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…
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…
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…
While my first book had published was Vagabonding in 2003, and the first travel book I wrote (but did not publish) was Pilgrims in a Sliding World in 1995, the first book I ever completed was Dinosaurs, a whimsical (yet completely earnest) hand-illustrated science book that I wrote in 1978, at age seven. I have talked…
When my first book, Vagabonding, hit bookstores early in 2003, it didn’t make many bestseller or Top-10 lists — though it did find an enthusiastic word-of-mouth following that has slowly grown in the two-plus decades since it first debuted. This grassroots success has been so resonant that Vagabonding has, in the past ten years or so, landed…
1) Unplugged travel is the best travel Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees “independent” travelers eagerly settling down in front of…
Since remote antiquity, for all kinds of reasons, people have left home and hit the road. Couriers and diplomats, merchants and worshippers crisscrossed the Mesopotamian triangle well before 3000 BC. Even tourists, travelling for pleasure, left graffiti on the Pyramids by 1500 BC. Very early in history, then, travel and writing converged. Homer’s Odyssey, the…
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be…
Interview by Don George You are usually referred to as a “travel writer,” and your books are shelved in the “travel books” area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term “travel writing” mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go…
My father had an idea for a children’s book. He recited the idea to me many times when I was little. It was to be a story about beauty. It begins with a father saying good night to his daughter. The daughter is afraid to be alone and so she begs the father to stay…
I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in…
