The first copy of Vagabonding I ever held in my hands sits in this display case at The Atlanta Hotel in Thailand. The story of how it ended up there is inseparable from the tale of my own travels in that part of the world. As was the reflexive habit among young budget wanderers passing…
Kim Krizan, who cowrote Before Sunrise with director Richard Linklater, talks about the travels (and historical moment) that influenced the movie
Kim Krizan, who cowrote Before Sunrise with director Richard Linklater, talks about the travels (and historical moment)
that influenced the movie.
The following is an outtake from an email Q&A interview I had with travel writer and filmmaker Ash Bhardwaj, for his 2024 book Why We Travel. Ash Bhardwaj: What were the formative moments in your writing career? Rolf Potts: There are many moments, big and small, that will feed into any writing career. The most significant…
Mars on Earth: Wanderings in the World’s Driest Desert
One advantage of reading a book in the twenty-first century is the diversity of ways a person can engage with that book on a multimedia level. When my fifth book The Vagabond’s Way came out in 2022, it was available in hardcover and audiobook, but one could also hear me talking about its themes in a…
1) “Don’t create things to make money; make money so you can create things. The reward for good work is more work.” 2) “99% of success is just showing up. In fact, most success is just persistence.” 3) ‘You don’t need more time because you already have all the time you will ever get; you…
When I visited Bangkok’s iconic backpacker travel ghetto Khao San Road during my round-the-world “No Baggage Challenge” back in 2010, the experience was, at the time, something of a “walk down memory lane” that channeled an earlier chapter of my vagabonding career. Indeed, eleven years before I made that 2010 video dispatch, I wrote a Salon.com…
Why a chapter about “slum tourism” was edited out of The Vagabond’s Way (with Chloe Cooper Jones)
It’s easy to forget, as travelers, that what feels “inauthentic” by our own cultural standards doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not authentic to the culture we’re visiting. As a foodie, Kiki was over the moon about visiting Bangkok, but when she asked some Thais at our hotel where they might go to find great mango sticky…
Long-term travel 101: Matt Kepnes on how to save money on an extended journey
