Vagabonding - by Rolf Potts
ISBN: 9780812992182Date read: 2025-11-05
How strongly I recommend it: 5/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
I read it long after release, when its ideas are thoroughly ingested into my culture, so it had few surprises. I prefer his newer “Vagabond’s Way”.
my notes
Three general methods to simplifying your life:
1. stopping expansion
2. reining in your routine
3. reducing clutter.
The best way to prepare for a trip was to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump over the back fence.”
Vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal.
Tourists from Los Angeles will travel to Thailand to see relatively modernized Hmong villagers don ethnic costumes, yet those same tourists would never think to visit a community of similarly modern Hmong-Americans in Los Angeles.
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
Which is the real adventure:
Buying into a guided expedition?
Or lingering for a few weeks in some Bolivian village to learn a local craft without fully knowing the local language?
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.
View each new travel frustration — sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict — as just another curious facet.
Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences.
What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind.
Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.
At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community.
On the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you’ve already drawn.
If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband is more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world so much as giving you an opportunity to see hers.
If a Paraguayan barber insists that dictatorship is superior to democracy, you might just learn something by putting yourself in his shoes and hearing him out.
Mute your compulsion to judge what is right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper.
Have the tolerance and patience to try to see things for what they are.