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…
Last year around this time I wrote a post called “Rolf’s Top-10 ‘Reverse-Bucket List’ experiences from 2023,” in which I confessed that I’ve near really been one to create “bucket lists” so much as decide, after the fact, that a given experience was extraordinary enough to have retroactively qualified as bucket-list worthy. Many of these…
Though people have been dreaming up “Bucket Lists” to help focus their travel and life goals for as long as the concept has existed, I have never consciously created one. Granted, I’ve had no shortage of year-to-year travel- and life-goals, but my “bucket list” experiences have typically been realized after the fact. For example, I…
As 2023 gets underway, I’ve resolved to be less “virtually present” on social media, and more emotionally present in my own life. Hence, it’s unlikely I’ll be adding many new posts to my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook accounts in the coming months. Lowering one’s social-media profile might seem like a peculiar choice in 2023, given…
My newest book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery and the Art of Travel, debuted in October, with a series of virtual and live events in places like New York, Kansas, and San Francisco. Early praise for the book came from The New York Times, which noted: “Rolf Potts, the author who inspired wanderlust…
I am happy to announce that my new book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel, will be released by Ballantine Books in October of this year, and is available for preorder from your favorite local or online bookstore. Information about promotions, book-tour events, and a tie-in Deviate podcast…
I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when…
The celebrity autographs pictured here come from a souvenir book Kiki’s great aunt kept when she worked as a “Harvey Girl” on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the 1930s. The Chicago-to-Los-Angeles luxury cars saw a lot of celebrities in the days before jet travel, and it was common practice for Harvey Girls…
Friends and vagabonders, I’ve been writing these updates for more than two decades now – it’s something I’ve been doing for such a long time that, in the age of continually updated social media, a website Update page feels downright anachronistic. Yet for all the years I’ve written travel-updates from various corners of the world,…
Friends and vagabonders, As 2019 nears its end, I wanted to check in and recap some of the things I’ve done and places I’ve traveled this year. From traversing the Indonesian island of Sumatra (as well as Sri Lanka, Dubai, and the Republic of Georgia), to speaking at the Kazakh equivalent of TED Talks, to…
Friends and vagabonders, Twenty years to the month after my first international vagabonding journey, I have embarked on another multi-month adventure through Asia. Back in 1999 the journey began in Bangkok, lasted nearly three years, led to my first book Vagabonding, and was largely chronicled in my second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. I…
