Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Product Information

Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life— six weeks, four months, two years— to travel the world on your own terms. A Japanese woman dropping everything to travel the world for a year after living through Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami; In A Sunburned Country follows Bill’s hilarious journey through the sunbaked deserts and endless coastlines of Australia, trying not to get killed by the deadly wildlife. It’s full of fun & interesting facts about the country.

Rolf recently released an updated version of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (along with another brand-new book) that has just hit shelves. Theroux earned his reputation as one of the all-time great travelogue writers because he lives every word that he writes. Dark Star Safari takes readers through his voyage from the top of Africa to the bottom. Learn how to become an expert traveler with my top travel tips to help you save money, stay safe, and more.The helpful folks at BnA introduced me to Rolf Potts’s book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. I had been doing shit like this before I was even a legal adult, and I continue in the same sort of lifestyle as I approach my 60th birthday. A good question to ask yourself before you set out on a long period of travel is whether or not this is for you. A lot of people tell me that they are jealous of the way I live, but I doubt that would like it if they were to change places. I certainly wouldn’t change lives with them. To many people, money is a part of their daily lives. They think that they can’t travel because it’s too expensive. For this reason, long-term travel seems to be restricted to hippies or college students who are wealthy.

Traveling simply means freeing yourself from “stuff”, leaving you with only the bare necessities to live. By freeing yourself physically from the stuff that defines you, you’re stripped down to just yourself — a sometimes scary reality that forces to figure out who you actually are. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule."

I don’t like work,” says Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “but I like what is in the work— the chance to find yourself.” When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat in astonishment. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for eight months as a toilet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Even if they didn’t yet have their own motorcycle, another couple months of scrubbing toilets would earn them enough to buy one when they got to China.

Simplistic reading. Contains a lot of material I've seen reiterated before in other guidebooks; holds a lot of stuff which is well-covered elsewhere; yields a lot of info which should already be common-sense to the experienced (or even mildly-experienced) traveler...so, I confess I'm merely going to skim this thing.You might appreciate Baturi by Matthew Stephen, Roam by Dean Starnes or Europe on a Shoestring: Big Trips on Small Budgets (Lonely Planet Shoestring Guides) by Sarah Johnstone.