By Rolf Potts
(excerpted from Forever Nomad)
Years ago, while I was trying to finish writing a book about the philosophy of long-term travel, I ran into a problem while outlining the final chapter. My intention in this chapter had been to speak to the importance of — and difficulties inherent in — returning home after an extended, life-altering journey. The problem was that I had not yet returned home myself — I was writing my book in a residential hotel room in southern Thailand, and the very notion of “home” was, for me, at the time, vague.
Yet, somehow, I had intuited that returning home — or, perhaps, finding a new sense for home — was a key part of the travel process. By that point in my life I’d been traveling through Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for nearly three years. Add in the two-year expat stint I had spent teaching English in Korea, and it had been five years since I’d lived in the United States for any extended period of time. Since I’d found steady work as a freelance travel writer, I could have extended my overseas journey another five years — but somehow I knew the point of a long-term journey isn’t to travel indefinitely: the point is to travel in such a way that it enhances your life in a way that is unique to your own way of being in the world.
In many ways those three years of wandering across distant continents gave me the best experiences of my travel career, and I’ve never quite traveled with the same existential intensity as I did back then. The book I wrote in that room in Thailand, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, has since been through dozens of printings in several languages worldwide, and I’ve visited dozens more countries on every continent on the planet. I’ve driven a Land Rover across the Americas, sailed the Aegean Sea, hosted a Travel Channel special, started a summer writing workshop in Paris, lectured at Penn and Yale, lived multi-month stints in New Orleans and Havana and Rio, written three more books, and — in a test of extreme minimalism — traveled around the world for several weeks with no luggage or bags of any kind. These new adventures were all great, but they couldn’t really compare to that first overseas vagabonding journey because they were happening to a person who was already used to traveling. The thrill of traveling long-term for the first time is a singular joy by the very nature of its freedom-rich novelty, and the more you travel, the more your relationship to it changes.
This needn’t be a bad thing. The more you travel long-term — and the more you realize that long-term travel is cheap and accessible enough to do again and again over the course of a lifetime — the more it becomes an integral part of your life. As travel becomes more integral to your life it also becomes less novel, of course — but it also becomes deeper and richer, slower and more nuanced. One of my favorite travel acts in the years since I wrote Vagabonding was getting a home of my own on 30 acres of prairie near my family in north-central Kansas. On the surface living in a home-place where you can be still and centered would seem like the opposite of travel, but in a way my many years of travel have made my time at home seem that much more satisfying — and being there is not separate from, but very much a part of the greater journey.
Everyone travels in different ways, and I think every experienced wanderer balances the idea of home and travel on his or her own terms. But one amazing thing that travel teaches you is that coming home — or finding home — after a long trip doesn’t spell the end to your wandering; it just deepens your relationship to the adventures yet to come.
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