Blog – Rolf Potts: Recent Episodes
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Reaching the village of Tenmaru in the Melanesian South Pacific was quite the task. First, it took Kiki and me nearly 20 hours of trans-Pacific flights to reach Vanuatu by way of Fiji. Then, because Air Vanuatu had just gone out of business, it took us 16 hours on an industrial ferry to reach the…
The post On finding familiar things in some of the most isolated parts of the world appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How tourists, influencers, and nomads transform destinations
The post Live from Bali: How tourists, influencers, and nomads transform destinations (for good and for bad) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Jenny Inzerillo of High Plains Public Radio’s “High Plains Morning” chats with actress/writer Kristen Bush about her film THE GAME CAMERA, the Rural Women Films initiative, and its artistic mission to uplift female voices in rural America. CONDENSED TRANSCRIPT Jenny Inzerillo: Folks, you are tuned to High Plains Public Radio. I am so excited to…
The post A new film, shot in Kansas, aims to show what is possible for women’s artistic voices in rural America appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Though travel writing is sometimes viewed as its own, self-contained genre, its core task can pertain to all manner of prose writing, since any good narrative (fiction or nonfiction) needs to establish an effective sense of place. Place is, in effect, a character in any story, so it’s good for writers to know how to…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part VI: On depicting places appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel writing has long been considered to be one of the least reliable forms of nonfiction narrative. Scholars often point to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville as the iconic example of a classic travel book that bore little relation to truth, but skepticism about the tales of voyagers runs from Lucian’s second-century True…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part V: On veering from the truth appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ugly Americans (and non-Americans) on the road, and how to avoid being one
The post Vagabonding audio companion: Obnoxious travelers (and how to avoid being one) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The video below doesn’t contain a narrative arc — it’s just a series of slice-of-life moments from a half-day cage-truck trip around the northern rim of Malekula Island, en route to the isolated Big Nambas village of Tenmaru. Rough as dirt track looks, it was the only through-road on that part of the island. Buying…
The post On sharing a truck with 11 other people (plus chickens & yams) in Vanuatu appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When I teach my travel memoir classes each summer in Paris, I often do a lecture based on Thomas Swick’s “Roads Less Traveled: Why so much travel writing is so boring.” This essay astutely outlines seven key things that tend to be missing from generic travel stories, including imagination, insight, and humor. Swick notes that…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part IV: On recounting dialogues appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This photo of “kastom” dancers was taken our second full day of traveling through Malekula Island (and its surrounding islets) in the Vanuatu archipelago. Kastom is a pidgin word (a play on the English word “custom”) that refers to traditional art, ceremonies, religion, and magic in Melanesia. This troupe of men and boys from the…
The post To keep cultural traditions active, Vanuatu kastom dances are sometimes performed for tourists appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Having touched on the task of depicting myself as a character in the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-finished first attempt at writing a travel book), I will now examine the task of depicting other people in nonfiction writing. Indeed, just as the “I character’ is a selective persona that doesn’t comprehensively…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part III: On depicting other people appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I’d heard of the ritual of drinking kava before I traveled to Vanuatu, but I didn’t realize how pervasive the practice was (particularly among men) until I traveled to the outer reaches of the archipelago. Made from the emulsified bush-roots of Piper methysticum (roughly, “intoxicating pepper”) and mixed with water before being filtered with a…
The post Exploring the chill, euphoriant ritual of drinking kava at an Uripiv, Vanuatu nakamal appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Matt Green walked across America, then walked down every street in NYC. This is his story.
The post What you discover when you walk down every single street in New York City (encore) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When teaching my creative writing classes in Paris, I typically begin my memoir-themed craft lecture by writing these words on the whiteboard: Author | Character / Narrator The vertical line between “Author” and “Character/Narrator” is in part meant to underscore the fact that – in analyzing a person’s writing – we’re not talking about the…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part II: The author is a character appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Although the word “locavore” has something of an upscale-foodie connotation in the US, to “eat foods grown locally whenever possible” (as Merriam-Webster defines it) is pretty much the only option for people who live in the outer islands of Vanuatu. After the 16-hour ferry ride from Efate to Malekula, Kiki and I boarded one more…
The post In places like Uripiv, Vanuatu, “locavore” isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s the only way to eat appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.
The post What’s the Best Way to Explore Kenya? Join a Local Hiking Club. appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author. Specifically, my failure to write an insightful and coherent book about my first vagabonding experience – an eight-month van journey around North America undertaken when…
The post Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part I: Pilgrims in a Sliding World appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Our arrival in the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu just so happened to coincide with Air Vanuatu, the nation’s flagship airline, going out of business. This meant that we had no easy way to travel domestically from island to island, apart from taking industrial ferries that require passengers share the boat with cargo. Years ago,…
The post The secret to adventure is to travel in such a way that it finds you appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Unplugged travel is the best travel Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees “independent” travelers eagerly settling down in front of…
The post 3 key insights from “Dervla Murphy’s Laws of Travel” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“We need positive visions of how all this technology gets deployed, because what we visualize is what we build.” –Jane Metcalfe In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jane talk about the pioneering work she did with Wired during the dawn of the “digital revolution” (3:00); how and why Jane’s professional focus shifted away from digital…
The post A history and future of digital and biological technology, with Jane Metcalfe appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Since remote antiquity, for all kinds of reasons, people have left home and hit the road. Couriers and diplomats, merchants and worshippers crisscrossed the Mesopotamian triangle well before 3000 BC. Even tourists, travelling for pleasure, left graffiti on the Pyramids by 1500 BC. Very early in history, then, travel and writing converged. Homer’s Odyssey, the…
The post “Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology” (Oxford): Introduction essay appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Filmmaker Daniel Troia talks about his experience of biking across the USA with no food or money
The post Bicycling across the USA (with no money or food) looking for human connection appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be…
The post Of Travel, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Interview by Don George You are usually referred to as a “travel writer,” and your books are shelved in the “travel books” area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term “travel writing” mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go…
The post Bill Bryson: The 1998 Salon Wanderlust “Walk in the Woods” interview appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Roy Peter Clark Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy…
The post How writers can sharpen their prose by understanding the “ladder of abstraction” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Insider tips for family vagabonding and worldschooling
The post Wonder Year: The Art of Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in…
The post “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There”: An introduction to Rolf’s second book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or…
The post “Perhapsing”: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction, by Lisa Knopp appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf reflects on the music of Elliott Smith, Nirvana, and his own Pacific NW grunge band, Swizzlefish
The post How Rolf Ruined the 1990s: A personal history of my grunge-bandwagon band appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My father had an idea for a children’s book. He recited the idea to me many times when I was little. It was to be a story about beauty. It begins with a father saying good night to his daughter. The daughter is afraid to be alone and so she begs the father to stay…
The post “The most beautiful thing in the world,” from Chloe Cooper Jones’s “Easy Beauty” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An ambulatory field report from a "Walk and Talk" moving salon across northern Thailand
The post Walk and Talk: Notes from a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in…
The post In Praise of Loitering, by Ross Gay appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black…
The post “How to Write About Africa,” by Binyavanga Wainaina appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Essential tips and strategies for telling travel stories, with Andrew McCarthy
The post Essential tips and strategies for telling travel stories, with Andrew McCarthy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The faces with anticipated youth look out from the current identifications, judge or salesman, the neighbor, the man who killed, mattering only as the sliding world they betoken, the time it never mattered to accumulate, the fact that nothing mattered but for what one could make of it, some passing, oblique pleasure, a pain immense…
The post “The Faces,” by Robert Creeley (1983) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Phillip Lopate In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective,…
The post To show and to tell: How to write nonfiction from a “double perspective” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What it's like to spend a full year traveling within a day's radius of your home, with Alastair Humphreys
The post What it’s like to spend a full year traveling within a day’s radius of your home appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Late last year I had the honor of participating in a seven-day, 100-kilometer “Walk and Talk” across northern Thailand. Organized by futurist Kevin Kelly and writer-photographer Craig Mod, a “Walk and Talk” mixes long-distance hiking during the day with an in-depth, one-topic-per-night “Jeffersonian conversation” over dinner each evening. Our ten hand-picked participants, strangers to each…
The post Notes on “Walk and Talk” (a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Deviate Super Bowl Special: Superstitions, sacraments, and the weird emotional power of sports
The post Sports, superstitions, and sacraments: A Deviate Super Bowl Special (2024 remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At the height of the Covid pandemic a few years ago, when Kiki and I were dreaming of travel to Kenya, we became fixated with the Lets Drift Instagram account, which depicted the hiking adventures of young Kenyans in the gorgeous landscapes of their own country. For me, the appeal of the Let’s Drift narratives…
The post The best way to experience a new place is to find a shared community of interest appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One cool thing about traveling through Kenya last summer was the number of fellow-travelers we met who were visiting from other parts of Africa. We met Kevine Kagirimpundu of Rwanda and B’Nor Mackey, originally from Ghana, at Nairobi’s Karen Blixen Museum. Kiki and I were curious about the place because of the 1985 Meryl Streep…
The post When your fellow tourists turn out to be as interesting as the tourist attraction appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Bestselling author Tim Ferriss and Rolf discuss travel, time wealth and "success management"
The post Tim Ferriss and Rolf discuss travel, time wealth, and “success management” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Though people have been dreaming up “Bucket Lists” to help focus their travel and life goals for as long as the concept has existed, I have never consciously created one. Granted, I’ve had no shortage of year-to-year travel- and life-goals, but my “bucket list” experiences have typically been realized after the fact. For example, I…
The post Rolf’s Top-10 “Reverse-Bucket List” experiences from 2023 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One intriguing aspect of traveling through the desertlike landscape near north Kenya’s Ndoto Mountains was the opportunity it provided us to meet fellow travelers. The travelers in this case there were not Western tourists, but young Rendille “warriors” (tribesmen who’ve been circumcised, but are not yet married) who live traditional nomadic lives in the northern…
The post In northern Kenya, one’s fellow travelers aren’t always fellow tourists appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Road rituals, imagination, and bringing the mindset of travel back home (Vagabond's Way book club remix)
The post The best journeys explore mindscapes as well as landscapes (book club remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“Staged authenticity” is a term coined by anthropologists to describe how, within the tourist economy, indigenous people perform a version of their culture that caters to the expectations of tradition-obsessed outsiders. My visit to northern Kenya this summer reminded me how complex and savvy displays of indigenous traditions can be — often mixing ancient cultural…
The post Locals often perform a version of their culture based on travelers’ expectations appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Thomas Swick's on coming of age overseas in Poland, and becoming a travel writer
The post Going abroad for love, and travel writing that says something new about a place appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Authenticity, the wisdom of place, and how to act off the beaten path (Vagabond's Way online book club, redo of e229)
The post Seek places where your very presence makes you interesting (book club redo) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel memoir lab: Truth, luck, & multi-genre storytelling (with Tom Bissell)
The post Travel memoir lab: Truth, luck, & multi-genre storytelling (with Tom Bissell) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Authenticity, the wisdom of place, and how to act off the beaten path (Vagabond's Way online book club)
The post Seek places where your very presence makes you interesting (book club remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Vagabonding audio companion: The story behind Rolf's travel career and philosophy
The post Vagabonding audio companion: A life in (and philosophy of) long-term travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Around the World in 80 Trains author Monisha Rajesh on the joys of rail travel (encore).
The post A train isn’t just a vehicle; it’s a place (a remix encore, with Monisha Rajesh) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Tourist zones, scams, slow travel, and the ethics of taking photos (Vagabond's Way online book club)
The post Travelers experience more when they slow down and ask lots of questions appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Dare to do Dirt": Seeking rural places (and how to best experience them)
The post “Dare to do Dirt”: Seeking rural places (and how to best experience them) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Vagabonding audio companion: Why (and how) travel souvenirs matter
The post Vagabonding audio companion: Why (and how) travel souvenirs matter appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This image, taken a few years ago at the Go Viral festival, a SXSW-style “influencer” gathering in Kazakhstan, evokes an anecdote I share on page 166 of The Vagabond’s Way. I had been invited to Almaty to talk about digital nomadism and travel storytelling to the assembled audience of Central Asian artists and entrepreneurs. Since…
The post The truest “influencers” don’t live in the virtual world appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Everything feels new at the outset of a journey (online book club remix)
The post Travel can return you to a kind of childhood (online book club remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A look at how museums work (live from a presidential museum and a Barbie doll museum)
The post What museums reveal about places (and what they have to offer travelers) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Internet cafes were so central to the lives of long-term travelers 20 years ago that my memories of vagabonding through Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s are inseparable from occasional stop-offs in these little storefronts full of dial-up-connected computer terminals. At the time, internet cafes felt revolutionary in their ability to connect travelers…
The post Remembering internet cafes, and how they affected the experience of travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A "Vagabonding Audio Companion" remix of a GFU study-abroad podcast.
The post Vagabonding audio companion: How to study abroad (even if you aren’t a student) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author and actor Andrew McCarthy on walking across Spain with his son.
The post Fear, family, and walking the Camino de Santiago (live with Andrew McCarthy) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Reading stories is an act of imagination for the reader Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story,…
The post 15 insights from Jonathan Gottschall’s book “The Storytelling Animal” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Matt Kepnes on how to preempt (and deal with) travel burnout on the road
The post Travel burnout is a real thing (and it’s OK to feel it sometimes), with Matt Kepnes appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This image from my trekking journey in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands figured into the recent Deviate episode wherein Ari Shaffir and I discussed the idiosyncrasies of travel onstage at KGB Bar in NYC. Specifically, we talked about the tourist desire to see a “pure” vision of distant cultures, and how years of working with travelers in…
The post What we hope to see in places can be at odds with reality appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ari Shaffir and Rolf discuss the power of luck (and the peculiarities of Las Vegas)
The post The Mystical High Church of Luck: Decoding Las Vegas (with Ari Shaffir) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his online book club discuss quests, guidebooks, and other issues from The Vagabond's Way.
The post How travelers create quests and find community (online book club remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From the Faroe Islands: translator Matthew Landrum on how place informs art
The post Art introduces us to places before we go there (live from the Faroe Islands) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“”I wasn’t partying. I wasn’t relaxing on the beach. I was photographing – working – every minute of the day. That was a means to see as much as I possibly could. And to keep looking.” –Kevin Kelly In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Kevin discuss the ambitions and connections that led Kevin to Asia…
The post Travel can be a way to see the future (and experience the past), with Kevin Kelly appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A remix of Rolf's first discussion of The Vagabond's Way with The Nomadic Network book club
The post The best age to travel is whatever age you are now (an online book club remix) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On the joys of getting lost, learning languages, and interacting with distant cultures at home.
The post Seek out global connections while you’re still at home (with Kristin Van Tassel) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Exactly 10,603 days days ago this week I packed a few belongings into a second-hand 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon (into which I’d built a homemade fold-out bed), and embarked on a journey across North America that wound up lasting eight months. Nowadays this endeavor is known as #vanlife, but in that pre-hashtag era it was (for…
The post Your first vagabonding journey remains in conversation with the travels that follow appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Native American football star John Levi takes on the 1927 New York Giants
The post A Native American football team beat the 1927 NFL Giants: The story of John Levi appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel writer Tony Perrottet on the idiosyncrasies of ancient Roman tourists.
The post Why you go someplace is less important than just going (with Tony Perrottet) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The grateful acre was created when God created the Earth. The grateful acre was grateful to wake up one day and realize that it was an acre. God smiled upon it and the grateful acre was grateful. It was grateful when dirt appeared upon it. Even though the dirt made the acre feel heavier, the…
The post Justin’s “Grateful Acre” fable, from Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Easy beauty" versus "difficult beauty," and how it affects the way we see things on the road.
The post Integrating love of travel & love of home (with philosopher Chloe Cooper Jones) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
As 2023 gets underway, I’ve resolved to be less “virtually present” on social media, and more emotionally present in my own life. Hence, it’s unlikely I’ll be adding many new posts to my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook accounts in the coming months. Lowering one’s social-media profile might seem like a peculiar choice in 2023, given…
The post A few thoughts on the merits of taking an extended break from social media appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Eric Weiner on the joys of slowing down and being open to uncertainty on the road
The post Travel contracts your possessions and expands your life (with Eric Weiner) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My newest book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery and the Art of Travel, debuted in October, with a series of virtual and live events in places like New York, Kansas, and San Francisco. Early praise for the book came from The New York Times, which noted: “Rolf Potts, the author who inspired wanderlust…
The post Dispatches from “The Vagabond’s Way” book launch (and a sojourn in DC) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Filmmaker and anthropologist Pegi Vail on global traveler culture
The post Travelers create their own distinct global culture (with anthropologist Pegi Vail) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My book The Vagabond’s Way has a mini-chapter entitled “The Definition of ‘Traveler’ is Broad (and Vibrant),” which examines the notion that “middle-class folks from industrialized countries aren’t the only people taking journeys.” I allude to a number of situations that illustrate this (based on travel experiences in India, Mexico, Laos, and Sumatra), but the…
The post The global definition of “traveler” is broad (and vibrant) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
There is something curiously ephemeral about theater: Actors bring a specific world alive onstage for a few weeks or months, then that world vanishes when the play finishes its run. Kristen Bush’s extraordinary presence and stamina as “Emma” in Duncan Macmillan’s dark addiction-recovery drama People, Places and Things at DC’s Studio Theatre was lauded by…
The post Kristen Bush “masterful” in Duncan Macmillan’s “People, Places & Things” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
NYT travel writer Seth Kugel on travel experiences that go beyond what you can buy
The post The travel industry is here to help you; feel free to ignore it (with Seth Kugel) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ari Shaffir and Rolf discuss "The Vagabond's Way" onstage at KGB Bar in NYC.
The post Deviate Live in NYC: The Vagabond’s Way (onstage at KGB Bar with Ari Shaffir) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Kate Harris on reinventing the notion of exploration
The post Reinvent what it means to be an “explorer” (with Kate Harris) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Lunatic Express" writer Carl Hoffman on the merits of traveling on local buses, ferries, and trains.
The post The subtler risks of travel carry rich rewards (with Carl Hoffman) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Pico Iyer has published 15 books, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. At the same time he has been…
The post 10 Insights from Pico Iyer’s 2022 TravelCon Keynote Address appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-writing icon Tim Cahill on the counterintuitive rules of adventure travel.
The post Uncertainty makes for the truest adventures (aka Tim Cahill’s Travel 101) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Stephanie Rosenbloom on going solo, and savoring travel experiences.
The post Traveling solo opens up new possibilities in a place (with Stephanie Rosenbloom) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Writing Away" author Lavinia Spalding on why you should journal when you travel
The post Keeping a journal helps you make sense of the journey (with Lavinia Spalding) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Paul Theroux on his novel "The Bad Angel Brothers," and the contradictions of the global economy.
The post Paul Theroux on the merits of travel and the paradoxes of the global economy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid…
The post Oh me! Oh life! by Walt Whitman appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Ernest White II talk about using what money you have to create the life you want.
The post Seeking real crowds beats crowdsourcing (from The Vagabond’s Way book launch) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For travelers seeking to keep track of how many countries they’ve visited, a common question is: What, exactly, counts as a “visit” When Kiki and I hiked through the Finnskogen region of Norway, for example, the trail took us across the border into Sweden’s Värmland province, before it looped us back into Norwegian territory a…
The post How does one determine what counts as a “visit” to another country? appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Legendary travel writer Eddy L. Harris on why an attitude of "let's go find out" is a great travel ethos.
The post Preconceptions can blur what you see firsthand on the road (with Eddy Harris) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ari Shaffir talks about why getting lost on the road can be a good thing, as presented in Rolf's new book, The Vagabond's Way.
The post Travel deviations can be as appealing as travel plans, with Ari Shaffir appeared first on Rolf Potts.
It took a trip to Norway, of all places, for me to learn of an American car known as the “Vagabond” — a proto-hatchback manufactured by Michigan’s Kaiser Motors in the late 1940s. One curious thrill of travel is the opportunity it offers you to see your own country through the eyes of another culture.…
The post Seeing 1950s American culture through Norwegian eyes at a Sørum car club appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Human beings are more alike than unlike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure. It is necessary, especially for Americans, to see other lands and experience other cultures. The American, living in this vast country…
The post Maya Angelou’s “Passports to Understanding” (1993) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) Why is travel so exciting? Partly because it triggers the thrill of escape, from the constriction of the daily, the job, the boss, the parents. ‘A great part of the pleasure of travel,’ says Freud, ‘lies in the fulfillment of . . . early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.’…
The post Paul Fussell’s introduction to The Norton Book of Travel (1987) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An audio excerpt from the introduction of Rolf's new book, The Vagabond's Way
The post The Vagabond’s Way: An audio introduction to Rolf’s new book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-TV host Ernest White II on the nuances of Kansas, and what home reveals about travel
The post Vagabonding audio companion: Love, finding home, and telling TV travel stories appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Has anyone ever considered the philosophy of travel? It might be worth while. What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Moreover locomotion- the privilege of animals- is perhaps the key to intelligence. The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the…
The post “The Philosophy of Travel,” by George Santayana appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The joys and challenges of living and working in Antarctica, with Karen Pszonka
The post “On the Ice”: What it’s like to live and work at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Kevin Harrison on storytelling from places and people we don't typically hear about.
The post A Critical Race Theorist’s guide to writing smut novels, with Dr. Kevin Harrison appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“Good Digs in Timbuktu” By Nicholas D. Kristof (an excerpt) It was the slow train to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa, and it had just stopped at the border of the Ivory Coast. Among the mango sellers alongside the train, I found two Canadians who were headed in the same direction.…
The post Nicholas D. Kristof’s case for using indie-travel guidebooks (from 1986) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The life and disappearance of Father Paolo Dall'Oglio and his travelers' sanctum in Syria
The post Traveler ideals, hospitality, and the disappearance of an Italian priest in Syria appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Creative persistence: The art of writing (and finishing) better long-form narratives
The post Refuse to be Done: The art of creative persistence for long-haul projects appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Rolf Potts Most any journey can, at moments, have a way of making a traveler feel like he’s navigating a blurred line between present and past. Walk through the urban slums at the outskirts of modern Mumbai, and you can get a sense for what New York’s Lower East Side might have felt like…
The post “Picturesque World”: Intro to The Best Travel Writing, Vol. 11 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Marcia deSanctis on revisiting places, souvenirs, and travel as self-reinvention
The post Marcia DeSanctis on revisiting places, souvenirs, and travel as self-reinvention appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I am excited to announce that my new book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel, will be released by Ballantine Books in October of this year, and is available for preorder from your favorite local or online bookstore. Information about promotions, book-tour events, and a tie-in Deviate podcast…
The post The Vagabond’s Way: Ballantine to release Rolf’s new book in October of 2022 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Every time you leave home, Another road takes you Into a world you were never in. New strangers on other paths await. New places that have never seen you Will startle a little at your entry. Old places that know you well Will pretend nothing Changed since your last visit. When you travel, you find…
The post “For the Traveler,” by John O’Donohue (2008) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On confronting discontent, travel as education, and how to write a Big Idea book.
The post Chris Guillebeau on life goals, work, and travel as alt-university [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sophia Bentaher on her experience of hitching Europe in search of pastry recipes.
The post Hitchhiking for pastries: The art of structuring a journey with an obsession appeared first on Rolf Potts.
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed…
The post Street Haunting: A London Adventure, by Virginia Woolf (1930) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Embracing uncertainty and discomfort as the pathless path to true success.
The post How to embrace uncertainty and redefine success by taking a “pathless path” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How travel helps you better understand how your body works
The post What travel teaches you about the human body, with Dr. Jonathan Reisman appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) Some people have asked, “Why does it matter to me in Chicago if some tribe in Africa disappears?” My answer is that it probably doesn’t matter to you at all in Chicago if a tribe in Africa disappears. And what does it matter to a tribe in Africa if Chicago disappears? Again, not…
The post “On Native Ground,” by Wade Davis (2008) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Alastair Humphreys on making a living as an adventurer
The post The creative art of making a living as an adventurer, with Alastair Humphreys appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How the people we meet by accident as we travel can deepen the journey
The post The strangers we meet on the road, and how they can deepen our journey appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“One of the things that young writers falsely hope exists is inspiration. A lot of young writers fail because they aren’t putting in the hours. …I think it’s crucial that we have some kind of rhythm. Whether you can write all day every day, or whether you can write four hours on Sunday. Whatever it…
The post 5 Thoughts On the Difficult Work Of Writing appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to take the attitude of long-term travel back home with you.
The post Vagabonding audio companion: What it’s like to come home after a long trip appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Meghan Daum on career-reinvention, flyover country, and voices of generations
The post Meghan Daum on career-reinvention, flyover country, nuance, and Gen X appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the twenty-year gap in generational nostalgia In the seventies, people lived the fifties, reminiscing over the preordained conclusion that it had been a better time to be alive (Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley on TV, American Graffiti and Grease in movie houses). In the eighties, people fixated on the sixties, and particularly…
The post 13 Outtakes from Chuck Klosterman’s “The Nineties” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Paul Theroux on aging, slow travel, and the inherent complexity of Mexico
The post Paul Theroux on reading, teaching, and slow travel in Mexico [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Planning long-term journeys around the world's cheapest destinations, with Tim Leffel
The post How inexpensive countries are the secret to prolonging the journey [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the joys of traveling in the United States To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the climate and geography change with every state line. These are indeed things that cannot be learned from…
The post 9 Outtakes from Dave Grohl’s “The Storyteller” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Journalist Harley Rustad on the mysterious disappearance of Justin Alexander in India.
The post Lost in the Valley of Death: The life and disappearance of Justin Alexander appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Pascal once wrote that all mankind’s misfortunes spring from just one cause: ‘he does not know how to sit still in a room.’ I like that: it makes me less ashamed to admit that I am a poor traveler. Places interest me, but more and more often the mechanics of getting to them defeats me,…
The post Prologue from Peter Whitfield’s “Travel: A Literary History” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his friends recall the bygone rite of making cassette mixtapes to share with friends
The post A mixtape (of sorts) about mixtapes: Music as intimate communication appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French genius who blessed the world by inventing the hypodermic syringe and the calculating machine (if such things can be counted blessings) took a singular view of man’s liking for travel. It was an ironic view, considering that he also invented the world’s first public bus service: for so far…
The post Simon Winchester’s intro to Martin Parr’s 1995 photo book “Small World” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The Sears Christmas Wish Book was (truly) great American literature (with Tod Goldberg)
The post Holiday Special: Celebrating the Sears Christmas Wish Book [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast gives me the pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore most any topic that interests me — and often I end up exploring affecting and meaningful episodes from my own life. I have, for example, produced episodes about my childhood fascination with the 1976 Sears Christmas…
The post Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes about life-affecting personal experiences appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In this bonus outtake from "The Nomads," Rolf talks about how technology affects travel.
The post Digital nomadism [bonus]: How technology has changed the way we travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What it must be like to be an angel or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner. The last time we go to bed good, they are there, lying about darkness. They dandle us once too often, these friends who become our enemies. Suddenly one day, their juniors are as old as we yearn to be.…
The post Parents, by William Meredith appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Vacations as we know them began in the mid-twentieth century Long enjoyed by the leisure class, vacationing was an unknown practice to most Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet by midcentury, paid leave periods, carved out for the explicit purpose of giving individuals the chance to get away for a while,…
The post 9 Outtakes from Richard K. Popp’s “The Holiday Makers” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf recounts his first 8-month vagabonding trip 27 years ago.
The post Van Life before #VanLife (encore): Revisiting a classic USA road trip appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, November 1967) One warm summer day I was standing on a beach near Tom Never’s Head on Nantucket. Children were splashing around in the gentle surf as their mothers lay gabbing by the Styrofoam ice chests and the Scotch Grills. About thirty yards from shore, a man paddled back and…
The post “Shark!” by Peter Benchley (the 1967 magazine essay that inspired “Jaws”) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) To convey a dynamic nonfiction narrative, one must build oneself into a character on the page The problem with I is not that it is in bad taste but that fledgling personal essayist and memoirists may think they have conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that I…
The post 7 thoughts on the necessity of turning oneself into a “character” in nonfiction appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf discusses his travel book "Marco Polo Didn't Go There" with the Nomadic Network book club.
The post Tales from the vagabonding trail: Discussing “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In this remix episode, Ari Shaffir and Rolf brainstorm on where to travel next
The post Vagabonding audio companion: Travel brainstorming, with Ari Shaffir appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My travel mindset has been undergoing a walking-oriented transformation ever since I met my wife Kiki — though my yen for traveling on foot goes back to my 2002 trek across Andorra and 2000 walk across Israel, and even the summer-camp backpacking excursions of my late teens. Below are my five favorite recent Deviate episodes about…
The post Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes (so far) about travel on foot appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf talk about why he created a podcast, in this remix of an episode of "3 Clips"
The post Maintaining creative fitness: How my podcast augments my writing career appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A discussion of the factors that go into choosing where to set up a home in America.
The post Finding the best places to live: Searching for home in America [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) As a writer your only job is to make the reader turn the page As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the…
The post 5 thoughts on giving your essay or story a narrative “engine” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Editor Pamela Fiori on the pioneering travel magazine Holiday, and its postwar influence.
The post Travel writing in the “Mad Men” era: The myth and legacy of Holiday Magazine appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Twenty years ago, the skeleton of a wild pig gleamed among violets while the leaf rot around it grew hot with spring. I slipped the molar out of its grin like an oiled key and took it home, leaving the boar to reassemble, if it ever did, at a gap-toothed resurrection. I hold it up…
The post The Man Explains His Souvenirs, by Charles Rafferty appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Historian and author on the spectacle and idiosyncrasies of the ancient Olympics in Greece.
The post The Olympics started out as a travel fest: All about the ancient Greek Games appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The joys and idiosyncrasies of traveling Japan on foot.
The post Experiencing Japan the slow way (on the 750-mile Shikoku Pilgrimage) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The World samples a half-century, peripatetically. It selects its subjects as it goes along. Its title may perhaps imply a more considered and objective collection, the sort of memoir in which a philosophically minded novelist might reflect upon his times, or a retired columnist from a quality broadsheet. Do not be deceived. This portfolio of…
The post Prologue from “The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000,” by Jan Morris appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A "Vagabonding Audio Companion" episode, on the mindset and lessons of long-term journeys.
The post Vagabonding audio companion: How your earliest journeys transform you appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago. My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own…
The post Five of the best Deviate episodes about life-changing travel experiences appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf shares audio outtakes from an in-progress film documentary about digital nomadism.
The post Digital nomadism: A history and future (from a documentary film in progress) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Asher Ross for an upcoming book from Kinfolk on souvenirs. What thoughts do you have on bringing home souvenirs for friends and family? If seeking to preserve an ephemeral experience in an object is often hopeless, even for ourselves, what does it mean to try to…
The post Notes from an interview about how the meaning of souvenirs has changed appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Julia Cooke on it was like to fly PanAm at the dawn of the Jet Age.
The post Travel in the “Mad Men” era: Stewardess work at the dawn of the Jet Age appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when…
The post Rolf Potts marries Kristen Bush in quiet post-pandemic Kansas ceremony appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Dave Seminara on how a man named William Baekeland conned an elite travel community.
The post The curious case of a con-man who infiltrated the world of elite travelers appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(An excerpt) Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or…
The post “Why all writing is travel writing,” by Nicholas Delbanco (2004) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Kiki dig deeper into the notion of nostalgia, and how it frames one's memories of life.
The post Memories you didn’t know you remembered: A deeper dive into nostalgia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, December 1965) One noontime last spring a photographer, two assistants, a lady editor and a fashion model turned up at the corner of Bleecker and Leroy Streets, in Greenwich Village. This is a tenement block and a market district, the nucleus of what is left of the old Bleecker Street…
The post “Bleecker Street: Bohemia’s Barometer,” by Michael Herr appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The Seeker and the Monk: Why Thomas Merton is as relevant as ever
The post What a 20th century monk can teach us about living (with Sophfronia Scott) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From the outset, the “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast was meant to give me the occasional pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore my other interests. My five favorite music-themed Deviate episodes are outlined below. Though later seasons of my podcast have episodes riffing on bands like Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Iron…
The post Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes about music (so far) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Late last year, a Spanish researcher named Sergio Gonzalo contacted me with some questions for a multidisciplinary study on travel. “I am trying to approximate how different sciences or disciplines have approached travel as an activity and as a phenomenon,” he wrote. “For that reason, some specialists from different disciplines (such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology…
The post Notes from an academic Q&A about travel and travel theory appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his friends recall their formative travel years teaching English in Asia.
The post Life changing travel experiences: Epiphanies of expatriate life in Korea appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ants are not fond of margarine. Like us they prefer Butter. They do not have cholesterol problems Because as yet they do not own TVs. For centuries They have toiled in order that they might be able to Take a night off and watch the Northern Lights which Are their version of canned laughter. They…
The post Ants, by Vicki Hudspith appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Mosquito Coast" author Paul Theroux on slow travel and the art of listening [encore]
The post Paul Theroux on the necessary obstacles of immersive slow travel [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Some of my most popular Deviate podcast episodes have been about the craft of writing (and, often, travel writing specifically). This has dovetailed nicely with the creative writing classes I offer in Paris each summer — and I have, over the years, featured interviews with such Paris co-teachers as Major Jackson, Hala Alyan, and Elena…
The post Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes about writing craft (so far) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
It is commonly known that travelers, when thrown together overseas for extended periods of time, will eventually start to obsess on the idiosyncrasies of their bowels (Tim Cahill has commented on this at length). And, in places where toilet paper seldom exists (such as Asia), there is much debate about just how sanitary it is…
The post A few notes on wiping your ass (from filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Remembering the Wichita Wings, and the bygone glories of major-league indoor soccer.
The post Triumph in the middle of nowhere: The most 1980s underdog story of the 1980s appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A look back at baseball's nearly forgotten grassroots superstars (with historian Phil S. Dixon)
The post On the road with the superstars of Negro League baseball, 100 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One of the reasons I named my podcast Deviate (as opposed to, say, Vagabonding) is that I wanted the creative freedom to veer away from the travel issues I’ve covered as a journalist for the past two decades, and explore other intellectual themes. Since my interest in cinema and screenwriting is as old as my…
The post Five of the best Deviate podcast episodes about movies (so far) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The history of how philosophy has influenced (and intertwined with) travel
The post Notes on the philosophy (and deeper meaning) of travel, with Emily Thomas appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Most schools employ outmoded models of learning We learn and teach in institutions that were designed to train citizens for the Industrial Age. From compulsory public schooling for K-12, to the birth of the research university, virtually all of the apparatus of “school” was designed to retrain farmers and artisans to the Industrial mode…
The post 5 thoughts on developing a better pedagogy for writing appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The celebrity autographs pictured here come from a souvenir book Kiki’s great aunt kept when she worked as a “Harvey Girl” on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the 1930s. The Chicago-to-Los-Angeles luxury cars saw a lot of celebrities in the days before jet travel, and it was common practice for Harvey Girls…
The post Brief thoughts upon reading a book of celebrity autographs from the 1930s appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Pam Houston on the joys of creating home amid a lifetime of travel.
The post Pam Houston on home, and the beauty of our pared-down lives [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, July 1954) Recently I drove from Garrison-on-Hudson to New York on a Sunday afternoon, one unit in a creeping parade of metal, miles and miles of shiny paint and chrome inching along bumper to bumper. There were no old rust heaps, no jalopies. Every so often we passed a car…
The post “Jalopies I Cursed and Loved,” by John Steinbeck appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Kiki reflect on the philosophy of walking amid at 20+ mile hike.
The post Long-distance hiking at home: The art of journeying out of your own back door appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond, That dreams at the gates of the day? Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies, And ever so far away; Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls, And ye of the trail overfond, With saddle and pack, by paddle and track, Let’s go…
The post The Land of Beyond, by Robert W. Service appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From The New Yorker, June 17, 2002 (an excerpt) In the summer of 1977, I saw Star Wars twenty-one times, mostly by myself. I was thirteen—that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me, impatient to get to my favorite seat. All twenty-one viewings took place at the Loews…
The post “Alone at the Movies,” by Jonathan Lethem appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Pico Iyer on travel, impermanence, and what Japan can teach us about life.
The post Pico Iyer on the creative task of travel across the world and deep within [encore] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Every so often university students interview me about my travel-writing career — particularly its origins — and some of these exchanges are worth publishing here, since these questions are relevant and worth making public for the sake of other aspiring writers. The exchange below was initiated in 2018 by Marleigh Love, a creative writing student…
The post Q&A notes for a research paper on The Writer’s Journey appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Bruce Kirkby on three months of off-grid travel, with kids, in Himalayan India
The post What it’s like to take your kids on a three-month journey in the Himalayas appeared first on Rolf Potts.
There is this sense from Before Sunrise that life, when it adds kinds of completeness and continuation, never equals the potential those youthful moments once contained.
The post Thoughts on watching the Before trilogy in a single day, 25 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Around the World in 80 Trains author Monisha Rajesh on the joys of rail travel.
The post The joys and idiosyncrasies of global train travel (with Monisha Rajesh) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums.
The post Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking”: A Personal Testimony appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Kiki (and Salvie the cat) talk about how the travel ethos can apply to home life.
The post Five Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home (a road-trip intro to Deviate Season 4) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, May 1965) My widowed mother’s name is now “Memère”— nickname for Grandma in Québecois—since her grandson, my nephew, calls her that. It is 1957. I am still an itinerant; Memère and I are going from Florida to try to settle down in San Francisco, our meager belongings following us slowly…
The post “On the Road With Memère,” by Jack Kerouac appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Reporter Thomas Bird interviewed me by email last month for a South China Morning Post article called “Digital nomads adjust to living in one place rather than traveling.” What follows is the full text of our exchange on the topic of how travelers are adjusting and finding opportunities amid new global realities. Do you think…
The post Thoughts on how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect digital nomads appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Ari Shaffir discuss walking across Israel, kibbutz living, and other Holy Land travels
The post Life changing travel experiences (with Ari Shaffir): Walking across Israel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the essential hardship of travel in the ancient world As late as the end of the fourth century BC, travel in and around Greece was neither easy nor particularly pleasant. Those who went by sea depended on the sailings of merchant-men, put up with casual accommodations once abroad, and worried about pirate attacks…
The post 9 Outtakes from Lionel Casson’s “Travel in the Ancient World” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A discussion of writing strategies with Jeremy Bassetti of the Travel Writing World podcast
The post How to write a travel memoir (and how failure is the best teacher) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How lifestyle simplicity can free up the time to let you enjoy life on your own terms
The post Strategies and arguments for the simple life (from an off-grid perspective) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) A reader of books is a reader of himself Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself…
The post 7 thoughts on the power of reading appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An audio remix of Rolf's old Thanksgiving Special for the Travel Channel
The post American Pilgrim: Revisiting Rolf’s lost Travel Channel Thanksgiving special appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand,…
The post Marginalia, by Billy Collins appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The pleasures of (and strategies for) traveling solo, with Stephanie Rosenbloom
The post Solo travel: Celebrating the pleasures of (and strategies for) journeying alone appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From The Guardian, September 19, 2009 (an excerpt) Last year, on a visit to the Mani in the Peloponnese, I went to visit the headland where Bruce Chatwin had asked for his ashes to be scattered. The hillside chapel where Chatwin’s widow, Elizabeth, brought his urn lies in rocky fields near the village of Exchori,…
The post William Dalrymple on the new generation of travel writers appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A "Vagabonding Audio Companion" episode, on the core principles of long-term world travel.
The post Vagabonding audio companion: Time Wealth and the spiritual texture of travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literature is created on both sides of the frontier that divides fact from fiction, and it is crossed by writers quite casually. But it is a border that should be defended. Orginally published in The Guardian, November 16, 2002 (an excerpt) For much of my life, I have worked on frontiers. Night, fog, armed guards,…
The post Truth is another country, by Timothy Garton Ash appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Pam Mandel reflects on stories from her new travel book, "The Same River Twice"
The post Coming-of-age on the road as a dirtbag backpacker (with Pam Mandel) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
She comes on drenched in a perfume called Self Satisfaction from feather boa to silver pumps. She does not need to be loved by you though she’ll give you credit for good taste. Just because you say you love her she’s not throwing herself at your feet in gratitude. Every other star reveals how worthless…
The post Mae West, by Edward Field appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Frank Bures on how culture-bound syndromes like "penis theft" aren't as weird as they might seem.
The post On penis theft, creepy clowns, anxiety, and how culture tells us what is real appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the notions of “success” that bind us to big cities Success and failure were the terms in which young people who had just moved into the city spoke. It was not a place to live as much as it was a test or a game. I despise both. “Why don’t you leave?” I…
The post 7 Outtakes from Eula Biss’s “Notes From No Man’s Land” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A text companion to Rolf's Deviate episode ""Pandemic love, cheating death, & cassette tapes: A personal history of nostalgia."
The post Notes from my “Personal History of Nostalgia” podcast essay appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A meditation on the peculiar power of memories, 50 years into life
The post Pandemic love, cheating death, & cassette tapes: A personal history of nostalgia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One attempts to be significant on a grand scale in the knockdown battle of life but settles. It is clammy today, meaning wet and gray, not having a hard, calciniferous shell. I love the expression “happy as a clam,” how it imparts buoyant emotion to a rather, when you get down to it, nonexpressive creature.…
The post Clam Ode, by Dean Young appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A personal history of becoming a rock music fan amid 1980s Satanic Panic
The post A folk history of Satanic Panic, backmasking, and rock music in the 1980s appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Vagabonders Cory Lee and Zachary York talk about traveling the globe with physical disabilities
The post What it’s like to travel 37 countries (and counting) in a wheelchair appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) Several weeks ago, as I was reflecting on what I might say at this occasion, I encountered a friendly colleague, whom I asked for ideas and suggestions. “What is the title of your lecture?” he asked. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom,” I replied. “Interesting,” he responded. “You mean, therefore, identity is the faculty, authority…
The post The Potentate and the Traveler, by Edward W. Said (1994) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf shares his keynote address from the 2018 TravelCon gathering
The post 20 lessons learned from 20 years as a travel writer: A TravelCon keynote appeared first on Rolf Potts.
5 examples of primal desires in movie storytelling 1. The desire to save one’s family (Die Hard) 2. The desire to protect one’s home (Home Alone) 3. The desire to find a mate (Sleepless in Seattle) 4. The desire to exact revenge (Gladiator) 5. The desire to survive (Titanic) 9 rules for finding and fixing…
The post 3 screenplay-writing checklists from Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat!” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel writer Suzanne Roberts on sex, beggars, and other ragged edges of the travel experience.
The post Sex, travel, and the art of being a better bad tourist (with Suzanne Roberts) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort. So slow a fading out brings no real pain. Breath growing short Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain Of energy, but thought and sight remain: Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls On that small…
The post Japanese Maple, by Clive James appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How appreciating baijiu liquor can help you better understand and experience Chinese culture
The post Drunk in China: A vicarious Middle Kingdom adventure via its favorite booze appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his high school friends discuss racial diversity as they experienced it growing up.
The post Growing up racially diverse: A not-so-politically-correct roundtable appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a…
The post 6 thoughts on writing your way into an understanding appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Eric Weiner on what time-honored philosophy teaches us about self-improvement
The post Eric Weiner’s journey into the ways philosophy compels us to live better appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always pushing the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the…
The post Lower the Standard: That’s My Motto, by Karl Shapiro appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Celebrating the joys of travel hostels, and memories of an iconic hostel stay in Cairo
The post Life changing travel experiences: The best hostel ever (in Cairo) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, water, and time itself, translated…
The post 9 Outtakes from Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why we love specific albums from specific artists at specific times in our lives
The post Brian Koppelman on the intimacy of podcasting and the genius of Iron Maiden appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Douglas Rushkoff From an entry on his June 1, 2002 weblog (an excerpt) One great function of the blog is to reach more people with the same message. Since I receive a few emails each week asking me to explain the best ways to “get started” as a writer or journalist, or to find…
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Author Ed Buryn on the timeless principles of independent travel
The post Vagabonding pioneer Ed Buryn on what indie travel was like in the 1960s appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Futurist (and Wired magazine co-founder) Kevin Kelly on how travel has changed
The post Kevin Kelly on how travel has changed over the past 50 years [rebroadcast] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Something has been growing around here, something is going on. I look for signs that we are all being filmed by slow cameras. Around us beds go mad making themselves; pots boil & empty & fill again like magic; toilets convulse & flush under cold porcelain; Wall paint thins to a sigh. Our underwear greys…
The post Statuary, by Patricia Traxler appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rebroadcast in honor of Emmy-nominated screenwriter Bettina Gilois (1961-2020)
The post Remembering Bettina Gilois (and what writers can learn from her work) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One great thing about travel is the way it forces you to come to terms with the rich complexity of history – particularly the amazing historical sites you had no idea existed until you set off to wander the world. Many fellow-travelers recommended that I visit Sigiriya when I was in Sri Lanka, but it…
The post One gift of travel is being amazed by histories you didn’t know existed appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to handle it when your parents die: A conversation with my parents
The post Talking with my parents about how to handle it when your parents die appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel to majestic historical sites is, when it comes down to it, an act of creative imagination – and few things serve to remind the traveler of this fact like the task of waiting in line to see said historical sites. This image (one that is usually left out of visual travel accounts) documents me…
The post What you learn about ancient historical sites by standing in line outside them appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Bonus: What travel-writing means in the 21st century, with Doug Bock Clark
The post Bonus: Unpacking the mission of travel-writing in the 21st century appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Doug Bock Clark on traveling Indonesia's last subsistence whaling culture
The post What the world’s last subsistence hunters can teach us about humanity appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his high school friends' quarantine book club: The Great Gatsby
The post Revisiting The Great Gatsby, high-school-style, in quarantine appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The day before I ascended Adam’s Peak, I formulated a creative plan to get to the ancient Sri Lankan rock fortress of Sigiriya immediately after the climb. Since the traditional Adam’s hike begins just after midnight and ends just after dawn, I figured I’d skip a second night in the trailhead-town of Dalhousie and head…
The post How I arranged my own limo ride (in a minivan) ride across central Sri Lanka appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why travelers seek out museums (especially in Iceland)
The post Why travelers visit museums (in places like Iceland), and what they find there appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Adam’s Peak is the second-highest mountain in Sri Lanka, and (since reaching the peak is a pilgrimage ritual for adherents of the country’s four biggest religions) it is by far the most popular for hikers. Local Buddhists believe a rock on the 7,359-foot summit bears the footprint of Lord Buddha; Hindus think the footprint belongs…
The post Celebrating the ritual of a non-pilgrim pilgrimage up Adam’s Peak appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and his friend Brian recall the experience of jumping freight trains as young men
The post Life changing travel experiences: Jumping freight trains in the Pacific NW appeared first on Rolf Potts.
News analysis: Rolf and writers like Pico Iyer and James Fallows speculate on what travel will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The post The Future of Travel After the Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Rolf Potts.
After traveling classic Sri Lankan train routes across the highlands from Kandy to Ella to Nuwara Eliya, I ended up taking a long-haul tuk-tuk from Nuwara Eliya to the Adam’s Peak trailhead town of Nallathanniya. This wasn’t planned in advance; I did it at the suggestion of my driver, Suranga, whom I’d hired to take…
The post An unexpected long-haul tuk-tuk journey through central Sri Lanka appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Lands of Lost Borders" author Kate Harris on how travel puts us in touch with life's deepest questions
The post Kate Harris on the way travel can lead us into deeper questions about the universe appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This is Nuwon, who oversees a restaurant named Mandala Café just down the road from the train station in Ella. Mandala Café has an unabashedly Rastafarian vibe, and pictures of reggae great Bob Marley hang in every corner of the restaurant. Though Ella is a mountain town smack in the middle of Sri Lanka, Mandala…
The post It is totally normal to see a quasi-Rastafarian bar in the middle of Sri Lanka appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Actor-writer Andrew McCarthy tackles questions from the classic "Proust Questionnaire"
The post Andrew McCarthy on the Proust Questionnaire (and Brat Pack legacy) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Located in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, Ella is a classic backpacker town. Sure, there are parts of Ella that exist independent of tourism, but it’s not hard to spend a week in the town entirely in the company of travelers from Europe and North America. There are plenty of things to do in…
The post On the joys of hostel life in a Sri Lankan hill-station backpacker town appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to make a life through your art without selling your soul
The post How to balance creative success with business success: An open chat appeared first on Rolf Potts.
While trains are a great way for travelers to get around in many parts of the world, in Sri Lanka they are something of an attraction in and of themselves. On the Kandy-to-Ella train through the central highlands – and again on the Ella-to-Nuwara Eliya train – my fellow travelers spent hours hanging out the…
The post In Sri Lanka trains don’t just take you to attractions; they are the attraction appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Will Hunt, author of "Underground: A History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet," on the joys of subterranean travel
The post How underground exploration is the perennial frontier of adventure travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, I’ve been writing these updates for more than two decades now – it’s something I’ve been doing for such a long time that, in the age of continually updated social media, a website Update page feels downright anachronistic. Yet for all the years I’ve written travel-updates from various corners of the world,…
The post Update: Spring 2020 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Having arrived in Kandy without a hostel reservations (or even a Sri Lanka guidebook), I fell back on the old backpacker trick of asking local folks at the train station for recommendations. Two decades ago they might have pointed me to a hostel (which was what I had in mind), but now that I’m in…
The post On the joys of staying put (and running errands) in a place like Sri Lanka appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How Maggie Downs quit her job and embarked on (her mother's) solo dream-trip
The post Honeymoon without her husband: Maggie Downs’ uncommon world journey appeared first on Rolf Potts.
After a guesthouse reservation fell through in Colombo I decided to give Sri Lanka’s sweltering capital a miss and head five hours inland to the storied hill-station city of Kandy. Coming off Sumatra I hadn’t properly fleshed out my travel plans for Sri Lanka, but sometimes it’s nice to improvise, and learn things as you…
The post Stepping back onto the backpacker trail on the trains of Sri Lanka appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How mentoring can enhance your career (with Cal Fussman and Alex Banayan)
The post The win-win of being a mentor, with Cal Fussman and Alex Banayan appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to make a "Shelter in Place Film Festival" (instead of bingeing video)
The post Why a “Shelter in Place Film Festival” beats bingeing video right now appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf talks about "travel from home" strategies with TripScout founder Konrad Waliszewski
The post Using your travel skills to make quarantine life better: An open chat appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This photo was taken last summer, during my keynote speech at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral” festival, which is a kind of Central Asian equivalent of TED Talks. I also gave some smaller talks, including a “Travel Storytelling” session to a room full of young Kazakhs. The crowd was smart and engaged, and they had tons of…
The post How being travel-influential differs from being an travel “influencer” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf reflects on the future of travel, and what's in store for Deviate Season Three.
The post Reports from my travels in quarantine: A Deviate Season Two coda appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The month I spent in Sumatra proved to be as spectacular a kickoff to any year I’ve experienced during my time on planet earth – but it was merely the first stop on a dynamic Air Treks itinerary that took me to a number of countries in Asia ( with Sri Lanka, as we shall…
The post One could spend years in Indonesia without needing to revisit a single place appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Life changing travel experiences: Quarantine recollections of Paris and Prague
The post Life changing travel experiences, quarantine edition: Paris and Prague appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Thoughts on how the current pandemic will transform long-term travel.
The post How COVID-19 will transform the business of long-term world travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Eva Holland on how fear works, and how to best manage it.
The post What fear is, how it works, and how to manage it (with Eva Holland) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic last month (which, in real time, didn’t feel sudden, even as data changed on a daily basis) left us all scrambling to understand what was happening, why it was happening, and what we should do about it. One way I sought to make sense of the disease during…
The post Travel and health in the age of COVID-19: A Deviate podcast roundup appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I need to confess, as I come to the end of the Sumatra leg of these Dispatches, that the visual narrative of these posts is – perhaps inevitably – shaped by what I was able to photograph as a solo traveler on the island. A few weeks ago I illustrated a mini-essay about the joys…
The post Celebrating (the glorious imperfection of) travel-selfie photos appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel writer Marco Ferrarese describes how the pandemic has affected his family back in Italy.
The post On losing one’s parents to COVID-19: A traveler-report addendum appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One curious aspect of my stay at Sumatra’s Rimba Ecolodge was the fact that, during my tenure there, I was the only guest who was not there to observe wildlife. We all ate meals together in the dining lodge, and while I enjoyed the company of my French and Dutch and German fellow-travelers, they would…
The post People of Sumatra #19 & 20 (travelers’ edition): Surfers and birders appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Dr. JP Santiago on how the pandemic will transform air travel, and what the new "normal" will look like.
The post How COVID-19 will transform airports (and other pandemic considerations) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Dr. JP Santiago on how the way we talk about COVID-19 affects how we respond to it.
The post Why the way we discuss (and interpret information about) COVID-19 matters appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One physical activity I rediscovered during my time in Sumatra was open-water swimming. I alluded to this in my previous post about Lake Maninjau – but whereas my swim to the bat-infested slopes of Tarandam Island was a one-off undertaking, I swam over mile each day during my stay at Rimba Ecolodge. Specifically, I made…
The post On the joy of open-water swimming (and taking selfies) in the Indian Ocean appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A collection of global reports on what it's like to travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The post What it’s like to travel during COVID-19: Reports from around the world appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Global reports on pandemic-age travel, including Matt Kepnes on contracting COVID-19.
The post How Nomadic Matt got COVID-19. Plus: Reports from stranded travelers appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Dr. JP Santiago on how to discern useful health info from nonsense in the time of COVID-19.
The post How to make sense of health data in a time of pandemic (and beyond) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Nadege and Reno founded Rimba Eco-Lodge almost one decade ago as a way to integrate tourism with habitat preservation on the Indian Ocean coast of West Sumatra. Tourism, they tell me, is more sustainable than logging or mining when it comes to bringing money into the area – and the very presence of tourists protects…
The post People of Sumatra #17 & 18: Nadege and Reno, impresarios of ecotourism appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A TED Talk cheat sheet: Elena Passarello on how to share your expertise via public speaking.
The post How to enhance your career by becoming a better public speaker and reader appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I spent my final week on Sumatra at Rimba, a remote ecolodge on a roadless stretch of coast one hour by boat from Padang. There, I rented a rattan-and-bamboo room with beach access and a view of the Indian ocean for $18 a night, including three meals a day at the dining lodge, and full…
The post Playing games with my day (and life) at my Sumatra beach office appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Lifestyle coach Tara Quinn on how to take time off from work to travel.
The post On sabbaticals: How to take a career break without breaking your career appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I think I become smitten with wherever I am in the world if I have enough time to linger and get to know it a little. This was certainly the case with the Mentawai settlements of Siberut Island, an isolated and beautiful (and, at times, uncomfortable) place that harbors some of my favorite travel memories…
The post Siberut farewell meal: How the Mentawai thank their meat before they eat it appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Comedian Ari Shaffir and Rolf have an open-ended talk on joys and idiosyncrasies of independent travel.
The post Ari Shaffir and Rolf do a deep-dive on the finer points of indie travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and novelist Aaron Hamburger talk about Nirvana, and how music can frame experience and memory
The post Remembering Nirvana, and how music can frame experience (and memory) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already — the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are…
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Rolf and Tod Goldberg unpack their youthful fixation with the band Jane's Addiction
The post How music affects you when you’re young (or, the joys of Jane’s Addiction) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My guide in the jungles of Siberut Island was a Mentawai fellow named Agus, who was a walking example of how cultures everywhere creatively adapt to a globalized word. Agus wore Western garb, had a university linguistics degree from the Sumatran mainland, and spoke great English (his fourth language, after Mentawai, Bahasa, and Minangkabau) –…
The post People of Sumatra #16 (Mentawai Islands edition): Agus, the modern tribesman appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Life changing travel experiences: A journey in Asia with my mom and dad
The post Life-changing travel experiences: China and Mongolia with my parents appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This post isn’t about the dragonfly pictured here; it’s about the joys (and challenges) of trying to take a shit in the jungles of Siberut Island. One would have to be extremely self-conscious to take a selfie while voiding one’s bowels in the jungle; hence the photo of this dragonfly, which I spotted while looking…
The post The task of taking a shit in the jungle is yet another gift of travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara fact-checks the dinosaur book Rolf wrote at age 7.
The post Why dinosaurs matter (also: Rolf fact-checks the dino book he wrote at age 7) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At some point in the past five years I realized that listening to podcasts has replaced watching TV or movies for me. Though I still watch the occasional video entertainment, usually via streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I more often turn to podcasts for amusement and edification when the workday is done. My relationship…
The post Relistening to The Rewatchables: 5 best episodes of The Ringer’s movie podcast appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One of the best things about trekking into the jungles of Siberut Island was the opportunity it afforded me to become completely, refreshingly bored. Experiencing this kind of boredom – and coming to terms with it in an attentive, creative away – is, in fact, one of the time-honored gifts of travel. The rise of…
The post Simple boredom is, at times, one of the greatest gifts of travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Matt Green walked across America, then walked down every street in NYC. This is his story.
The post What Matt Green discovered by walking every single street in New York City appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A personal history of sports fandom (and watching the Super Bowl in distant countries)
The post A personal history of being a lifelong pro-sports fan (Super Bowl special) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When I trekked into the jungles of Siberut Island off the western coast of Sumatra last winter, my guide, Agus, kept me busy with activities that gave me a peek into the local Mentawai culture. No doubt Agus has, in the years since he began taking travelers into the jungle, learned to balance an accurate…
The post Experiencing (and staging) Mentawai authenticity in the jungles of Siberut appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the tendency of early anthropologists to see tourists as intruders So long as the idea of culture remained bound in place and time and the interest of anthropologists was focused on the discrete nature of particular “cultures,” phenomena such as tourism could rarely be viewed as more than an unwelcome intrusion upon the…
The post 9 Outtakes from Erve Chambers’ “Native Tours” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sgt. John Monk was an army veteran whose heroism spanned decades. This is his story.
The post The power of small choices across decades: The Sgt. John Monk story appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This is what I packed for my three-month journey across Asia last year: A handful of clothes, books, and toiletries that fit into a 35L Tortuga Setout pack. Sometimes, during multi-day jungle or motorcycle treks, I stowed the Setout in guesthouse storage and traveled with the smaller, ultralight Outbreaker daypack. Looking at these items now,…
The post A few notes on the ongoing ritual of packing light appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On confronting discontent, travel as education, and how to write a Big Idea book
The post Chris Guillebeau on goals, writing books, and travel as alt-university appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When I was in Kandy, Sri Lanka last year I mailed nearly 50 postcards to Deviate podcast listeners, as part of an informal Season One promo, while I was on a round-the-world AirTreks itinerary across Asia. Writing 50 or so postcards was good fun, but it made me realize how rare it has become for…
The post Writing postcards (and Instagram posts) as travel ritual appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Your true writer’s voice is rarely an expression of intention When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. –Zadie Smith, “This is how it feels to me,” The Guardian,…
The post 5 insights on how to find your voice as a writer appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Rachel Friedman on non-linear career arcs
The post How to balance a life of artistic ambition with sanity and happiness appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Brief History of Indonesia" author Tim Hannigan on traveling the archipelago
The post Indonesia: An argument for (and essential tips on) traveling the archipelago appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Two decades on, it’s difficult to remember how obsessively the media was fixated with the 1999-to-2000 New Year (and, in particular, “Y2K glitch” worries about computer data). I was writing my “Vagabonding” column for Salon Travel at the time, and the editor there requested that all regular contributors write a short meditation on where they…
The post Noplace to Go: Remembering the Y2K New Year, 20 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A look at Noah Baumbach's cinematic debut, 25 years on
The post Why Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking & Screaming” might be the best movie ever appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the origins of campus “political correctness” discourse Throughout the 1980s, conservative pundits warned of a multiculturalist crusade to reshape the campus. …Speech codes and sexual-harassment policies targeted those who did not display the proper sensitivities to minorities and women. The professors of the academic left underwrote these developments by unmasking the ideal of…
The post 9 Outtakes from Lingua Franca’s “Quick Studies” (2002) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf and Tod Goldberg recall the joys of the old Sears holiday catalog
The post Deviate Christmas Special: Celebrating the Sears Wish Book [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) Space-age technologists tell us that we are the first people for whom it is possible to possess any corner of the globe within twenty-four hours — the first traveler’s for whom the fourth dimension is not a mere hypothesis but an available experience. This very afternoon, you or I could leave the White…
The post Travel and the Sense of Wonder, John Malcolm Brinnin (1992) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author Jeffrey Tayler on the consolations of Dante and Ecclesiastes
The post Bonus: On the therapeutic uses of reading classic literature and scripture appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Author and therapist Hala Alyan on fine-tuning how we talk about our lives
The post What narrative therapy is, and how it can make your life feel more coherent appeared first on Rolf Potts.
[Update: My podcast episode about Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming, featuring journalist and critic Michael Weinreb, is now online.] Noah Baumbach, whose new movie Marriage Story (starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver) debuts this week, is one of the most respected American indie-film writer-directors of his generation. His cinematic vision has evoked comparisons to auteurs like…
The post Remembering Noah Baumbach’s delightfully grumpy early-2000s fan-site Q&As appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Here Lies America" author Jason Cochran on how history gets spun at tourist attractions
The post America’s most solemn historical sites rarely offer an honest take on history appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In light of the (now possibly passé) “OK Boomer” meme bouncing around the internet in recent weeks, I’ve seen a number of social-media references to a 2017 Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope,” which contained this startlingly relevant (for me, at least) piece of cover art containing pop-culture…
The post A “Generation X” take (of sorts) on generational generalizations appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to seek useful life-advice (and write a Big Idea book about it)
The post Author Alex Banayan on seeking mentors for life (and writing) guidance appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the sheer economic power of tourism In gross economic power [tourism] is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture. At least one out of every ten people around the world is financed by the industry, according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labour Organization, who told me that the figure…
The post 7 Outtakes from Elizabeth Becker’s “Overbooked” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why travel media shies away from certain kinds of fun people have on the road
The post On the under-appreciated reality of revelry, sex, and misadventure in travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, As 2019 nears its end, I wanted to check in and recap some of the things I’ve done and places I’ve traveled this year. From traversing the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as well as Sri Lanka, Dubai, and the Republic of Georgia), to speaking at the Kazakh equivalent of TED Talks, to…
The post Update: Fall 2019 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How inexpensive countries are the secret to prolonging the journey
The post The world’s cheapest destinations, and why (besides savings) they’re great appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion — it’s probably one of the innumerable clichés which have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that it takes a special effort not…
The post 7 tips for making your writing stronger, from William Zinsser appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel joys, border politics, and the limits of magical realism
The post Paul Theroux on aging, slow travel, and the inherent complexity of Mexico appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Screenwriting lecture from the Paris Writing Workshop
The post Bonus: Storytelling for the screen: A lecture from the Paris Writing Workshop appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What comics and movies teach you about telling stories
The post Benjamin Percy on how comics and movies teach the best lessons about telling stories appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Long after you have swung back away from me I think you are still with me:you come close to the shore on the tide and nudge me awake the way a boat nudges the pier: am I a pier half-in half-out of the water? and in the pleasure of that communion I lose track, the…
The post Losing Track, by Denise Levertov appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to use travel guidebooks in the 21st century
The post Why travel guidebooks still matter (and how to best use them on the road) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the difficulty of writing about music Writing about music is like describing the color blue. You can try to explain what you see when you see blue, but it is unlikely that a blind person will picture the exact shade you mean. Similarly, you can write about music all you want, but the…
The post 9 Outtakes from Gina Arnold’s “Exile in Guyville” (33 1/3) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to see America through its iconic wilderness areas
The post An insider’s guide to traveling America’s National Parks in the 21st century appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My very first vagabonding trip – which was one of the single greatest journeys of my life (if nothing else because it was my first) – happened 25 years ago, in 1994. My friend Jeff and I spent nearly eight months traveling around North America by van, and the two of us reminisce about the…
The post A (literal) photo album from my 1994 van vagabonding trip around North America appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf recounts his first 8-month vagabonding trip 25 years ago
The post Van Life before #VanLife: Rolf unpacks his very first vagabonding journey appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Michael Mewshaw First presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans, October 28, 2004 (an excerpt) I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I…
The post Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Big Idea" books, and the insights and effort that go into writing them
The post Ryan Holiday on how to conceive, research, and write a “Big Idea” book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
20 years on, Kevin Spacey's suburban drama feels a tad strange
The post “American Beauty” has not aged well: Reconsidering the film, 20 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Wesley Morris on Spike Lee's classic 1989 film
The post Wesley Morris on why Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” remains a classic appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the deepest source of wanderlust I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what. 2) On the intoxicating joy of long-term travel The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so…
The post 9 Outtakes from William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Tips and routes for traveling the continent on foot
The post Explore Europe on Foot: The hows and whys of trek-travel on the continent appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Note: The following interview appears in the paperback edition of Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Rolf Potts: In the book you say that “travel reveals less about the truth of a place and hints more about how complicated the world is.” It struck me that this is also…
The post Kate Harris and Rolf discuss exploration, borders, and wildness appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The joys of trekking overseas
The post The case for why trekking on foot is the best way to embrace slow travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the “Readings” section of the July 2004 issue of Harper’s. [Cliches] STRANGELY FAMILIAR From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted “too frequently” to Strange Horizons, an online magazine of “speculative fiction.” The document was compiled…
The post Pointers on writing an unoriginal story appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Understanding Japan, aging, and impermanence
The post Pico Iyer on travel, impermanence, and what Japan can teach us about life appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Slow-travel strategies in the City of Light.
The post A first- (or second-) timer’s guide to experiencing Paris at a slow pace appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ink runs from the corner of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry The librarian does not believe what she sees. Here eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs…
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The people of my time are passing away: my wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: it was once weddings that came so thick and fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: now, it’s this…
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How (and why) to keep a travel journal on the road
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1) Adults are often ashamed to be novices As adults, we rarely learn fresh skills or dare ourselves to change direction. We urge our children to be bold risk-takers, to show grit and open themselves to new experiences. But us grown-ups? We hide behind the way we’ve always done things. We become so boring! Adults…
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Celebrating the classic prison drama, and why it's so affecting
The post The Shawshank Redemption’s brilliant reworking of Stephen King, 25 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Never explain something you can dramatize Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing — they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. Dialogue, the natural talk of characters pursuing desire, is not a platform for the filmmaker’s philosophy. Explanations…
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Celebrating Tarantino's masterpiece, 25 years on
The post Celebrating the subtle (and not-so-subtle) genius of Pulp Fiction, 25 years on appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Tips and insights from one decade of travel
The post Bonus: Nomadic Matt’s top-19 lessons learned from a decade of travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to travel the world for years at a time
The post Matt Kepnes on how to travel for years (instead of days or weeks) at a time appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Narrative structure can be found everywhere Narrative structure can be found everywhere: in jokes, lab reports, historical accounts, personal essays, songs and ballads, news coverage, comic books, movies, sitcoms, and ballets such as the Nutcracker that tell a story through dance. Some television commercials are mini-narratives lasting only a few seconds without dialogue or…
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"Microadventures," and redefining adventure as you grow older
The post Alastair Humphreys on making outdoor adventure a more active part of your life appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Of all the times I’ve been name-checked in the Washington Post, the most counterintuitive occasion came last month, when it appeared in an obituary for Bushwick Bill, the one-eyed, 3’8″ gangsta-rapper most notable for his work with the Geto Boys. Specifically, the obit alluded to my 2016 book The Geto Boys, which was part of…
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Will New Orleans still be there in 100 years?
The post Will New Orleans still be there in 100 years? Examining the fate of a city. appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Is tourism is ruining the destinations we love?
The post Backpacker, Go Home: How Tourism Is Ruining Everything (or Not) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism/personal essay: Rolf reflects on the journals he kept between 1984 and 1986 – a time when he played D&D, bicycled everywhere, and pretty much watched the same movies as the boys in Stranger Things.
The post Stranger Things is the story of my youth (and my mid-1980s journals prove it) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Travel allows one to stop acting like a new person and to start becoming one The unfamiliarity of travel jolts you out of your familiar patterns. Who we are on the road is different from who we are at home. I don’t know if who we are on the road is closer to our…
The post 9 Outtakes from Matt Kepnes’ “Ten Years a Nomad” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How to (truly) get off the beaten path as a global traveler
The post Seth Kugel on how to (truly) get off the beaten path as a global traveler appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win…
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How to tell true-life stories
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Remembering David Lynch's counterintuitive travel classic, 20 years on
The post Why David Lynch’s The Straight Story is a travel classic (and how it got made) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1 Who says science fiction is only set in the future? After a while, the story that looks least believable is the past. The console television with three channels. Black and white picture. Manual controls: the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven. You have to get up and walk somewhere to change…
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1) On what travel can reveal about the way we live If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardor and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might…
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What makes travel movies good
The post Celebrating the best travel movies ever (and what, exactly, makes them good) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Robert D. Kaplan Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (an excerpt) Knowing the future is easy, if only we were willing to see the present. In the 1980s, it was one thing to learn about Afghanistan through fleeting and sporadic news reports; it was another to watch with a…
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Rolf recalls his attempt to invade the set of The Beach
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1) Allow healthy separation between you and the first draft A bit of separation between you and your script is healthy. After a few weeks, you might even forget every word that you wrote. That is a good thing. It’s important to look at your script with fresh eyes, as a new reader would. Reread…
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Author Dave Cullen on covering Columbine and Parkland
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Early on you introduced me to young women in bars You were large, and with a large hand You presented them in different cities, Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafés. It was a time of general confusion Of being a body hurled at a wall. I…
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Sarah von Bargen on how smarter travel creates better journeys
The post How to travel lighter, safer, and smarter (featuring Sarah von Bargen) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How no-bag travel can improve the journey
The post How to travel with no luggage at all (and what this teaches you) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the way empathy requires inquiry and openness Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” 2) On the…
The post 9 Outtakes from Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“The time-honored tradition of the flâneur is when the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it.” –Will Self, interviewed in World Hum “He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of…
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Rolf reflects on how things have changed since his 1999 Asia journey
The post 5 ways indie travel has changed (and stayed the same) since 1999 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) Why is so much travel writing so boring? Why on Monday morning do people talk about an op-ed piece they read in the Sunday paper, or a sports column, or a magazine essay, or a feature profile, but rarely a travel story? Why do the travel magazines, lavish with tips and sumptuous photographs,…
The post Roads Less Traveled: Why so much travel writing is so boring, by Thomas Swick appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Embracing philosophy as a way to help life suck less
The post How philosophy can (truly) improve your life, featuring Monica McCarthy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ari helps Rolf make sense of his first magic mushroom experience
The post Ari Shaffir unpacks Rolf’s experience of doing psychedelics for the first time appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A “close reading” is a detailed examination of a text to study its design. The goal is to explore how an effective text works, and consider the decisions and strategies the author used in creating it. There is no rigid set of rules about how one must approach a close reading, but there are a…
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I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. “Sit down and have a drink” he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. “You have SARDINES in it.” “Yes, it…
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1) On the ubiquity of beauty Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 2) On the uses of simplicity It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if…
The post 9 Outtakes from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(an excerpt) We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches…
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Cultural criticism: During a journey across south and southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the changes he's seen over the course of 20 years as a vagabonding traveler.
The post 5 Ways Indie Travel Has Changed — And Stayed The Same — Since 1999 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) The story begins to flow once you pinpoint the right idea The book is the idea. Once you have that idea, it just flows out. This is perhaps the best advice I can offer. Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way…
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My grandpa was a farmer shaved with big hands on his straightedge wiping grey goo onto a newspaper fold at the kitchen table white chipped pan warm dirty water he stared out at the fields never missed a spothis eyes were set deep like a crop he’d always hoped for and he talked so slow…
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1) On the intrinsic human urge to travel The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, the bear…
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By Larry Habegger (an excerpt) The best travel stories are really stories about life, with lessons for the writer and reader about ourselves and the people and places in our still magical world. We don’t have to travel far to explore both the outer and inner worlds. Some of us love to roam the world,…
The post Writing About Travel: A Brief Primer appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) The better the villain, the better the hero The better the villain, the better the hero. The better the villain, the better the plot, because the villain is the one who’s usually driving the plot. I was very, very, very lucky to inherit [Hannibal Lecter]. I could not invent him to save my life.…
The post 6 thoughts on enhancing your screenplay by fine-tuning your villain appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This is the kit Amanjano uses to make Mentawao tribal tattoos, of the sort he (and shaman like him) wears all over his body. The top item is a palm-wood hammer that is used to tap the wood-mounted nail (note lower item) when injecting tribal ink under the skin. Tattoos are one of the first…
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My second host in the Siberut Island rainforest was Amanjano, a 62-year-old shaman who lived on a scenic bend of stream deep in the jungle. Amanjano proved to be more laid-back and happy-go-lucky than Amantiru, my first host – in part, I’m sure, because of his nature, but also because of his age. Whereas Amantiru…
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This is my send-off after a multi-night stay at Amantiru and Baitiru’s place in the Siberut Island rainforest. It was interesting how quickly I became used to the rhythms of jungle life. I recall thinking, upon first hiking up into Amantiru’s house, “Dude, that guy is wearing a loincloth.” A couple days later, having gotten…
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The social atmosphere on Siberut Island was very much geared toward evening gatherings. It took me a while get used to it, since even before the web-wired “information age” I grew up surrounded by popular culture like TV – and Amantiru’s place didn’t even have a radio. Indeed, the songs Amantiru and his friends sang…
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After the teacher asked if anyone had a sacred place and the students fidgeted and shrank in their chairs, the most serious of them all said it was his car, being in it alone, his tape deck playing things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth had been spoken and began speaking about their rooms,…
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My trekking guide, Agus, told me the story of some Dutch journalists who wanted to visit an “authentic” Siberut Island village, and were disappointed that the Mentawai they saw within a day of the Baderaeket River used plastic cups and ate processed sugar. Insisting that Agus take them deeper into the jungle for a purer…
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Amantiru, my Mentawai host on Siberut Island, processed sago flour using a technique not dissimilar to traditional wine-makers’ ritual of stomping grapes. He jokingly called it “dancing without music.” Whereas the world’s most iconic staple foods are rice (commonly associated with Asia), wheat (Europe and the Middle East), and maize (the Americas), the Mentawai diet…
The post A short primer on Mentawai sago-flour preparation (aka the Sago-Pulp Workout) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One of the more startling features of Mentawai houses are the animal skulls that hang over the lintel of each family home. Some of these bones once belonged to wild pigs, others to flying foxes. Most unnerving to behold are the bones of “simpai,” the black-and-yellow primate endemic to the islands, which yield faintly human-like…
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I suppose I’ve always known that there are men in isolated parts of the word who dress in bark-fiber loincloths and lace their arms and legs in animist tattoos, but it was a tad strange to meet one in person. During the days I stayed at Amantiru’s longhouse a part of me kept waiting for…
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1) On the way trails have made us what we are Trails can be found in virtually every part of this vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours. Throughout the history of life on Earth, we have created pathways to guide our journeys, transmit messages, refine chaos, and preserve wisdom.…
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The Baderaeket River is the first step in reaching the Mentawai tribal villages on the Siberut Island. “Baderaeket” means “One Way” – and the river has this name because it’s the only way to get into the rainforest on this part of the island. After traveling 20 miles up the Baderaeket River by boat with…
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I am by nature an introvert – and this instinct can really kick in when I’m around people who don’t speak English. Usually, in a place like Asia, someone will come over and try to strike up a conversation, but these women did not. At least, not at first. I took this picture not long…
The post People of Sumatra #12 & #13 (Mentawai Islands edition): Mageba and Simalaje appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel has a way of making you imagine yourself living alternate existences. Sometimes these daydreams are the result of genuine cross-cultural empathy. Just as often, however, they are pure fantasy. I saw this little island on the high-speed ferry to the Mentawai Archipelago from the Sumatran mainland. It seemed perfect somehow, with its white-sand beach,…
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When we recount our travels to other people, it is common and understandable to leave out those throwaway afternoons when a simple task goes awry in a banal way. Misadventures, of course – those spectacular and at times melodramatic failures of the expected – are the bread-and-butter of travel writing. But it’s less common to…
The post When getting lost is neither an adventure nor a misadventure, but just is what it is appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Peter Hessler Originally published in The New Yorker, July 24, 2000 (an excerpt) “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress asked. I was getting used to making difficult decisions in Luogang, a small village in southern China’s Guangdong Province. I’d come here on a whim, having heard that Luogang had…
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I met Toikot on Siberut, the largest island in the Mentawai Archipelago, off the western coast of Sumatra. Toikot is 78 years old. Like most Mentawai men his hair has remained jet-black into old age, and his lean, ropy muscles would put even Iggy Pop to shame. His full-body tattoos mark him as a shaman,…
The post People of Sumatra #11: Toikot, Mentawai shaman-elder of Siberut Island appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Of all the travel-instincts I’ve built up over the years, few compare to the hard-won skills I learned during my two-year stint as an English-conversation teacher in South Korea. As exhausting at that job could at times be, it taught me how to interact with people who have yet to master spoken English. It made…
The post I acquired some of my best travel-superpowers teaching English in Asia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Hello Guesthouse in Bukittinggi has an unassailable word-of-mouth reputation among backpackers who’ve been to this part of Sumatra – in large part because of Ling, who co-owns the place with her parents, and knows a little bit about everything there is to see and do within a 100-mile radius of the city. The work that…
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More often than not travel writing (and, in particular, travel Instagram) leaves out those necessary but far less glamorous moments of travel that are nonetheless essential if the travel — and travel writing — process is going to happen. I’m thinking of those small moments of running errands, doing laundry, waiting in line at train…
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Here’s a real-life travel parable for you. It happened to me in the western Sumatran city of Bukittinggi, when I was hungry and wanted to find a place to have dinner. Having been in the Bukittinggi area for more than a week, I wanted to try a local specialty. Ever since I’d visited the pacu…
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1) Make the scene three-dimensional in the reader’s mind There is Flaubert’s rule that you need three particular things in the room for the room to become three-dimensional in the reader’s mind. So that if we establish this box of Kleenex, that bottle, and that lamp — not in one sentence, but over a few…
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About a week after embarking on my winter journey through Asia, I wrote the following passage in my journal: “More than steak or bourbon I am dying for a decent map to Sumatra.” Indeed, as much as I have celebrated the joys of motorcycle travel here in Sumatra, the journey has been complicated by the…
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People of Sumatra #9: Zul (aka Bandalo). Arlen Nova’s Paradise Homestay has been on the shore of Lake Maninjau for nearly a quarter-century now, though Zul has only been the manager for the past few years. As with most of the people who live in this part of Sumatra, Zul is Minangkabau, which is the…
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When I arrived at Lake Maninjau in western Sumatra and saw this steep-sloped little island sitting half-a-kilometer across the water from the front door of my guesthouse cottage, I knew I’d have to swim out and see what was there. As I’ve traveled over the years, I’ve come to realize that a given travel moment…
The post A whimsical swim to Tarandam, Lake Maninjau’s island of giant bats appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Jonedi’s life was formed by Minangkabau tradition, which stipulates that young men must leave their home-villages in their late teens. This coming-of-age ritual, called “merantau,” literally translates as “emigration” – but in practice it’s something more along the lines of “go out and make yourself useful.” Jonedi left his home-village for the city of Bukittinggi…
The post People of Sumatra #8: Jonedi, the Minangkabau drifter (not dreamer) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This guesthouse cottage cost me $8.50 a night, breakfast included (dinner was an extra $1.75). It was located at the edge of the Harau Valley (the setting of my recent posts), and the neighboring cottages were arranged around a lotus pond, with rice-paddies stretching out in one direction, and the waterfall a two-minute walk in…
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When I saw this Sumatran father steering his three sons through a Harau Valley village in a motorcycle sidecar I knew I’d have to flag him down and ask for a picture. The above photo was the result. Twenty years ago, when I was first traveling through Asia, I’d reckon this photo would have yielded…
The post Taking travel-photos of local people is a different task than it was 20 years ago appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I spent a week riding a motorbike through the equatorial highlands outside the Sumatran hill-station town of Bukittinggi. My overnight destinations included the waterfall-studded Harau Valley and the freshwater caldera of Lake Maninjau. Motorcycling in this part of the world is a crash-course in road intuition. One doesn’t study urban traffic patterns here so much…
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I met these guys by accident, when a sudden rainstorm caught us all out in the open. I was walking back to my motorbike from a backcountry waterfall; they’d been tapping rubber trees in a rural grove near Sumatra’s Harau Valley. Siar motioned for me to join them as they jogged to a shelter on…
The post People of Sumatra #6 & 7: Mal and Siar, who waited out a rainstorm with me appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The above image offers a glimpse into my failed attempt to create one of those Instagram-influencer-style don’t-you-wish-you-were-me-in-this-beautiful-waterfall type videos. It all started out innocently enough, when I was riding my motorbike around western Sumatra’s waterfall-studded Harau Valley. I’m not sure what the name of this waterfall is. I initially assumed it was called “Dilarang Merusak…
The post This is what happens when Instagram-influencer type waterfall selfies go wrong appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Minangkabau Joe is not his real name, but he reminded me of my Uncle Joe back in Kansas – another effortlessly competent farmer-athlete who walked with a swagger not because he was trying to swagger, but because that’s the way he walked. I’m no expert in the intricacies of Sumatran cow racing, but I sensed…
The post People of Sumatra #5: Minangkabau Joe, the Michael Jordan of cow-racing appeared first on Rolf Potts.
One of the strangest and most fascinating spectacles I’ve witnessed here in equatorial western Sumatra is “pacu jawi” the harvest-festival cow races that the Minangkabau people have been staging each year for more than a century. The Minangkabau have a unique and faintly reverent relationship with bovines – their name literally translates to “buffalo champions”…
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By the time Ari arrived at Lake Toba from Medan he had been on the road for 6 hours with a share-taxi minivan full of passengers. By the time we reached Bukittinggi he’d been driving for 24 hours. One of the reasons Sumatra gets far less tourist traffic than islands like Java and Bali is…
The post People of Sumatra #4: Ari, the Neal Cassady of the Trans-Sumatran Highway appeared first on Rolf Potts.
- It’s so much easier to get further from home than nearer that all men become travelers. 2. Of all the ways to avoid living perfect discipline is the most admired. 3. Idolators of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of kitsch, camp, trash that they cannot fail…
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As I wander across Sumatra I plan to occasionally point out journey-details that don’t jibe with the “Instagram-perfect” travel aura that seems to frame most popular travel reportage (a trend that is likely as audience-driven as it is centrally designed). Two things that stand out about Sumatra after more than a week of traveling here:…
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Boymen. After gazing at Danau Sidihoni (Sumatra’s lake-on-an-island-on-a-lake-on-an-island) for 20 or so minutes one starts to get antsy. Boymen and his friends were smoking cigarettes near their motorbikes on the far shore of the lake, so I went over to talk to them. Back home in the U.S. I probably wouldn’t randomly approach a group…
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Here’s a post that will appeal primarily to geography dorks: Danau Sidihoni (pictured above), which I reached by motorcycle during my Lake Toba sojourn, has the distinction of being a lake that is on an island (Samosir) that is on a lake (Toba) that is on an island (Sumatra). Perhaps someday an enterprising Sumatran developer…
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Santi. I’m not sure what Santi does for a living, or where on Samosir Island she lives, but I do know that she was remarkably cheerful for someone who’d just gotten her scarf caught in her motorcycle wheel. I didn’t have a tourist map to Samosir Island, so apart from Lake Sidihoni (more on that…
The post People of Sumatra #2: Santi (who got her scarf caught in her motorbike sprockets) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I found the above sign — and its whimsical rundown of tourist options — at Lake Toba, Sumatra. Apparently a gold-capped variety of magic mushrooms grow on the mountain slopes of Samosir Island, and it is locally legal (in the de facto sense, at least) to harvest and sell them. Many of the restaurants in…
The post Yes, magic mushrooms are still very much a part of the Lake Toba backpacker scene appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This is the view from the balcony of my Lake Toba, Sumatra guesthouse hotel, which is costing me $11.75 a night. Since I got here I’ve been putting in-house expenses on a tab in a paper ledger at the front desk: $1.42 for a fried-rice-and-chicken dinner; $0.71 for a cup of locally grown Sumatran coffee;…
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1) On the liberating joy of trashy movies Trash doesn’t belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the fun of trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and entertaining. …Who at some point hasn’t…
The post 9 Outtakes from Pauline Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Ganda. Short for “Propaganda,” a word his mother found in a magazine the week he was born. Propaganda never had a problem with his name until his 20s, when he got a job on a Holland America cruise ship. The word “Propaganda” on his nametag befuddled English-speaking passengers and made his bosses nervous. Now he…
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Twenty-five years ago this month, when I was about to embark on an eight-month van journey around North America (my first-ever vagabonding sojourn), my sister gifted me this copy of Let’s Go USA 1993. At the time I had only the dimmest conception of what indie travel-guidebooks were. That first journey taught me that travel…
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By William Zinsser (an excerpt) Next to knowing how to write about people, you should know how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like. In a few cases…
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Friends and vagabonders, Twenty years to the month after my first international vagabonding journey, I have embarked on another multi-month adventure through Asia. Back in 1999 the journey began in Bangkok, lasted nearly three years, led to my first book Vagabonding, and was largely chronicled in my second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. I…
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1) Bringing a list of questions isn’t essential When it comes to interviews, I very rarely turn up with a list of questions. Almost never, in fact. If you’ve prepared well, and know something about your subject, the conversation just happens. –Tom Bissell, interviewed in The Rumpus, April 17, 2012 2) Let the person talk…
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A woman travels to Brazil for plastic surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty and has the usual desire to stay pretty. Once she is healed, she takes her new face out on the streets of Rio. A young man with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead. The body is shipped back to…
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1) On the importance of reading to writing I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns…
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By Jess Walter (an excerpt) 1. The population of Spokane, Washington is 195,526. It is the 105th biggest city in the United States. 2. Even before the recession, in 2008, 34,000 people in Spokane lived below the poverty line—a little more than 17 percent of the population. That’s about the same as it was in…
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1) A character must control his or her choices within the movie When I see scripts that aren’t working, it’s often because that character really has no agency. Has no real decision-making capability on what’s going to happen next. Either they’re always responding to what the villain is doing, or what other characters are sort…
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Lights are burning In quiet rooms Where lives go on Resembling ours.The quiet lives That follow us — These lives we lead But do not own — Stand in the rain So quietly When we are gone, So quietly… And the last bus Comes letting dark Umbrellas out — Black flowers, black flowers. And lives…
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1) On the edifying mission of pre-tourism travel Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. 2) On the aesthetic compromises of modern travel I don’t want to sound too gloomy, but there’s…
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(an excerpt) FIRST GRADE My hair was too short and my U.S. Government glasses were horn-rimmed, ugly, and all that first winter in school, the other Indian boys chased me from one corner of the playground to the other. They pushed me down, buried me in the snow until I couldn’t breathe, thought I’d never…
The post “Indian Education,” by Sherman Alexie appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Deviate Season One finale
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1) On how quotidian life is like killing zombies Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game, and it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting four hundred work emails on a Monday morning, or filling out paperwork that only generates…
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Stories about Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and more
The post An outsider’s inside history of the Beat Generation, as told by Charles Plymell appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) The letter form is a good way to warm up I’ve found that the letter form is a good way to get me going. I write letters just to warm up. Some of them are just, “Fuck you, I wouldn’t sell that for a thousand dollars,” or something, “Eat shit and die,” and then…
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I pick an orange from a wicker basket and place it on the table to represent the sun. Then down at the other end a blue and white marble becomes the earth and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.I get a glass from a cabinet, open a bottle of wine, then I…
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(an excerpt) Vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and…
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Balancing travel with a true sense for home
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Former Black Flag front-man Henry Rollins has, over the course of his career, achieved notoriety as a punk-rock pioneer and prolific spoken-word performer – but in recent years he’s also become an advocate of slow, humble, close-to-the ground international travel. Though Rollins’ 1994 band-tour memoir Get in the Van contained hints of his shoestring-travel instincts,…
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Celebrity, storytelling, and the joys of travel
The post Andrew McCarthy on storytelling, celebrity, and how travel changed his life appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) When you’re ready to stop, stop For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit. –William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976) 2) Your…
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Time wealth, and the poetics of time
The post Major Jackson on the poetics of time (and how best, in life, to spend it) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sometimes a moment contains so much of itself it begins to multiply. A beetle lands on an entomology book, then scuttles towards The White Album. At any moment there are at least twelve assholes reading On the Road on the road and some lovers talk about fucking while they fuck. Remember that time we drank…
The post Like Kanye Rapping About Kanye Rapping About Kanye, by Caylin Capra-Thomas appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Music, expat life, and long-term travel
The post White Zombie guitarist J. Yuenger on music, expat life, and long-term travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the psychic necessity of distant places We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. 2) On the simple pleasures of the present moment For my own part, I am pleased enough with…
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How to take a train across Russia
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The great railway bizarre
The post The great railway bizarre: A Trans-Siberian story (plus audio endnotes) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By Rolf Potts (excerpted from Forever Nomad) Years ago, while I was trying to finish writing a book about the philosophy of long-term travel, I ran into a problem while outlining the final chapter. My intention in this chapter had been to speak to the importance of — and difficulties inherent in — returning home…
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TV storytelling and creative self-discipline
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Not many people know it but Adam and Eve had a dog. Its name was Kelev Reeshon, which means, first dog. Some scholars say it had green fur and ate only plants and grasses, and that is why some dogs still like to eat grass. Others say it was hairless like the Chihuahua. Some say…
The post Adam and Eve’s Dog, by Richard Garcia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An alternative history of popular music
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(an excerpt) In the fifties I learned to drive a car. I was frequently in love. I had more friends than now. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin my roommate shit blood, turned yellow, and lost most of his hair. I attended the lectures of the excellent E.B. Burgum until Senator McCarthy ended his tenure. I imagined…
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How to survive a natural disaster
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By Ryszard Kapuscinski (An excerpt) Herodotus — who lived 2,500 years ago and left us his “History” — was the first reporter. He is the father, master and forerunner of a genre –reportage. Where does reportage come from? It has three sources, of which travel is the first. Not in the sense of a tourist…
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Podcast fame, sports, and performing blackness
The post Wesley Morris on podcast-fame, sports, and performing blackness in America appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On the way photos have turned us into image junkies Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to…
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1980s rock and Satanic Panic
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1) All good stories use some kind of formula Everyone knows that pop genres like horror, mystery, musical comedy and adventure, use formulas, of course — that’s what ”genre” means. The highbrow ideal says that art should be original and (usually) true to life; those are supposedly the hallmarks of quality. But we now live…
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For an hour or two the evening has no limits Or so it seems to you as you walk the pavements Of this, your adoptive city. Before you the sun At play lights the windows of the office buildings In the vault of the avenue, conveying odd images Like the faces seen in the flames…
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From Paul Fussell’s Abroad (1980) As I have said, it is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. A way to combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist. Despite the suffering he undergoes, the anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler: his motive is not inquiry but…
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Most livable small cities
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(An excerpt) Once a young woman walked every afternoon along a stretch of beach. She was tall, with a slender tanned body, and her bathing suit was very short and tight and of a soft gay green yarn. Every afternoon as she crossed the warm sand to the steps up the cliff, she passed close…
The post M.F.K. Fisher’s “Laguna Journal” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A history of the Negro Motorist Green Book
The post On American Highways II: A brief history of the Negro Motorist Green Book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A history of the American family road-trip
The post On American Highways I: A brief history of family road-trips in the USA appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) On why humans seek out stories We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape…
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How to break up with your smartphone
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Shot List 1. Night. River. subtitle: It was for such a night she had waited. 2. Trunk of her car is open and lit by a funnel of light from the porch. 3. She loads the trunk: 4×6 trays, photographic papers, strobe light. Strobe doesn’t fit, she angles it into the backseat. 4. She is…
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Classic rock is nearly (but not really) dead
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1) On authenticity Now suppose some loon comes up and says: “Have you found the real Asia?” It is all real as far as I can see. Though certainly a lot of it has been corrupted by the West. Neither Victorian Darjeeling nor the Kennedy-era Oberoi can be called ideal Asia. I remember Deki Lhalungpa…
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Why travel writing matters
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For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp. –Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer (2006) This sentence…
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Why 1980s teen movies matter
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A little more than seven years ago, I wrote “travel stunt” essay — “Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV)” — that recounted the experience of holing up in a Las Vegas hotel room for one week and spending all of my waking hours watching the Travel Channel. The experience was uniformly awful,…
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How to talk to someone who is mourning
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Friends and vagabonders, Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been working on of late — including my Deviate with Rolf Potts podcast; my new book, Souvenir; and upcoming creative writing classes in Paris and Santa Fe. Podcast: Deviate with Rolf Potts Deviate, which debuted last November (and has since surpassed a quarter of a million downloads), features engaging, off-topic…
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Deep travel, packing light, and the art of listening.
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A couple awaiting the arrival of their first-born delivers instead a ring-tailed lemur. They are beside themselves. The father beats the obstetrician with clenched fists. He curses the nurses and flings himself to the floor bawling. The mother stands up on the table and denounces God. The next day they go home. The lemur eats…
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The way we grow food has been broken for 10,000 years (but we can fix it)
The post The way we grow food has been broken for 10,000 years (but we can fix it) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Excuse me if I’m a little terse here. It’s not about travel. It’s about writing. If you want to publish stories, you have to think about readers first. Why should readers pay (or even take the time) to read your stories if the writing isn’t hard and sharp, instructive and edifying? So my advice would…
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The lost world of 1970s Asia (and why you should travel now)
The post Kevin Kelly on the lost world of 1970s Asia (and why you should travel now) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Dominatrix work, sex therapy, BDSM, and alternative sexualities
The post Kink Doctor Dulcinea Pitagora on sex therapy, BDSM, and dominatrix work appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literary criticism: Travel writing has long been a part of our serious literary fabric, and perhaps more than ever, the power of travel writing to create a dialogue across cultures is crucial.
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Six strategies for helping you correct your self-help bad habits
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The way we teach and learn has been broken for 300 years
The post The way we teach and learn has been broken for 300 years (but we can fix it) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cannery Row has been one of my favorite books ever since I first read it as a teenager. John Steinbeck’s gentle depiction of Depression-era ne’er-do-wells in Monterey, California doesn’t typically appear on lists of great American novels (and Steinbeck himself is better known for works like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of…
The post A Guide to Doc’s Melancholy Music in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Writer Ann Neumann on late-life quality-of-life
The post How we die in America (and why it’s important to talk about it) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
(An excerpt) Every explorer names his island Formosa, “beautiful.” To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful — except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has…
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Travel stories about the quest for souvenirs
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The American road is our art, pure process of leaving. Driving doesn’t end. It only startsas the radio feeds a secret part of the brain that’s always running the American road. Our art has no destination, though it departs, and the eyes, never full, keep filling. Driving doesn’t end. It only starts when the land…
The post It Only Starts, by Melody Davis appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Magic hoo-hoos man-titty, and what romance reveals about life in America
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Travel, memory and the curious psychology behind collecting souvenirs
The post Ari Shaffir on travel, memory, and the odd psychology of souvenirs appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Death of Kurt Cobain and origins of Generation X
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1) On New York City It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. 2) On…
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A Kansas-based travel writer on our obsession with souvenirs. Interview by Gina Kaufmann Rolf Potts, travel writer and author of Souvenir A miniature Eiffel Tower, a plastic snowglobe that encases the White House, a seashell from the beach … we don’t give much thought to souvenirs. A travel writer, who just wrote a book about souvenirs,…
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The Epic One-Against-Five Foul-Out Basketball game of 1964
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Cultural criticism: Rolf Potts on tourism, kitsch, and the eternal tchotchke. Excepted from his 2018 book Souvenir.
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Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.At rest on a stair landing, They feel it Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the boy as he practices…
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Negotiating fear, and what it's like to be dead for ten minutes
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Native American zombie movies and DIY film
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I try to discourage the preoccupation with “being a writer”. I don’t even let my students talk about it. The writing suffers under that kind of self-consciousness. I failed one student a Duke. His mother called me and said, “He doesn’t usually fail. He’s a good student, and he wants to be a writer.” I…
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Sports fandom, and growing up Muslim in America
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By Rany Jazayerli The year was 1860, and the world was, as usual, in upheaval. In China, the Second Opium War was coming to an end. America was preparing itself for major surgery, in the form of the Civil War, that would finally cure the young nation of its congenital defect of slavery. And in the…
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Mid-life career change, defining a generation, and finding God
The post Sophfronia Scott on God, mid-life career change, and defining a generation appeared first on Rolf Potts.
By David M. Gross and Sophfronia Scott [2018 companion podcast interview with Sophfronia Scott online here.] They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short…
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By Bob Shacochis Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, ‘Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend.’ If you want to know a man, the proverb goes, travel with…
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The weird and complicated history of the Star-Spangled Banner
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What it's like to be a Latino police officer in America
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What it's like to be a black police officer in America
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There was a life before us my sister and I discovered, silently looking at photographs we shouldn’t have been looking at of the English girl my father was engaged to during the war. Here she is right in front of our eyes, the woman before my mother, in a black lace cocktail dress holding a…
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A Shadow History of Rock Music in the 1980s
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One of the writing projects I’ve been working on this winter is Last Nine, a coming-of-age screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for more than a decade now. Built around a single incident I remember from my high school Spanish class when I was 17 years old, Last Nine tells the story of a teenager…
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Plotting murder, and the emotional impact of sports
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“I always want to remind people that the word fiction doesn’t come from some imaginary Latin verb meaning I make things up as I go along. It actually comes from a real Latin verb which means I give shape to. The essence of fiction is shaping, patterning, and plotting, using symbols, handling narrative, all those…
The post How the Devices of Fiction Can Enhance Travel Writing appeared first on Rolf Potts.
How the B-movie sausage gets made
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Getting your big creative break at mid-life
The post Novelist Cynthia Sweeney on getting your big creative break at mid-life appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Poetry: "A well-known circus man who was reputed to be immune from snake bites, died at the County Hospital after having been bitten by a rattlesnake."
The post Novels in Three Lines, if Félix Fénéon had written for Billboard Circus News appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, Keep probability-some say-in view. But my advice to story-tellers is: Weigh out no gross possibilities, Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of Known instances of virtue, crime or love. To forge a picture that will pass for true, Do conscientiously what liars do- Born liars, not the lesser…
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Keanu Reeves, idealized love, and the joys of celebrity fixation
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The Sears Wish Book was (truly) great American literature
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Quitting your smartphone, and the merits of magic mushrooms
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What follows is an abridged transcript of Tim Ferriss’s podcasting advice from Deviate with Rolf Potts, Episode One. Sub-section topics within the interview include the following: 1. How Tim Ferriss Got into Podcasting 2. How to Frame Questions in an Interview 3. The Advantages of Doing the Interview by Skype 4. Deciding if Podcasting is…
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The Disaster Artist, bogus authenticity, and thrash metal
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Introversion, finding mentors, and mountaineering's Glass Ceiling
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Optimizing creativity, discipline, and throwing out quality work
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On black/white and gay/straight male friendships
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How to create a successful podcast
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“Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other. That is, the particular and the universal. A travel book will make the reader aware of a lot of things — ships, planes, trains, donkeys, sore feet,…
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1) A journal forces you to think clearly about the day “The journal calmed me and forced me to think clearly about the day. Often the day had been muddled with so many things happening one after another that the only way to straighten it out was to write about it, reliving it until the…
The post 8 Thoughts On Keeping a Journal When You Travel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The following is adapted from a lecture in my July 2017 screenwriting class at the Paris Writing Workshop. 1. All characters must suffer. No Game of Thrones character avoids misery. How they deal with suffering is how we learn who they are. 2. Obligation must be at odds with desire. No Game of Thrones character…
The post 15 Ways Game of Thrones is a Master Class in Conflict-Driven Storytelling appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the plot is emotional, intellectual, or physical — as long as it compels the reader to…
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From Off Assignment's recurring feature devoted to the letters that travel writers pen during their earliest hours in alien lands, Rolf shares a 2000 letter he wrote to his new Belgian girlfriend from Laos.
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Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for…
The post You Reading This, Be Ready, by William Stafford appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores. The fundamental difference between them is that a confession, in the word’s historical, nonliterary sense, is addressed to some entity—God, the court, the public, a person one has wronged. That…
The post 5 Thoughts on Confession in Memoir, from Emily Fox Gordon appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Don’t be afraid of dying. The glass of water Is quickly poured into the waiting goblet. Your face that will be of no further use to mirrors Grows more and more transparent, nothing is hidden. It’s night in the remotest provinces of the brain, Seeing falls back into the great sea of light. How strange…
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“In most cultures, stories entail causality and goals, and so that’s what listeners expect when they hear a story. This expectation is so strong that the listener will use them when remembering the story, even if the story lacked these elements.” –Daniel T. Willingham “The Privileged Status of Story” (2004) “By telling stories, you objectify…
The post 6 Thoughts on the Importance of Storytelling appeared first on Rolf Potts.
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man,…
The post A Mown Lawn, by Lydia Davis appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Exactly twenty years ago I was entering my fourth month of living as an expatriate English teacher in Pusan (a.k.a. Busan) South Korea. This was my first experience of living in another country, and those first few months were difficult — partly because of culture shock, partly because of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-life mid-twenties crisis, and partly because…
The post Eurodance Music Ruined My 1996 Arrival in Korea (and Left Its Mark On K-Pop) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For the past several years now I have, unfortunately, found it nearly impossible to reply to all the emails various people send my way. I feel a faint sense of guilt when I leave messages unanswered, but there are reasons why I don’t always respond. So, while I always enjoy hearing from people, you’ll up your odds…
The post I Love to Hear From People (But There Are Some Caveats) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak…
The post The History Teacher, by Billy Collins appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This Sunday I’ll be watching the Patriots and Falcons play Super Bowl LI via wee-hours live-stream in the southern African beach town of Swakopmund, Namibia. This game-day ritual is a time-honored tradition for me: Since I first traveled overseas 20 years ago, I’ve followed Super Bowl games from 16 different cities in 9 separate countries…
The post Watching the Super Bowl in Namibia (and: Titles I Celebrated #8-10) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
1) Plays are written with a communal audience in mind I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal…
The post 4 Thoughts on Playwriting and Process, from August Wilson appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as…
The post Two-Headed Calf, by Laura Gilpin appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism: The Sears catalog might well be considered a great work of American literature, having influenced the syntax of advertising, transformed mail-order commerce, and catalyzed America's (decidedly democratic) language of desire.
The post Literature of Desire: The 1976 Sears Christmas Wish Book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Twenty-five years ago my friend Liesl made me an audiocassette mixtape called Rondo Rolf. I haven’t owned a functioning tape player for more than a decade, yet I can’t bring myself to throw Rondo Rolf out, since that would be akin to, say, burning a treasured scrapbook or travel-journal. The tape simply contains too many associations to…
The post Mixtapes as a Lost Language: A Brief Cultural Primer appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media pundits have pinpointed a number of seeming prophets — philosopher Richard Rorty, Supreme Court justice David Souter, the TV show Black Mirror — that anticipated the conditions of the election before they happened. To me, the most salient prognostication of 2016 comes from historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book The…
The post Six 1962 Daniel Boorstin Quotes That Foresaw Events In 2016 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
THE MASSIVE SWASTIKA, twenty meters in size, can only be seen from the air in autumn, when the larch trees turn a yellowish brown and stand out against the evergreen forest. Had the pattern been sown in the distant past, it would have been visible only to a higher being. At halftime, the marching band…
The post Excerpts from Angle Of Yaw, by Ben Lerner appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Writing craft: Studying a show's pilot script is a useful way for aspiring scriptwriters to get a sense for how its creators chose to establish the world of the story, introduce its characters, and leave the viewer wanting more.
The post Stranger Things: 5 Differences Between the Pilot Script and the First Episode appeared first on Rolf Potts.
“Friends and vagabonders, “Welcome to my newly redesigned website!” I wrote that phrase almost exactly sixteen years ago, when (thanks to a lot of heavy-lifting from my webmaster Mike Marlett) I updated RolfPotts.com from its basic, blue-and-white 1998 design to a black-and-tan layout with ambitious new content. A prominent feature of this new content was my “Vagabonding…
The post Notes On Updating An Author Website in the Late 2010s appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For the past 25 years I’ve regarded July of 1991 as being significant for two reasons. First, it was the month I chopped off the “mullet” hairstyle I’d been wearing since 1986 and began to grow out what might be termed “grunge hair.” And, just as significantly, it was the month I attended the first Lollapalooza festival when…
The post A VHS-Dubbed MTV Memoir of Lollapalooza 1991 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially…
The post Musée des Beaux Arts, by W. H. Auden appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Poetry: "At least, not in the pages of Billboard Magazine / Which chronicled showbiz scuttlebutt in the days / When entertainments were an in-the-flesh affair."
The post Clowns Weren’t Creepy in 1921 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on…
The post Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sports commentary: As a die-hard fan, seeing your team lose in the postseason is a rich source of speculation and mythology. Seeing your team win it all makes for a much better story, save one key conundrum.
The post Notes On the Narrative Conundrum of Baseball Fandom appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism: Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single "Gangster of Love." The racial implications weren't so simple.
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Cultural criticism: The Geto Boys' self-titled third album rattled America’s cultural gatekeepers, making N.W.A and 2 Live Crew look like a society luncheon.
The post The Great Rap Censorship Scare of 1990 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Araki was the only drink on offer, and the owner sloshed it into a plastic bottle from an unwieldy jerrycan before moving around the room to refill clients’ glasses for ten cents a shot."
The post Market Town, Tribal Bar, Country Liquor appeared first on Rolf Potts.
"Whatever Johnny Wadie Red Tabel was, it wasn’t whisky; its flavor was a medicinal blend of anise, vanilla, and laundry detergent, and its buzz arrived in tandem with its hangover."
The post Johnny Wadie Red Tabel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Lyric essay: This prose poem jumbles passages from slave narratives and self-help books, Walden and the Hadith, online therapy forums and celebrity memoirs, weaving together a series of age-specific moments that shed light on the boundaries of memory and the complexities of self-presentation.
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Satire: "Hey there, I’m a TV show set in New Orleans. I’m about art and integrity, and I don’t give a shit what you think of me."
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Found poetry: "I loved drawing out / the symbols / of the alphabet. / They were all / their own kind / of monster with / their own kind of tongue."
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Sports commentary: During Kansas City's inspired 2014 playoff run, social media only heightened the gloriously irrational, neurotic nature of baseball fandom.
The post The Sweet Superstition of Rooting for the Royals appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Graphic memoir: Aided by illustrations by his adolescent nephew, Rolf plumbs the humiliations, triumphs, and idiosyncrasies of his own adolescence.
The post A 14-Year-Old’s 1984 Diary, Illustrated By A 14-Year-Old In 2014 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Personal essay: Thirty years ago, Rolf and a friend from elementary school created a vision of the future—a space opera put to tape—and buried it in a time capsule. Listening again today reveals how we remember the present as it never quite was.
The post Burying the Present appeared first on Rolf Potts.
TV criticism: HBO's series about post-Katrina Louisiana obsessively works to prove it's not a tourist in New Orleans. It ends up losing the city — and the viewers — in the process.
The post Treme’s Authenticity Problem appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism: Dennis O'Rourke's 1988 documentary "Cannibal Tours", which probed the absurdities of global tourism, was as brilliant and cringe-inducing as any episode of "The Office" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Twenty-five years after its initial debut, the rise of social media self-documentation has made the film feel more relevant than ever.
The post Cannibal Habits of the Common Tourist appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism: When, two generations ago, Susan Sontag wrote how "needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted," she very well could have been making a prophetic observation about "selfies."
The post Selfies and the Touristification of Everyday Experience appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: A Chinese teenager defaced the Luxor Temple. That’s bad, but scribbling on Egyptian antiquity is as old as tourism itself.
The post Mandarin Graffiti appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From bicycling across Burma, to shopping for donkeys in the Libyan Desert, to being drugged and robbed in Istanbul, to traversing Israel on foot... Rolf has had his fair share of epic adventures. He has dedicated most of his life to writing about experiences that communicate the glorious complexity and possibility of being alive. In his books, Rolf shares the spirit and philosophy of independent travel. Through the wonderfully voyeuristic ‘Marco Polo Didn't Go There’ and the Zeitgeist defining ‘Vagabonding’, Rolf has inspired an entire generation (including us) to go out and see the world.
The post 2°E with Rolf Potts in Paris appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Long-form reportage: In September of 2012 a Kansas small-college football player was beaten to death outside a late-night house party, allegedly at the hands of players from a rival school. Rolf takes an investigative look at the 125 years that led up to the murder, and how small prairie-town colleges stay alive through sports, often importing inner-city kids to fill out rosters.
The post Murder of football player in Kansas shakes town, raises questions appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Media criticism: Compared to the "Generation X" media frenzy of the early 1990s, the online chatter surrounding HBO's Girls is a refreshingly diverse inquiry into what it means to be young in recession-era America.
The post The Upside to All the Online Chatter About Girls appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Cultural criticism/personal essay: Why do we take pictures when we travel? And what has been lost and gained as our photo albums move from hard copy to digital?
The post Tourist Snapshots appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literary criticism/collage essay: In his literary manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields argues for artistic plagiarism and the end of traditional narrative. Rolf's response — embedded in a story about getting drugged robbed overseas — appropriates its own flavor of plagiarism to counter Shields' argument.
The post Remixing Reality appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Interview: Rolf talks with travel writer Pico Iyer about his book "The Man Within My Head," and how art can help us identify parts of ourselves we never otherwise could have articulated.
The post The Joy of Reading Graham Greene appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: The same travelers who insist on dropping the "s" from Laos in the interest of linguistic accuracy would never call Egypt "Misr" or Finland "Suomi." What factors influence the names we give to the places we visit?
The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Interview: Rolf talks with the legendary travel author about technology, traveling light, reportorial accuracy, notions of home, and the "Tao of Travel."
The post Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and ‘Three Cups of Tea’ appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Essay/Reportage: When allegations surfaced that parts of Greg Mortenson's memoir "Three Cups of Tea" had been fabricated, reports noted that the book is "required reading" for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Various other branches of the military promote titles like "Freakonomics" and "Starship Troopers." Why is this the case, and what do these non-military books offer to combat-bound soldiers?
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Media criticism: Where does the Travel Channel take us? To find out, Rolf locks himself into a Vegas hotel room and embarks on a one-week experiment in gonzo-criticism.
The post Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literary Criticism: Between 1996 and 2002, a spate of British-authored pulp fiction portrayed self-absorbed 20-somethings trying (and failing) to use travel in Asia as an escape from the superficial, directionless, consumerist lives they lead back home. What did these novels predict about the way travel was changing?
The post Sons of “The Beach” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf leaps off of cliffs, soars through the trees, and jets up rivers near Queenstown, on New Zealand's South Island.
The post Exploring the laws of physics in New Zealand appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On a 24-hour train transit from Bangkok to Penang, Rolf learns the social limitations of Thai whiskey, and meets a fellow traveler who embodies the antithesis of "traveling light."
The post Scenes from a train: Thailand to Malaysia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Back in Thailand after a seven-year absence, Rolf revisits the Khao San Road backpacker scene, eats insects in Chinatown, and tests his no-baggage wardrobe in an upscale nightclub.
The post The Same River Twice: Bangkok in Three Acts appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Stuck with a cold in an isolated corner of South Africa's Welgevonden Game Preserve, Rolf's cameraman Justin comes face to face with an unusual bush cure.
The post Justin’s elephant-poop cold remedy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Near Kruger National Park, Rolf discovers that the "Big Five" safari animals aren't nearly so exciting as the creatures one finds by happenstance.
The post Hanging with the animal paparazzi in South Africa appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Looking to trim his beard amidst a luggage-free journey, Rolf stumbles into the most detail-intensive barbershop-shave of his life.
The post An Egyptian straight-razor shave (in 21 easy steps) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Near Giza, Rolf discovers that the vendor culture that surrounds the Pyramids is nearly as interesting (and historically rooted) as the Pyramids themselves.
The post Embracing my inner tourist at Giza appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In the twisting alleyways of a Moroccan medina, Rolf does away with pre-planning and follows his instincts.
The post In Fes: Walk until the day becomes interesting appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Not long after mispronouncing the town of "Chefchaouen" to his Moroccan taxi driver, Rolf goes on to discover the accidental charms of a town called "Tetouan."
The post The wrong town in Morocco appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf explores the streets of central Madrid through seven drinks and nine dishes.
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Three days into his round-the-world no-baggage journey, Rolf explores Paris from the back of vintage Citroën 2CV.
The post Rolling retro-style in Paris appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In transit between New York and Paris, Rolf tries to make the most of a three-and-a-half hour London layover.
The post 19 London clichés in less than four hours appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From his home in rural Kansas, Rolf lays out the reasons why he wanted to circumnavigate the globe without so much as a fanny pack or a man-purse.
The post Why Rolf is Traveling Around the World With No Luggage appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, This fall I will embark on a journey that will take me around the world without using a single piece of luggage. From late August to early October I will explore 12 countries on five continents, crossing the equator four times, without carrying so much as a man-purse. The few items I…
The post Update: Fall 2010 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Advice: There is an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to "do well" in the world instead of living well. This excerpt from Vagabonding explores the notion of simplicity.
The post The Difference: Living Well vs. Doing Well appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Recent months have taken me to places like Wales, Italy, and France — though I’ll confess I’ve spent less time vagabonding than I have giving lectures about the art of vagabonding. 2009 was kind to me in terms of book accolades, as Marco Polo Didn’t Go There became the first American-authored book…
The post Update: Winter/Spring 2010 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Advice: Travel has a way of slowing you down, of waking you up, of pulling you up out of your daily routines and seeing life in a new way. This new way of looking at the world need not end when you resume your life at home.
The post 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Suffering from jet-lag amid a dead-of-winter magazine assignment, Rolf's inability to sleep leads him into a series of after-hours dive-bars, where a coterie of young Russians teaches him the philosophical joys of getting to know a city by night.
The post St. Petersburg, Vampire-Style appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Toward the end of each year I usually post a round-up of my travel highlights from the previous 12 months. This year I’ve been diligent enough with updates that I don’t feel I have many new 2009 details to share. Hence, I’ll just share a few images from some of my favorite (photographable) moments this year:…
The post Update: Fall 2009 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In a five-part series, Rolf Potts joins Trekkies aboard a "Star Trek" theme cruise to Bermuda.
The post Where no Travel Writer has Gone Before appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A video teaser for Rolf's "Star Trek" fan-cruise series. Original music by Rolfe Kent and Meredith Meyer; edited by Mike Marlett.
The post Where no Travel Writer has Gone Before (Video) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Nearly five years ago my old mentor Don George approached me with some interview questions for a book on travel writing he was putting together for Lonely Planet. My Q&A appeared on pp. 35-38 of Travel Writing, which hit bookstores worldwide in early 2005. With Travel Writing going into a second edition this year, I…
The post Rolf’s Advice From Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Last fall saw the debut of my second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, and I spent three months on tour promoting it in various North American cities, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In addition to the great feedback I got from audiences…
The post Update: Winter/Spring/Summer 2009 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In an essay about the merits of global budget travel, Rolf uses his experiences with a group of Cuban bagpipers to illustrate how wandering on the cheap can lead to the kind of unexpected encounters that make a journey memorable.
The post Around the world on shoestring appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: "In Cuba, Guevara's ubiquitous image appears to fill the role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald — a sainted martyr of unwavering purity who also happens to promote a standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu." An analysis of Che's legacy in light of Steven Soderbergh's 2009 movie biopic.
The post Che: The Ronald McDonald of Revolution appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Before we get too far into 2009, I should probably try to sum up some of my travel-writing highlights from last year. Interestingly, my two most prominent happenings in recent months — the release of my second book and my TV hosting debut on the Travel Channel — weren’t even on my radar at the…
The post Update: Winter 2009 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What makes someone want to be the world's most traveled man? Rolf reports from from the back-roads of East Africa.
The post Mister Universe appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Media history: How one nearly forgotten 1920s Kansas publisher's "Little Blue Books" created an inexpensive mail-order information superhighway that paved the way for the sexual revolution, influenced the feminist and civil rights movements, and foreshadowed the Age of Information.
The post The Henry Ford of Literature appeared first on Rolf Potts.
With few crowds or restrictions, the remote Falkland Islands provide an intimate wildlife experience that offers an alternative to that of the Galapagos.
The post My Own Private Falklands appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, This fall will mark the debut of my second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations From Once Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer. This unorthodox collection of travel stories should be out in September, and I’ll add new details about it on my blog and Books page as that date…
The post Update: Summer/Fall 2008 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Whenever Rolf tells people how he learned to windsurf on Israel's Sea of Galilee, he's usually met with a bemused pause, as if a Bible-themed punch line should come next.
The post Windsurfing Where Jesus Walked appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Film commentary: To mark the DVD release of In Bruges, Focus Films asked Rolf and a panel of select travel writers (including Pico Iyer, Heidi Julavits, Tony Wheeler, and Ayun Halliday) to outline their favorite cinematic portrayals of cities. Films mentioned in Rolf's profile include Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, and Alexander Payne's About Schmidt.
The post Focus Films’ “City Confidential” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Media criticism: In recent years, the most vivid legacy of B-movie gimmickry has been the emergence of "mockbusters" — cheaply produced straight-to-DVD films with names like Transmorphers and Snakes on a Train. What sets mockbusters apart is that these films are deliberately released on DVD just as their blockbuster namesakes hit the big screen, thus creating a niche market based on simple consumer confusion.
The post Humor Doesn’t Translate Internationally appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Book review: For men, reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book is like traveling the world with a lovely and intelligent girlfriend who can't stop talking about herself: You've come to admire this woman — and you wish the best for her — but you wish she'd stop yapping about emotional minutiae so you could both look out and enjoy the scenery from time to time.
The post One Man’s Odyssey into Eat, Pray, Love appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, I write this update from Rio de Janeiro, where I am spending the winter learning samba and working on some magazine stories. 2007 proved to be a far-flung year for me, with travels taking me to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Russia, France, the Czech Republic, Canada, Brazil, and many parts of the…
The post Update: Winter/Spring 2008 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Satire: Rolf repackages the 17th century philosopher's 'Of Travel' essay in the manner of a 21st century magazine feature
The post 10 Sizzling Hot Travel Tips From Sir Francis Bacon appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Book review: Chuck Thompson's 'Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer' slams modern travel writing as mediocre, if not dishonest. But glossy magazines aren't the only venues that create a fictional matrix to lure audiences: Books like Thompson's tend to sell themselves on overstatement, as well as the exaggerated sense that the reader is getting privileged information.
The post The Trouble With ‘Smile When You’re Lying’ appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Jeu de Paume once dominated every level of French society. Today, only about 200 players remain. From the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Rolf reports on the lingering vestiges of the game that gave birth to modern tennis.
The post Jurassic Tennis appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf finally found a place to call his own — a bunkhouse overlooking the Kansas prairie. It's infused with the lessons he'd learned from 13 years living out of a backpack.
The post A Vagabond Finds a Home appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Not long ago, Abha Malpani queried me for a Written Road post she was writing about whether or not beginner writers should write for free in the name of building up story clips. Should a person, she asked, be open to writing without pay in the beginning of their career? This is what I told her:…
The post Should Beginning Travel Writers Write For Free? appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why your video store stocks "mockbusters" alongside the blockbusters: A look at how one Hollywood B-movie studio stays in business.
The post The New B Movie appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: Though innovative and inspiring, "On the Road" is a bad blueprint for life on the road. Kerouac's characters might cover a lot of miles between San Francisco and New York, but their adventures along the way are rarely more remarkable than what one might encounter in the freshman-pledge wing of a fraternity house.
The post We Don’t (Really) Know Jack appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Not long ago, while reading a collection of Jack Kerouac’s journals, entitled Windblown World, I came across a startling entry from April 17th, 1948, which sounds a lot like a page from Chuck Palahniuk’s book (and, later, David Fincher’s movie) Fight Club. From an informal gathering of friends in New York, Kerouac reports the following: Ginsberg went…
The post Did Allen Ginsberg (and Jack Kerouac) inspire Fight Club? appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Smoking will soon be banned from indoor public spaces in Paris. Is a museum dedicated to the classic French habit a celebration or eulogy?
The post Le Musée du Fumeur appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: Regardless of how you try to sugarcoat the flight experience, planes have functionally become flying buses — and the only people who would consider having sex on public buses are invariably on their way home from serving 18-to-24-month prison sentences for crystal-meth possession.
The post The Death of the Mile-High Club appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, 2007 promises to be a busy year of traveling, writing and teaching for me. Having returned from Cuba and the Dominican Republic this spring, I will head for Europe this summer, where I will teach writing classes in Russia (at the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg) and France (at my annual workshop…
The post Update: Spring/Summer/Fall 2007 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The Write To Travel blog recently interviewed me about my experiences as a professional travel writer. The Q&A format mimicked the questions I ask writers in my own Travel Writers series, and our resulting exchange might be termed “6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer.” Here’s what was discussed: 1) Did you always want…
The post 6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For the past seven years, I’ve been asking my various travel writer interview subjects how they got started writing. Frank Bures recently asked me that same question for a travel-writing class he’s teaching, and this is what I told him: My writing aspirations can be traced back to about age 13, when I started writing…
The post How My Travel Writing Career Got Started appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In the first of several dispatches from central Australia, Rolf discovers that the best thing about Aboriginal tour guides is that they don't really give a crap about tourists.
The post Going Native in the Australian Outback appeared first on Rolf Potts.
As I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, college students researching journalism, travel literature, and Americans abroad interview me quite frequently. I rarely see the final result of these academic research projects, but I always find the interview process interesting — and hence I will share some of these interviews in coming weeks. I’ll…
The post The Dangers and Joys Of Travel Writing: a Q&A appeared first on Rolf Potts.
A reader named Scott recently wrote me with the following question: How do you get published? I am working on a book proposal, but publishers don’t take unsolicited manuscripts or proposals and agents don’t seem to want unpublished writers. The book is nonfiction, about living and working in Russia for the last two years. I…
The post Tips For Getting a Travel Book Published appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Although the Books page of RolfPotts.com outlines my contributions to a number of literary travel anthologies in recent years, it doesn’t mention my appearance in three small-press fiction anthologies between 1999 and 2002. This is because, until recently, I never even knew these books existed. All of the stories in question were originally written when…
The post The Rolf Potts obscure collection: A look at three anthologies appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Before we get too far into 2007, I should probably try to sum up my 2006. It was really a nice year for me, in terms of travel and writing, as well as life in general. I visited a number of countries for the first time: Grenada in January, the Dominican Republic in May and…
The post 2006: The Year in Rolf appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literary criticism: 50 years on, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" reads like a drug-addled, homoerotic variation of "Jackass." If we aspire this year to recognize the anniversary of a Ginsberg poem that still seems relevant and challenging, we should fast-forward ten years to 1966, when the iconic Beat poet penned "Wichita Vortex Sutra."
The post The Last Antiwar Poem appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Museums honor achievement, but finding original travel experiences amid their exhibits can sometimes be a challenge.
The post In the hall of the Baby Jesuses appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, 2006 has been a busy year for me, both in terms of traveling and writing. The spring months found me in the Dominican Republic, and summer took me to France (to teach my writing class; see below), Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Recently, I’ve had articles appear in Outside (“Just…
The post Update: Fall/Winter 2006-2007 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Korean-born U.S. filmmaker Wonsuk Chin is making a movie that is partially inspired by Rolf's 1990's expatriate writings about Busan. With the movie in pre-production, Rolf travels to Korea to meet Chin and reflect on the expat experience.
The post Expats in Asia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-culture essay: Disparaging one's fellow travelers by national stereotype is a time-honored parlor game. Does it serve any purpose?
The post The worst tourists in the world appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Literary criticism/travel anthropology: How One Egyptian's Bad Haircut from a Greeley, Colorado Barber in 1949 Provided Ideological Fuel for 9/11.
The post The Tourist Who Influenced the Terrorists appeared first on Rolf Potts.
As a traveler, what's the best response when people ask you for money?
The post Begging the Question appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, 2006 is keeping me busy with writing and writing assignments — perhaps most notably my new weekly gig as the “Traveling Light” columnist at Yahoo! News. This, in addition to freelance articles I’ve written for Surfer (about long-term travel), Islands (about kayaking in Crete), Outside Traveler (about sailing in Greece), and the…
The post Update: Spring/Summer 2006 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-culture essay: Within certain hipster circles of indie travel, announcing that you patronize McDonald's is kind of like confessing that you eat your boogers. But the contempt sophisticated travelers hold for McDonald's has less to do with ethical principle than the fact that fast-food franchises ruin the fantasies of otherness that are an inherent part of travel.
The post Slumming the golden arches appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why do places grow vaguely annoying once they become travel destinations?
The post You Have Now Entered the Tourist Zone appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Book reviews: In a round-up of top travel books for the Travel Channel's World Hum, Rolf sings the praises of Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu (#8), Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (#11), Tim Cahill's Road Fever (#21), Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map (#26), and Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo (#28).
The post World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-culture essay: Souvenir hunting is not a meaningful examination of place so much as it is a litmus test of our own whims and preconceptions as travelers. At a certain level, buying an electric blender is more representative of day-to-day Indian life than buying Kashmiri silk (though, admittedly, a blender would not look as good in your living room).
The post Why we buy dumb souvenirs appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What could possibly be bad about an on-the-road romance? Try rekindling it when you get home.
The post The Dark Side of Travel Romance appeared first on Rolf Potts.
What's money worth? In Myanmar, Rolf discovers that travel has a way of putting "cash value" into a new perspective.
The post Lost in Transaction appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On a journey through western India, Rolf explores the former Portuguese outpost of Diu, which brims with history's phantoms.
The post India’s isle of ghosts appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Is it weird to want to visit the flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward during Mardi Gras season?
The post In New Orleans: The Allure of Disaster Tourism appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, 2005 proved to be a busy year for me, with travels and sojourns in New Orleans, England, northern Kansas, France (where I was the summer writer-in-residence at the Paris American Academy), Greece, California, and Mexico. A Korean translation of Vagabonding debuted in Asian bookstores early in the year, and I had an all-new…
The post Update: Fall/Winter 2005-2006 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
He traversed an entire nation in a long weekend. Now, Rolf shows how you can impress members of the opposite sex and write a textbook-perfect travel article in eight easy steps.
The post The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: Though the outgoing Harper's editor's opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, Lapham would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker — someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.
The post An Open Letter to Lewis Lapham appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-culture essay: The rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity: it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash.
The post The tourist is always the other guy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Why you need an agent These days, book editors want to deal initially with agents, not authors. An agent is your best intermediary to the book world. A committed agent will work to help you through the legal aspect of contracts, and help manage your career. Your agent will be your initial editor, as you…
The post Some Tips On Getting an Agent For Your Travel Book appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, After my return from Brazil in 2004, I’ve spent a good portion of the past year splitting time between Baja and USA locations such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Wichita, and New Orleans. This July I will travel to France, where I’ll be the summer writer-in-residence at the Paris American Academy.…
The post Update: Spring/Summer 2005 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Travel-culture essay: As alarming as it can be to find "Fried Rice With Crap" on a menu in Asia, bad translations can go both ways. Indeed, it's only a matter of time before someone travels to China and discovers that the "Crouching Tiger" Chinese ideogram on his butt cheek (purchased in good faith in Seattle) is provincial slang for "Adult Diapers."
The post Signs of Confusion appeared first on Rolf Potts.
During his stint as writer-in-residence for a global Land Rover expedition, Rolf explores the recently completed Carretera Austral (Southern Highway) through Chile's Aisen province.
The post The Other Patagonia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My favorite writing teacher from my college days, memoirist Laurel Lee, died of pancreatic cancer last week in Oregon. She was 58 years old. Laurel was perhaps best known for her 1977 book Walking Through the Fire, which was a Christian-themed account of her simultaneous struggle with Hodgkin’s disease, a dangerous pregnancy, and the fact…
The post Remembering Laurel Lee appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Last month, while I was driving down the Mississippi River on a magazine assignment, I had a curious experience in Rosedale, Mississippi. As I was eating lunch in a place called Leo’s Market, a waitress mentioned that Rosedale is the place where the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange…
The post Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in Rosedale, Mississippi appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, After four months of living out of a Land Rover, I have completed the San Francisco-to-Tierra del Fuego leg of the Drive Around the World expedition. It was an amazing experience across 13 countries, and I wish my expedition teammates luck as they continue this spring through Australia, Southeast Asia, India, China,…
The post Update: Spring 2004 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The desert coast of Peru is as gorgeous as it is baffling.
The post A Desert By Any Other Name appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When Rolf picks up a traditional, skirt-like lungi in Myanmar, he has no idea the fashion faux pas that will ensue. A meditation on "going native."
The post Native eye for the tourist guy appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, New Year’s 2004 finds me in Peru, where I am roughly halfway through my drive across the Americas on the Land Rover-supported “Drive Around the World” expedition. Since departing from San Francisco in early November of 2003, we have traveled overland through southern California, the Baja peninsula, mainland Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador,…
The post Update: Winter 2004 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
From the shores of a Thailand resort town, Rolf explores what happens when you mix rich men, elephants, and polo gear.
The post Jolly Good Excuse For a Party appeared first on Rolf Potts.
My nephew, Cedar, who is four years old and lives on a farm in Kansas, wrote a book for me yesterday. Since he didn’t know how to mail it to me as I make my way through Central America, his mother (my sister) transposed it into an email. I guess I’ll have to wait a…
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Friends and vagabonders, Fall promises to be an exciting season for me this year, as I will be departing to drive across the Americas as part of a Land Rover-supported expedition that will eventually drive around planet Earth along lines of longitude. The name of this expedition (and nonprofit organization) is “Drive Around the World”…
The post Update: Fall 2003 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
I’ve covered a lot of ground in Asia and North America since my last serious round of blog updates. My return home started in my jungle hometown (now former jungle hometown) of Ranong, where I moved out of my apartment and headed for Bangkok, where — in addition to scoring a cheap one-way China Air…
The post A quick recap of three countries and two states in three weeks appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At Thailand’s premier cowboy resort, a displaced traveler from Kansas explores the mysteries of the Far East’s Wild Wild West.
The post Cowboys and Indians, Thai-Style appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Book Review: As David Tomory's A Season in Heaven reveals, the wanderers of the 1960s and 1970s were creative and intrepid — but they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding. In short, they had the same charms and weaknesses as any self-conscious, authenticity-seeking counterculture movement of the last half-century.
The post Remembering the Hippie Trail appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, My latest update is short and sweet, in large part because I’ve been posting most of my new information over at my weblog. This summer I’ll be splitting time between Thailand (where I’ve been writing my second book) and Paris (where I’ll be teaching the travel writing section of a creative writing…
The post Update: Summer 2003 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The walls are a bit thin at my residential hotel here in south Thailand, so I can generally hear what’s going on in room 311 next door — whether I want to or not. Usually it’s just some couple having an argument, or an HBO Asia movie blaring too loud — but last night someone…
The post What I’m listening to in the jungle appeared first on Rolf Potts.
This morning, I went on my obligatory monthly visa run to Kawthaung, the small Burmese border town that lies about 20 minutes by boat from my temporary home in Ranong, Thailand. Ranong is where I come to hole up and get my writing done, so I always welcome this visa run, which takes me across…
The post Notes on possibility (from a visa run to Burma) appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings to you from Thailand, where I have just returned full circle after three months in the United States promoting my book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. My thanks to everyone who came out to say hello at my book events on the West Coast, in the…
The post Update: Spring 2003 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, After many months of writing and preparation, my Vagabonding guide is now available in bookstores! For comprehensive preview information on the book, go to Vagabonding.net, which will be adding new online content each week, all year long. For daily travel news and links, surf over to my all-new weblog,Vagablogging.net. This “blog” site will…
The post Update: January/February, 2003 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Central Laos has all the makings of travel’s last frontier: An unmapped wilderness, a lost city, and villagers unaccustomed to visitors. What’s at stake when tourists arrive?
The post Toura Incognita appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, It’s still a month before my Vagabonding book hits bookstore shelves, but a companion website, Vagabonding.net, is now officially online to give everyone a preview of things to come. Included on the site are a description and early reviews of the book itself, an interactive travel Q&A, a growing archive of vagabonding stories from…
The post Update: December, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Thailand — and my apologies for being so tardy with this update. Keeping me busy has been a summer of mostly non-Asian travel: a visit to my family in Kansas, meetings with editors in New York, a travel-writing teaching gig at the American Academy in Paris, a hike across the entire…
The post Update: October/November, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, This month I’m happy to announce that a couple of the feature articles I’ve written over the past year have finally hit the newsstands. One article, “The Last Archipelago”, appears in the July issue of Conde Nast Traveler, accompanied by several pages of photos by Cathrine Wessel. This story recounts an adventure…
The post Update: July/August, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The Mergui has some 800 (largely unmapped) islands, a population of elusive sea gypsies (the Moken), and, because it belongs to repressive Myanmar, almost no visitors. As the junta in Yangon inches toward political reform, Rolf plumbs a final frontier.
The post The Last Archipelago appeared first on Rolf Potts.
He'd navigated the Mekong river, wandered the Libyan Desert, and been stranded in Siberia. Then – in one last adventure after two years of vagabonding – Rolf traveled to Bangkok to face the specter of world-class luxury.
The post Fear and Loathing in a Five-Star Hotel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When Rolf's parents accompany him on a trip to Mongolia, he suddenly finds the whole parent-child dynamic reversed. But who's teaching whom a lesson?
The post Raising My Parents in Mongolia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Kansas, of all places — and thanks to everyone who wrote me after last month’s update with recipes and anecdotes about eating human placenta. Nobody actually volunteered to scarf down afterbirth on television, but I did learn a lot about this bizarre culinary art. One reader, who used to work…
The post Update: May/June, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, First off, I want to send special thanks out to all my old friends who sent sarcastic “Rolf = David Hasselhoff” e-mails after last month’s Update featured a picture of me running up a beach in a swimsuit. This month, I regret that the Update photo is not nearly so worthy of…
The post Update: March/April, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf reports from Thailand on the difficulty of taking part in a time-honored American custom — watching the Super Bowl — while traveling in Asia.
The post Super Bowl Exile appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings once again from Thailand, and here’s hoping 2002 finds you well! Late 2001 was a busy time for me, with various magazine assignments sending me hiking into the jungles of Thailand’s Khao Sok National Park, scuba-diving in the Andaman sea, and exploring the Mergui archipelago in the south of Myanmar. 2002…
The post Update: January/February, 2002 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Those of you who subscribe to my bimonthly mailing list may have noticed that I failed to send out an update message this month. There are two reasons for this. For starters, the events and aftermath of 9/11 seem to have resulted in a glut of forwarded news and opinion emails, and…
The post Update: November/December, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Well, I never thought I’d come to the point where I’d willingly display a photo of myself astride a horse. Maybe this is because I grew up so near the prairie, yet never learned how to properly ride a horse. Or perhaps this is due to lingering resentment over the fact that…
The post Update: September/October, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, This month I am happy to announce that — for the first time in ages — I have a new travel story appearing online. Actually, it isn’t a new story so much as it is the “Lost Vagabonding Column of 2000” — a Syria-based essay that got lost in the shuffle when Salon…
The post Update: July/August, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Sometimes you have to travel halfway around the world to find out how American you are.
The post Anthem Soul appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Late April finds me in Calcutta, poised to make my way into Burma after three months in India. And a wild three months it’s been! Since my last update, I have survived a dog attack in Himalayan snow leopard country, been jailed overnight by the Indian army near the Tibetan border, traveled…
The post Update: May and June, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Early March finds me well into my second month in India — a massive and complex country that I am still trying to absorb and comprehend. And, as P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “just when you think you’re getting India, you get it even less.” But even trying to understand this place has thus…
The post Update: March and April, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, January finds me back in India, headed northeast out of Bombay en route to the epic Kumbh Mela pilgrimage on the banks of the Ganges River, near Allahabad. This colossal Hindu sin-cleansing festival takes place every 12 years, and some sources are predicting a turnout of 70 million people (I didn’t tell…
The post Update: January and February, 2001 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
by Rolf Potts When my Vagabonding column debuted in Salon.com, lots of readers wrote to ask me how they, too, could get jobs as travel writers. This, I’ll admit, was a tough question to answer. After all, travel writing is not really something you can study for in college, and there are certainly no travel…
The post 10 Basic Tips for Travel Writers appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Friends and vagabonders, Welcome to my newly redesigned website! It’s been a long time since I sent everyone an update — June, in fact, when Salon closed down its travel department just as I was boarding a freighter for India. Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support for Vagabonding to me or to the…
The post Update: Fall 2000 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Taken under the wing of a Lebanese detergent tycoon, Rolf learns that there's a fine line between hospitality and kidnapping.
The post My Beirut hostage crisis appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At a 1-dinar cinema in Amman, Jordan, the real story has little to do with the movie itself.
The post Intrigue under the big screen appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Armed only with curiosity and a stained pair of pants, Rolf tries to make sense of the Islamic Feast of the Sacrifice in Aqaba, Jordan.
The post Dancing at the blood festival appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In Egypt, Rolf discovers that even the simplest experiences sometimes carry a price tag.
The post The baksheesh diaries appeared first on Rolf Potts.
With Flaubert's 1850 letters as a guide, Rolf explores the enduring allure of opera, orgasm, belly-dancing and other Cairo clichés.
The post Backpackers’ Ball at the Sultan Hotel appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An unorthodox tour of the second and final tomb of Lazarus puts a strange twist into Rolf's Larnaca layover.
The post Skepticism and salvation in Cyprus appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Leo's new movie may be fiction, but its portrayal of a crowded travel world is based in fact. Rolf reports — from the unlikeliest of places — on just what is happening.
The post Live from the trans-global Beach Nation appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf retraces the thin threads that led to his being drugged and robbed in the heart of Istanbul.
The post Turkish Knockout appeared first on Rolf Potts.
At Corfu's Pink Palace, the ouzo flows, the crockery flies and the libidos run wild.
The post A Greek romance appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Demoralized by goals and guidebooks, Rolf tackles Poland on a thumb and a prayer.
The post Road roulette appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Between the fistfights and the Finnish girls, it's hard to get any writing done.
The post Fear and loathing in Latvia appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In his first dispatch from an epic Beijing-St. Petersburg train trip, Rolf explores the mysteries of Mongolia.
The post Horse races, open spaces and the fate of Genghis Khan’s balls appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Amid an epic Beijing-to-St. Petersburg train trip, Rolf parties with librarians, tracks down the fate of Genghis Khan's testicles, and (among other things) embarks on a madcap race to catch up with the train after getting stranded on the Mongolian-Siberian border.
The post On the Trans-Siberian Express appeared first on Rolf Potts.
As he leaves Southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the evolution of the middle-class travel revolution.
The post Goodbye, Khao San Road appeared first on Rolf Potts.
The official analysis was "diarrhea, with vomiting." Right.
The post Retch-22: Laos in the time of cholera appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Hoping to find an obscure Vietnam War killing field, Rolf discovers that some lessons of history teach themselves.
The post Searching for Binh Hoa appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Wandering off the Vietnamese budget travel trail in search of authenticity, Rolf finds that authenticity isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The post The Barbecue Jesus and other epiphanies appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In a quixotic attempt to re-create Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" in Southeast Asia, Rolf invests in a Laotian riverboat and attempts to drive it 800 miles to the Cambodian border.
The post Apocalypse Not: One Month on the Mekong appeared first on Rolf Potts.
On the pleasures and paranoia of being a mostly clueless white guy in the company of Third World hosts.
The post Up Cambodia without a phrasebook appeared first on Rolf Potts.
For adventurers headed overland to Angkor Wat, Cambodia's Route 6 is Disneyland gone bad.
The post Song of the broken road appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Our correspondent reports from behind the scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie.
The post A spy on “The Beach” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf wanders in search of an Indiana Jones adventure in Thailand's gem country.
The post Getting stoned with Mr. X appeared first on Rolf Potts.
In the first installment of "Vagabonding," Rolf pays through the nose for his penny-pinching ways.
The post Penny Pinched appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf discovers the ambiguity of language and love in the Philippines.
The post Helen of Troy is in my taxi appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf describes a visit to Korea's DMZ, one of the planet's oddest tourist attractions, where visitors can pick up everything from propaganda to perfume.
The post Korea’s no-man’s land appeared first on Rolf Potts.
When he tries to infiltrate a movie set on a heavily guarded Thai island, Rolf embarks on a rollicking post-modern travel adventure, somewhat starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The post Storming “The Beach” appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Koreans and Americans both love dogs — they just have a different way of showing it.
The post Man bites dog appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf describes the heady rise and wistful fall of expat life in South Korea.
The post Letter from Pusan: The party’s over appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Poetry: "Looking at a steer and / imagining balls is not / nearly so hard as / looking at balls and / imagining a bull."
The post Staring Off Into Space is an Investment in the Soul appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Political commentary: Dissident politician Kim Dae-jung was not (as Time declared upon his inauguration) "Destiny's Choice" to lead Korea into the new millennium, but the beneficiary of mudslinging, opportunism and circumstantial luck amid a wacky 1997 election season.
The post A look back at the Korean presidential election of 1997 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
An American expatriate weathers the slings and arrows of learning another language.
The post Ignorants abroad appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Rolf goes to Las Vegas with $5 in his pocket, discovers the Mystical High Church of Luck — and ends up losing $100.
The post The Mystical High Church of Luck appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Commentary: Simon Peter once found that a relatively small amount of faith allows a man to walk on water, but he was never faced with the more relevant prospect of navigating intersections in a city where 15.5-ton Hyundai buses careen four abreast down streets originally designed for oxcarts.
The post Letter from Korea: September 1997 appeared first on Rolf Potts.
Book Review: Robert Bly's The Sibling Society is the latest doom-oracle for those born after the advent of polyester clothing. Conveniently, society is never as good as it was during the time when a given doomsayer came of age, and everything since has been a slippery slide on the downward spiral.
The post A review of Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society appeared first on Rolf Potts.