? Sorry.

Let's. Okay, one more, One more.

So, you know, you're a travel writer, so you can work while you're traveling. For most people, they got a job, and if, theoretically, they would leave for a time, for a couple years. But then there's always, like, the coming back because, I don't know, humans need. I don't know. I think most people need, like, a home, like a home base, a place to feel where they belong.

How.

And that might be hard. You travel for a couple years and, you know, you get in that mode and you feel like traveling. You come home, it doesn't feel like home anymore. What do you. I mean, do you. Do you not need. Do you not need that? Or have you come into a situation where, well, you went home and, you know, you can't really fit in anymore? Now what do you do?

I think that's another individual thing that some people just constitutionally are more bound to home. And I don't. I try to discourage sort of comparison morality. I mean, some people feel perfectly comfortable traveling for five years and not having a home. Some people travel for six weeks and they have it out of their system. And I don't think that it should be a contest for one. One way of traveling has more virtue than the other. I traveled for about eight years without a home, and it eventually sort of began to wear on me a little bit. I was thinking I was gonna get this big tattoo on my arm with, like, roots going down and leaves of grass going up to symbolize my lack of home. And. And then eventually I just bought some property, and I bought it in Kansas, actually. I got 30 acres for less than you could get 800 square feet in upper Manhattan. So I think you sort of create your own space. And there's no universal answer. Some people can take their work on the road with them. And tech people certainly can to some extent. And so you just sort of have to make your own way. And there's no one perfect example. And I try to discourage people seeing me as a travel writer as being the perfect example. I actually travel less than a lot of people who are forest service workers or professional jugglers or strippers or tech IT people who actually travel more than me because they're not forced to stop and write about it all the time and they're not forced into certain journalistic roles. They can just do it in a more wide open way. But I appreciate your questions. You get these when you travel for a long time, sometimes the hardest thing can be reconciling your experience with coming home.

Yeah, just two quickies. The first is if you're out there someplace and you go, gee, there's nothing in my wallet, I kind of need a few bucks, what do you do? Second is how do you find your methods of transport? If you're on a tramp steamer someplace, you have to know that it's going there and you have to be able to get on. So those are my two questions.

Okay. Well, I guess it's good to keep track of how much money is in your pocket. And not just your pocket, but your money belt and your hidden pocket and the little hidden place in your backpack. It's good to spread your money around in case you get your pocket picked or something. When I started traveling in earnest about 10 years ago, Traveler's checks were the big thing. You always turn in your money for traveler's checks. You very rarely see people using traveler's checks anymore because ATMs are everywhere and they may not be in the middle of nowhere. But you just have to realize if you're going to go to the middle of nowhere. One, everything is really cheap in the middle of nowhere, having been that many times. Two, just get a walk of the local cash and spread it out across your person and just keep track of how much money you have. And actually I found in those middle of nowhere places that tend to be a little poor people are really generous anyway. So if you are completely out of money, somebody who makes $20 a year will probably put you on a bus full of chickens and send you back to the city where you can get more money. And what was your second question?

How do you find your methods of transport?

Okay, I encourage everybody to to use travel guidebooks. That's one tip. Travel guidebooks usually have transportation recommendations. Lonely Planet Rick Steves Rough Guides there's any number of independent travel guidebooks that you can use. Some people are a little nervous about using travel guidebooks. They think it's going to sort of shape your experience too much. And it is good to keep a little bit of distance from your guidebook, but it will give you tips on eating, sleeping, transportation. Another thing, too, is just see how people travel locally. You know, if you see a bus full of people headed out towards the countryside, you can probably ask around, see where it's going. Probably won't cost very much money. And that holds true for a lot of things. When you're traveling overseas, if you see a beggar and you're not sure if you're conflicted what you should do, just see how the locals treat him. You know, the locals usually have their own ethical systems for dealing with beggars. They have their own practical systems for transportation, for guest houses. And I encourage people to use that local economy one, because it enriches the people who actually live there, instead of some office in Houston that owns a big, huge hotel. And it's cheaper and it puts you closer to the real people who actually live there. And you'll be more likely to interact with somebody who lives there than somebody who's on vacation from Germany or something. More questions?

Yeah.

I'm a person who's traveled quite a bit myself, and I really enjoy writing while I travel. I was wondering if you could just give us a. A little more insight into the process of how you go about when you sit down and write when you're traveling, how you make it commercially viable. I know that you do writing for a lot of magazines, et cetera. How you kind of balance telling detailed stories, et cetera, with kind of the spiritual aspect of what you write as well.

Yeah, well, I guess one way I can make a living for myself is not through the sacks and sacks of money that magazines give me, because that just doesn't exist, but through simplicity. Like I said, I got land in Kansas. I didn't get it in Tribeca, and I just don't own very much. And I've chosen to sort of shift my life so it involves less things and more free time. And that's sort of at the philosophical heart of my book. And then writing wise, the travel writing market is very competitive. It's growing because of Internet publications, and it's sort of split. You have what's called the service or news part of travel writing, which is basically advice on where to go, what to eat, which destinations are hot and which destinations are not. And then, as you said, the more spiritual, personal Narrative driven type of travel writing. It's much harder to sell stories in that narrative niche of travel writing. And I feel pretty lucky to have sort of gotten my foot into that door with salon.com about 10 years ago, back when there was still a market for that. If you're looking to get your own foot in the door, I would start with service articles, which are sort of these how to articles that gets your foot in the door. And it's really a relationship with driven business. Once an editor likes you and knows your work, they'll learn to. They'll go back to you. And another thing too is you have to keep traveling. A lot of people dream of becoming travel writers because they think it'll allow them to travel. That just doesn't happen. You have to become an expert at travel. You have to travel so much or travel to one place so much or travel in a certain way so much that you are an expert and you can write with authority because if you don't, and if you can't, then somebody else is going to do it because it's such a popular profession. Sure.

You said before that you prefer to travel by yourself. And can you tell us why? And my second question is, do you think as a woman is as easy to travel by yourself? I mean, would you recommend it to women too?

Okay.

I mean, I recently had a trip to Cuba and this was probably the worst idea to travel myself.

Yeah, really difficult. You're probably very popular.

Yes.

They have what are called hinateros. And I was very popular in Cuba too. There's sort of a hustler economy there because it's one of the best ways to make money in Cuba, traveling solo. My first trip around the United States, I was so nervous that I did most of it with a friend. And that was cool. But I realized there were so many times when I was traveling that I wanted to be alone. And I realized that when I traveled alone, I was much more open to other people and new experiences. And not all people have the personality to do that. And I don't say that it's right or wrong to travel alone or with other people, but I've found in my own experience, and I've found that a lot of people who've traveled a lot enjoy traveling solo because it just gives them more options and they're not bound to the whims of their travel partner. And if you feel lonely in your traveling, it's not that hard to find friends. I mean, you can go to those German backpackers that are drinking beer in Laos and have buddies for the next week. And then if you want to ditch them, you can ditch them. Whereas if you bring your own friend and say, I don't want to talk to you for two weeks, you might hurt their feelings. Whereas whoever you run into on the road, they're used to it. It's a very fluid social atmosphere there. And as far as women traveling solo, that's a tough one because it can be sort of a patriarchal world and women can feel intimidated. But women do travel solo successfully and often. I have about three pages dedicated specifically for travel tips to women in vagabonding, and I encourage you to look at that. But a lot of it is just sort of being aware of where you are. A lot of women run the risk of getting sexually harassed in conservative cultures. And in such a situation, it's good to sort of read up on the culture and find out, oh, wait, my miniskirt is giving these guys the wrong idea. You know, and from, you know, from a North American feminist viewpoint, you like, sort of like the idea that you can wear your miniskirt and people should leave you alone. But in India or in Syria or places like that, people just aren't used to this. And sometimes, just for your own peace of mind, maybe you should shift some fashion. You can. Also, in terms of safety, it's easy to find people to travel with, too. You can start out by traveling alone. If you go to a place like Cuba, find some other traveler and say, this is Bob from Germany, he's my husband. And then you won't get harassed as much as. So I encourage women to travel alone. Don't be naive. Don't take unnecessary risks, but use common sense and you can have an amazing time. And just as one final thought to that, I traveled in the Middle east for about six months seven years ago, and I never quite had the experience that my female friends were having because they had access to the female side of Arab culture. Whereas it was just culturally unthinkable for me to go hang out with a bunch of women in Egypt. Whereas the female travelers could hang out with women, no problem, or they could hang out with men, too. And so there are some nice advantages to being a woman as a traveler.

I just wanted to know. You're obviously very well traveled. I wonder if there's somewhere you haven't been if you're planning on going and I don't know what you can say about it.

Yeah, well, in like, big, broad terms, I haven't been to sub Saharan Africa or Antarctica, although that's just big geographical terms. I mean, I've been. I spent seven years in Asia, but I never went to any of the Central Asian republics, which was. Which. Which are amazing places that I would love to go to someday. I didn't go to the Caucasus. I've been. I spent summers in Europe for the last seven years, and there's still many European countries I haven't been to. Norway, Romania, Malta, places like that. So there's always. There's always some place you won't be able to go. You know, I lived in Thailand for two years, and there's so much of the north that I haven't been to yet. So I try not to be a country counter, and I try not to overthink it, but there's still places that really capture my imagination. You know, Cuba is a place I wanted to go so desperately for years, and I finally. That finally came true, and it was really worth it for me. Ethiopia is a place that I haven't been that I'd love to go. Madagascar, Antarctica for sure. And then even parts regions of countries that I've already been to that I want to go back to. Like, I want to see more of Patagonia in the southern part of Latin America. I want to see more of India. I was in India for four months, and India is like its own continent. There's so much that I didn't see, and I think I have to come to terms with the fact that there's so much that I won't see. I read this thing about the world's most traveled man. He visited like 317 countries and territories in two years. And it's like, wow, you know, did you see anything? Or did you just check things off a list? So I encourage people in the book, and I try myself. I'd rather spend four months really getting to know one place than racing through 12 countries. Any other questions for me.

On the thought of security?

Have you ever been to a place where you needed a weapon or if.

You get mugged, like, how you might.

React in that type of situation? Okay, if you get mugged, it's a bad idea to have a weapon or fight back. Because even if you win this fight, the odds are that the community will think highly of you. Laying some guy out is pretty low. Just law enforcement and social codes are just different. And if in. If at all possible, it's good to avoid those situations. And it's better to lose the 20 bucks worth of Lao kip in your pocket than try and fight your way out of it. So I really discourage sort of violently reacting to these things. I try to encourage people to avoid those situations in the first place. And sometimes that avoiding those situations is as easy as using common sense. I mean there's certain neighborhoods or times of night in New York where you wouldn't go and that applies to the foreign world as well. And and again, traveling with a weapon would be bad because there's like a.001% chance that you can use it to defend your Life and maybe a 5% chance that some policeman is going to find you and shake you down for, you know, 800 bucks for carrying a knife or a gun or something. So I definitely read guidebooks, the specific guidebooks to countries to find out what the dangers are and how you can avoid them. Just give yourself some information. Avoid those bad neighborhoods. If you're not sure about something, ask a local, say, is it cool if I walk home the two miles tonight or should I take a taxi? Just inform yourself and try to avoid those situations because it would suck to get stabbed in Manila or Tibet or something.

You mentioned like the guidebooks in your traveling and I've traveled a little bit, but some degree of travel I feel like is about conformity and non conformity, conformity. And do you do what's in the guidebook in the fromers or do you go off and say I'm going to go down the other path. Did you ever struggle with any of that kind of self righteous attitude at times? That was my first question. My next question is was there ever any degree of attachment to any of the places you went to? Did you ever meet a girl and say I'm going to marry her and live there?

Yeah, guidebooks. Even people who write guidebooks will say these aren't bibles, you know, these are just suggestions. And so I think guidebooks are most useful not in their like hotel and restaurant recommendations so much as their general information. They can give you cultural information about whether or not to look people in the eye when you shake their hand or whether you should shake their hand at all or what you should wear and when the religious holidays are. The cultural information for me is the important part of guidebooks. And I try not to be too much of a fundamentalist when it comes to going abiding by the recommendations. Sometimes when you're exhausted and you just don't have time to talk to people, sometimes it's nice to just open up your guidebook, find a hotel and go crash. And what was your other question about attachment or yeah, was there Any other.

Degree of attachment anywhere you went, or to people to settle down or anything like that?

Yeah, sometimes I've been trying to travel slower. It's funny that you talk about girls because for three winters in a row, I would meet a girl from Belgium and Thailand and. And totally fall for her. And I'd go visit her in Belgium and she'd be this completely different person. So I think it's good to remember that we sort of play roles. We play these new roles when we travel and that we're not always the same person on the road that we are at home. And I'm sure she thought I was a total schmuck when I was out of Thailand, too. So, yeah, I guess I haven't, for the sake of love, stayed anywhere for too long just because it can be sort of a complicated thing when you travel around. And then there's some places that have. That have sort of captured my heart, actually, one of which is Kansas. You know, I hadn't. It's where I grew up, but I hadn't planned on living there. And then I came back and I think I learned to appreciate my home and my family in a new way because I had seen how central home and family is to people all over the world. We sort of. We're individualists here in the United States and we value it. But I sort of learned a lesson about the importance of family and how that's sort of a basic unit for life in so many parts of the world. So I decided to go back to my family and sort of rediscovered my own home. And then, yeah, I've grown attached to Paris. I teach a class there every summer. I'm going to go back to Buenos Aires, Argentina, this winter. I was only there for five years a few years ago, but it just feels like this place I need to go back to and get to know a little bit better. And I encourage people that just because you're traveling doesn't mean you always have to be moving. You can be living in one place for six months and still very much be traveling. Kind of related to the question about getting mugged and stuff. Do you want to talk about some of the bad experiences you've had while traveling? Sure. I had one spectacular mugging that happened to me. I was drugged and robbed in Turkey. As Alexander mentioned in the introduction, it was actually Rohypnol, so I remember nothing of it. It was complete amnesia. And people say, what was the scariest part of your travels? And I'll tell them, trying to go down the mekong in this little fishing boat and wandering around in the desert and running out of water. But it's not getting robbed because I don't really recall what had happened. So yeah, it's been eight years now. I was walking through a tourist district of Istanbul and really tourist districts are probably the most likely place that you'll be the victim of a crime. People think, oh, I'm going to be safe. There's all these tourists, that's where all the con artists go, that's where all the pickpockets go. If you're in some little village nobody's ever gone to, there's no economy for pickpockets and criminals. So these guys befriended me. I thought that they were travelers from Morocco who just wanted travel advice and they sort of slipped me cookie with a little Rohypnol drug and they, I passed out and they took all my money and my passport and I don't remember a single thing of it. I woke up the next day and I was without money in this strange town and I just sort of had to improvise. But that's just, I mean, people have asked me, well, did that change your attitude towards travel? And I guess it was a very avoidable mistake. The page 70 of the Lonely Planet Turkey had said groups of Arab men working into targeting solo male travelers. And it's one of those things where like a female traveler probably wouldn't have put herself in that situation. But I've been traveling for nine months and I was badass, you know, and you know, I was taking in the world and I just, I just got sloppy. So I learned my lesson. I haven't, I haven't had. That's really the only crime related thing that's happened to me. I haven't even had my pocket picked or my hotel broken into. But it's an ever present thing and it happens to everybody eventually. It's just a matter of trying to be informed and avoiding it.

Most Americans, we get like two weeks, I think, of vacation, you know. Other countries, it's more in the culture, they take a year off after school. But it's not really common here. So for people who have a thirst for travel but you can't just like get up and leave. I mean, you don't have enough time to really see something. So, you know, what do you suggest? Like how did you get into your profession and what do you suggest for people who really want to travel but are kind of restricted in vacation and everything like that?

Yeah, well, you, you'll never get the vacation you want if you just sort of wait for somebody to give it to you. So you sort of have to create your own, your own vacation time. One way to do it is through extended absences or sabbaticals, which is sometimes as simple as asking for it. I mean, the worst that can happen is somebody will say no. Sometimes if you ask your boss for an extended leave of absence or a sabbatical, it's good to sort of prepare some information for them explaining how you can, you'll be a better worker this way. Or maybe you can do some remote work from the road. I have a friend who, he lives in the South Bay, San Francisco, and does a lot of it work. And he just told, he just went to his boss and said, look, I can be just as productive and five times as happy if I'm doing this in Rio. And he went there and he just made it happen and he was productive and he proved to his boss that he could continue to manage these accounts. And so now he's married a Brazilian and he's having a great time. So there's no easy answer. And every profession is different. I'm not even sure what it's like in Google, but if you're waiting for American vacation laws to improve, they'll probably never happen. So you sort of have to try and make space. I had a lawyer friend who was offered to transfer another office. That was sort of considered a hardship duty said, okay, I'll transfer up to that office, give me five months off in between. You don't need to pay me, just give me five months off for myself. And I met him in Jerusalem. He was off having a great time and traveling around and it enriched him. Another thing is don't be afraid to enable the Q word, quitting. I mean, it need not be this bridge burning experience. You can quit diplomatically and pick up your career later. You can put your travel experiences on your resume. And just because you're off traveling the world for a year doesn't mean you need to spend the whole time on some beach on the business end of a bong. You can actually enrich your life. You can find out experiences that might help your professional career. You can, if you work in IT here in the States, you can go see what's going on in India or Thailand or Argentina. And I encourage people to mix up their travels, even do some volunteer work just to enhance your life and enrich your life. And if you do that conscientiously, it's stuff that you can put on your resume. So that when you do go back into the job world, you're not compromised.

Sorry, one last question. Besides your pda, what do you take with you? What kind of clothing? What other stuff?

Okay, as little as possible. Actually, I don't even take a pda. Really. Some people think, oh, I'm gonna be traveling the world for two years. I'm gonna need all this stuff. It's actually the opposite. You need a few changes of clothes, some good shoes, a good backpack. There's toothpaste Switzerland. There's toothpaste in Zimbabwe. There's not always toilet paper in those places. But that's a whole other topic about toilet hygiene. You can learn a lot from a toilet, learn a lot about cultural difference from a toilet, but really, the last thing you want to do is drag everything you own around the world. And I encourage people to try and pack so light that they can fit it in an overhead bin of an airplane. You can fly up to your destination, take your gear off the rack, and hit the country. And it's hard to think that way because we're sort of surrounded by things in our home life. But you have to remember that, one, you don't want to carry your things all over the world with you. And two, one of the reasons you travel is to look outward and have all of these experiences coming into you. And it's sort of an adventure to shop for toothpaste when you're in Bangkok. And that's just part of the thrill of being places, is not having all these things to fall back on, not having your laptop and 50 DVDs to keep yourself company. Sort of having a minimum of filters between you and your experience just makes you more of an extrovert, and it throws you more into the culture of whatever place you're visiting. I have time for one or two more questions if somebody has.

How do you stay motivated, excited about.

Where you are to travel?

Yeah. Do you ever get like. Like, oh, another desert, another mountain, another lake?

That's a good question. Because it's good not to get jaded, and sometimes it's good to stop traveling for a while. I think that's another reason why I like Kansas so much, is that I can go back to this home, which is not a tourist destination at all, and just sort of be still for a while and sort of. And regain my hunger for new places. And it can be if you're on that backpacker circuit, which is not a stereotypical tourist circuit that you're talking about, so you're drinking beers with Germans and Israeli and Australians and British people in all these different countries, but you're still doing the same activity. So I guess it's just you have to force yourself not to get jaded and not to fall into certain habits, because you have habits at home that make your life more efficient. But on the road, habits can make your life more efficient, but they can also get in the way of new experiences. So it's just a way of forcing yourself not to be jaded. And, hey, if you're on the road for 18 months and you're just sick of this latest beautiful waterfall, and the last thing you would ever want to do is try and have a conversation in broken English or have another beer with another guy from New Zealand, go home, put your money in the bank, find a job, kick around for a while, and just sort of get your appetite for travel back. And I try to discourage the idea that there's some sort of pie in the sky idea that you should be traveling all the time. It's very personal. And some people will be motivated to travel constantly. And some people can scratch their travel itch in a short amount of time and they prefer to go back. And I think both ways are great. Just sort of follow your own calling. But be true to the idea that time is what really counts in life and manage your time in a way that's good and enriching and beautiful. One last one. Okay. Does anybody else. Okay.

I asked it before, but I didn't really get an answer. If you're stuck somepl you don't have the cash. Did you ever generate your own money out there?

I've worked jobs before, but not because I'm sort of on my last dollar. And again, try to avoid being in that situation. Actually, when I was robbed in Turkey, I sort of was in this strange situation where I was sort of a beggar. I was sort of dependent upon the kindness of strangers. And it's hard to ask people for money because you've been robbed and you have nothing, but you feel like such a con artist saying, look, man, I just need some money to get a taxi, to go to the consulate, to get a new passport. And it's hard and very humbling to do that. But I think if you find yourself in that situation, you just do it. And again, people are very generous, especially in poor parts of the world. I don't know how it is they have time for you, they watch out for you, and they consider it a matter of pride, especially if you're an American. You're from this really rich, loud and dominant country and they're showing you hospitality and they're helping you out. And it's something that people enjoy. And I think that's one thing that I've learned, and that's one thing that you can learn is the joy of hospitality. I think I've become a better host just from seeing the kindness of so many people who didn't have to feed me, didn't have to help me, didn't have to talk to me, but did when I was overseas. And I'm trying to roll that in to being someone who's more receptive to being a good host to other people. What next? We can do some signing type stuff. If you have questions, you can come up to me now and ask them. Personally, we ran out of books, but you can find them in the travel section of most bookstores. Vagabonding.net is my website. So thanks for coming. Good luck in your travels.