Rolf Potts > Quotes

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.”
― Rolf Potts

“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.”
― Rolf Potts

“having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“those who travel the world hoping to get “blinded by the light” are often blind to the light that’s all around them.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“And let me tell you something. That first morning, when you are in your country of choice, away from all of the conventions of atypical, everyday lifestyle, looking around at your totally new surroundings, hearing strange languages, smelling strange, new smells, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ll feel like the luckiest person in the world.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“My greatest skill has been to want little. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN A”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“you should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire; it’s the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it’s also the time to tie up your loose ends. Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“There’s a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about seventeen hundred years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over fifty years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows. Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place. Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises. In this way, vagabonding is not a merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases. Rather, it’s the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating a new fascination with people and places. This attitude is not something you can pick up at the airport counter with your boarding pass; it’s a process that starts at home. It’s a process by which you first test the waters that will pull you to wonderful new places.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“If you view the world as a predominately hostile place, it will be,” wrote Ed Buryn.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact—a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope;”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.”
― Rolf Potts

“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle. —PAUL AUSTER, SMOKE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“This book views long-term travel not as an escape but as an adventure and a passion—a way of overcoming your fears and living life to the fullest. In reading it, you will find out how to gain an impressive wealth (of travel time) through simplicity. You will find out how to discover and deal with new experiences and adventures on the road. And, as much as anything, you will find out how to travel the world on your own terms, by overcoming the myths and pretentions that threaten to cheapen your experience.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“finding a singular travel experience doesn’t require heroism so much as a simple change of mind-set. The reason so many travelers become frustrated while visiting world-famous destinations is that they are still playing by the rules of home, which “reward” you for following set routines and protocols.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel