 | Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel From the The Globe and Mail:
"Anyone who enjoyed Rolf Potts's travel essays during the heyday of Salon.com already has an appreciation for his descriptive flair and storytelling ability. Unlike so many "I-went-here-and-this-happened" travel writers, his pieces are heavy on cultural nuance and light on self-aggrandizement. Now, Potts has synthesized more than six years' worth of road experiences into an unusual travel guide that's much more than a how-to manual for open-ended journeys. With wit, insight and flair, he has created an inspiring philosophical handbook about living life as an adventure. In Vagabonding, he blends homegrown aphorisms with personal vignettes and practical tips. He finds vagabonding metaphors in Buddhist texts and tales of the Indian Raj, while underlining his points with quotes from an eclectic array of sources, including Seinfeld jokes and Rainer Maria Rilke poems. Each of the eight chapters includes useful print and on-line resources, quotes from fellow travellers and a profile of a historical vagabonder, among them John Muir and Annie Dillard. Vagabonding is an inspiring read for anyone who has ever contemplated taking an extended break."
From The Boston Globe:
"Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts makes an impassioned case for chucking it all and hitting the road. ... Picking up from Henry David Thoreau, one of the "vagabonders" he profiles, Potts urges us to "simplify" our lives and our travel ambitions and to shift our outlook on money and time in order to travel and live more deliberately. ... It's a dream many of us harbor: leaving our jobs, financial responsibilities, and familiar faces behind in order to wander the world. ... Potts writes largely for the backpacking crowd — offering advice on quitting your job, handling money issues back home, packing lightly, behaving inconspicuously abroad, and meeting people — but he also tries to puncture the illusions the rest of us carry about how hard, or how expensive, it would be to go "vagabonding" for a while, noting, "For what it costs to fill your gas tank back home, you can take a train from one end of China to the other." Potts shares a lot of first-person stories from his own adventures, and he is an effective advocate for the "vagabonding" view that we could all use a more adventurous attitude in our travels and our everyday lives. Moreover, his ideas are well-thought-out and deeply felt, and his research is prodigious — judging by the wealth of material quoted from travelers both famous and obscure. ... Potts makes a valuable contribution to our thinking, not only about travel, but about life and work. And he leaves us with a prescription for making our lives more meaningful and more fun."
From Outpost:
"While there are a lot of books out there that consist of straight-forward, linear retellings of a particular journey, Vagabonding is an odd hybrid, mixing adventure tale, historical account, motivational tome and practical guidebook. This book not only tells you how to get "out there", it tells you how to stay there, and why staying out there for a long time is important. Who hasn't begun planning their trip immediately upon returning from their most recent one? Who hasn't thought that after being gone for two months that their next trip should be four months? This is a book for those who need to disappear for a long stretch from the familiar but don't know how. ... The book is peppered by some of the best quotations on the subject of travel and personal discovery that I've ever read. They've obviously been compiled by someone who has read extensively on the subject while waiting in all manner of airports, bus stations, and hotel lobbies. So for all those that have the itch, this is the perfect book with which to scratch."
From BarnesAndNoble.com:
Editor's Pick: "Many of us harbor the fantasy of just packing up and taking off to travel the world, but few can really imagine having the time, or the money, to do such a thing. Enter Rolf Potts, veteran globe-trotter, adventure travel writer, and vagabond. As Potts explains, extended world travel is not really about having the time or the money; it's about adopting the right outlook and giving yourself the freedom to pick up and go. This book will sway readers to adopt such an outlook, with encouragement to "loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world" and take "control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate." The author's alluring prose is accompanied by questionnaires to help readers develop a more specific picture of their planned journey, as well as profiles of vagabonds such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Annie Dillard. Of course, there are also practical matters to be addressed. Vagabonding instructs on those topics as well, providing information on funding your extended sojourn, quitting your job on good terms, finding work overseas, managing your time, meeting people, and remaining safe on your travels. Potts includes ample additional resources, with helpful books and web sites listed in each chapter. Vagabonding is an inspiring book that will prepare you mentally and pragmatically to embark upon the travels you've always dreamed of."
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Best American Travel Writing 2000
From the Seattle Weekly:
"It's hard for any Y2K reader to turn away guidance in What to Read. Maybe several hundred years ago, when the bulk of the world's published texts could be contained in one good-sized library, yearly collections of Best This or That were unnecessary. But this is the age of info-glut, much of it the info-equivalent of info-swill. Enter Houghton-Mifflin, dispensing surety to the masses in their Best American series of annual noteworthiness. ... The sports and travel books make the best of it, dipping their toes into the digital ocean and coming back with Salon-soaked feet. (With travel it's a bit redundant, since Salon put out its own collection on the subject this year, but Rolf Potts's wry essay on the DiCaprio-ization of Thailand is worth reading wherever it turns up.)"
From MSNBC:
"This collection of the two-dozen best travel articles published last year offers a colorful sampler of different destinations, each one perceived by a distinctively different voice. ... For comic irony, there's Rolf Potts' quest to reach a forbidden destination: Thailand's temporarily forbidden island, cordoned off for the filming of Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Beach." ... Editor Bill Bryson brings his trademark wit and former journalist's sense of urgency to the task of selection."
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Salon.com's Wanderlust
From the Oxford American:
"Widely recognized novelists pen several selections: Isabel Allende visits the Amazon in search of a magic box to combat her writer's block, and Carlos Fuentes recalls a youthful encounter with Thomas Mann in Switzerland. But the stand-out pieces boast unique approaches from authors less well-known: Rolf Potts' attempt to storm the Thailand set of Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The Beach; Wendy Belcher's research into why all African travel books (including her own) begin the same way, 'with the author alone, carried along by some vehicle, looking down over some landscape and feeling anxious.'"
From Publisher's Weekly
"The 40 stories are all quick, attention-grabbing, first-person narratives — as short and direct as a shot of espresso. ... The best work here uses irony to convey the complex nature of travel in the age of the Internet, when much of the world is only a mouse click away. Rolf Potts's story 'Storming the Beach,' for example, contains daily e-mail dispatches about the author's attempt to replicate the events of Alex Garland's novel The Beach by substituting the fictional beach with the actual Thai beach where a film of the novel is being shot. ... Salon has always been a self-consciously literary Web site, so it is no surprise that these stories survive the transition from the computer screen to the printed page."
From Amazon.com:
"If there is a common chord to the 40 essays in this collection culled from Salon.com's 'Wanderlust' section, it's that a majority of the authors find a certain ardor in exotic locations perceived with curious and eager eyes. ... In some truly hilarious reports, Susan Hack goes on a desperate hunt for Tampax in Yemen, Rolf Potts attempts to infiltrate the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, and Douglas Cruickshank takes a decadent blitzkrieg through England. While travel writers may be romantics, thank goodness they can also be great fun."
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