Interview with Author, Essayist, and Travel Writer Rolf Potts
Originally Posted on Bosmosis.wordpress.com
If you’ve heard the term ‘vagabonding,’ there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name Rolf Potts. Though he invented neither the word nor the concept it denotes, he has done more than anyone to promote it as a viable travel ethic, describing it in his 2003 book Vagabonding – An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel as a deliberate way of moving through the world, “an extended time-out from your normal life –six weeks, four months, two years – to travel the world on your own terms.” Now in its 15th printing, Vagabonding has been hailed by some as a postmodern classic and has inspired thousands of would-be wanderers to reevaluate their priorities and hit the road.
Before launching his globetrotting career, Rolf lived as an expat in Busan, South Korea, teaching English in a hagwon and a college, honing his writing chops, saving his money, and imbibing lessons that would serve him well as the vagabonding columnist for Salon.com in the late 90’s. Since then he has driven a Land Rover across South America, piloted a boat down the Laotian Mekong, and hitched, biked, trained, planed or walked across six continents, once even traveling for 6 weeks and 30,000 miles with no baggage. His work has appeared in magazines like The New Yorker, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com and several others, as well as over a dozen travel writing anthologies.
In 2008, Rolf authored a second book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, in which he lets readers get under the hood of many of his best stories with extensive endnotes illuminating the construction of each tale. He also teaches non-fiction writing at the Paris American Academy and Yale University. When he’s not on the road, he’s home in Salinas County, Kansas in a farmhouse he renovated, just down the road from his family, enjoying the view of the Kansas prarie from his porch.
I recently heard that Vagabonding was being recorded for audiobook format, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit the book with Rolf and get his thoughts on it ten years – and tens of thousands of miles - down the road. Rolf was kind enough to answer some questions about the book, about travel writing, and offered some reflections on the formative time he spent in Busan.
Ten years down the road, what’s your own opinion of Vagabonding? How does the message hold up? Is it any more or less relevant?
I just reread the whole thing aloud for the audiobook, and listened to it multiple times in postproduction edits, and (while I'm no doubt liable to be biased) it feels as relevant as ever. I took out a few dated references in the audio version, and updated some of the resources online, but the philosophical core of the book still holds true. Before the recording session it had been awhile since I'd read the whole book, so it wound up feeling like a conversation with myself from ten years ago. I was home in Kansas when the first round of edits came in, and as I was listening to the audio I kept thinking to myself, "Man, I've got to get back out and travel some more."
Reading Vagabonding, one comes away with the message that travelling in a deliberate, thoughtful way is virtually synonymous with living deliberately, thoughtfully and openly all the time. Are you good at vagabonding at home? Keeping the traveler mindset alive for a summer in Paris doesn't seem like it would require too much effort, but how are you able to vagabond in rural Kansas? No offense to Kansas, but is that harder to do?
I think it's an ongoing challenge. Even on the road in 2013, with so much technology at our fingertips, it can be easy to slip into the ritual of tapping at your smartphone instead of engaging with your surroundings in some amazing place. So even in Paris or Tasmania (a couple of my recent destinations), mindfulness is an ongoing challenge.
Kansas is a challenge in a different way. I'm very contemplative here -- I do a ton of reading and writing -- but contemplation itself can take you away from your surroundings. I love aimless Kansas road-trips -- you tend to meet interesting people and see a lot of pretty landscapes -- but I'll admit I don't take them as much as I'd like.
How did your experience as an expat in Busan prepare you for long-term traveling? How did it prepare you for travel writing?
Expat life in Busan was terrific preparation for both long-term travel and travel writing, since it helped me understand cross-cultural difference at an intuitive level. Often use my time in Korea as an illustrative example of how you can intellectualize cultural difference all you want, but you can't really understand it until you are immersed in that culture, making discoveries and mistakes as you go. Working for a locally administrated institution (like a school) in that culture for months at a time is in effect a crash course on how to operate in a foreign culture. You end up with sharpened instincts for long-term international travel -- and this intensified awareness makes its way into your travel writing.
One reporting skill I picked up in the classrooms and on the streets of Korea was learning how to communicate without fully understanding a language. Academics have different terms for the kinds of communication that underpin travel reportage. "Intralingual" communication happens when, say, an American travels to Australia and communicates in English; "interlingual" communication happens when an American travels to Mexico and communicates in Spanish; and "intersemiotic" communication happens when an American travels to, say, Nepal or Zambia and communicates without the benefit of a common language. My experience in Korea attuned me to the idiosyncrasies of intersemiotic communication, and my ability to navigate these kinds of interactions has proven invaluable, both as a traveler and travel writer
You’ve said in a 2006 Slate piece that you had mixed feelings about your time as an expat in Busan. Could you elaborate on that a little?
I touch on one aspect of that ambivalence a little bit in the second installment of that Slate piece. When I was in Korea, a lot of the teacher-expats didn't specifically want to be there. They weren't trained in pedagogy, and they had no interest in teaching; they had come to the country mainly hoping to make some money and pay off debts (often college debts). When I first arrived in the country I fell into the reflexive, boozy negativity that seemed to pervade so much of the expat crowd. Every second person at a given expat bar claimed to be a writer or artist, but you never saw much writing or art. It was all very bitter and petty and self-defeating, and I didn't begin to write about Korea in a meaningful away until I learned to keep that expat crowd (friends and coworkers included) at arm's-length and experience the city on quieter, more Korean terms.
But apart from those nihilistic expat vibes, Korea could simply be a tough place to live and work. Koreans can at times be xenophobic, and I suffered my share of culture shock and loneliness. At times I worked crazy hours and didn't get much sleep. Winters could be brutally cold, summers could be witheringly hot, and I often got tired of the noise and crowds (and the occasional filth) of the big city. I'm actually glad I experienced all these things, but they weren't always easy.
What’s next on your personal travel itinerary?
I have a little bit of U.S. travel pegged to the release of the Vagabonding audiobook, and once that's done I hope to hit Indonesia for 4-6 weeks before starting another semester-long teaching gig at Yale.
Though I don't have specific plans right now, I'd love to get back to Busan one of these days. I lived a couple of the most important years of my life there, and it still feels like a kind of home to me.
John is a Busan resident, teacher, and blogger.
You can read the full Rolf Potts interview at his blog bosmosis.wordpress.com
More Rolf Links
- Letters from Pusan: The party's over (one of Rolf's early pieces for Slate in 1998)
- Pusanweb's 1999 Interview with Rolf (complete video)
- Rolf's Thoughts after judging our 2002 Writing Contest
- Rolf's 2007 Google Talk
- Rolf's 'Do Lecture', Time = Wealth
