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Author at last: Rolf's book, Vagabonding, was released this month by Random House.

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 include a Diary from my book tour, (which will hit the U.S. Midwest, West Coast and New York in January and February), as well as daily travel quotes and links.

In other publishing news, I have a feature story in the January 2003 issue of Conde Nast Traveler. The story documents a late 2000 expedition that journeyed into the Khammouan Biodiversity Conservation Area in the mountains of central Laos. The purpose of the expedition was not to discover new historical or scientific features, but to scout the area for new ecotourism attractions. Thus, the Laos adventure was a metaphor for the greater issues of tourism, and how the arrival of outsiders can affect a place (both positively and negatively). The stunning photos that accompany the story were taken by the renowned Norwegian photographer Knut Bry; an old gallery of my amateur photos from the expedition can be found here.

This month's RolfPotts.com Writers page features an interview with travel writing icon Pico Iyer whose work I have long admired. In answering my standard questions, Pico offered some intriguing insights into his early days as a traveler and writer. I could never mention all the highlights without transcribing half the interview, but here's a quick outtake:

"Travel has woken me up, in many ways. It's taught me how provincial I and my assumptions are. It's expanded my sense of what is possible among human beings and in terms of human kindness (and at times its opposite). And it has shown me a whole other way to live, without a steady prop, not hemmed in by familiarity, and living according to the principles and challenges I most respect. Best of all, it's helped me see all of life as a travel, and as an occasion for writing (in order to make sense of it). A few years ago my house burned down, and I lost everything I owned; all my notes, all the books I hadn't yet completed, all my photos and hopes and letters. And yet traveling helped me see this as a liberation: to live more at home as if I were on the road, to savor the freedom from a past and from possessions, and to think back on all the people I had met, in Tibet and Morocco and Bolivia, who would still have thought of my life as luxurious. Most of the people one meets while traveling deal with more traumas every day than the privileged among us meet in a lifetime. That's how traveling humbles and inspires."

Many more insights can be found at Pico's interview page. Next month, be sure to check back for my interview with Moon Handbooks founder Bill Dalton.

Until next time, cheers — and happy vagabonding. I hope you see many of you as I take my book tour on the road in coming months!

Rolf
Vagabonding.net
Vagablogging.net