Friends and vagabonders,
Late April finds me in Calcutta, poised to make my way into Burma after three months in India. And a wild three months it’s been! Since my last update, I have survived a dog attack in Himalayan snow leopard country, been jailed overnight by the Indian army near the Tibetan border, traveled two days by bus on The Most Terrifying Road in Asia, and I celebrated the Hindu Holi festival at a 10,000-foot high soiree that featured home-made booze and bootlegged Dutch porno videos.
Indeed, India has given me such a density of experience that at times it has seemed unreal. But, as the classic scripture from the Bhagavad Gita says, “The unreal never is: the Real never is not.” Little wonder that India has traditionally described herself as Karma Boomi — the Land of Experience. And all of that during a single two-week period in Himachal Pradesh. After that, my bout with giardia in Rajasthan, my case of dysentery in Gujarat, and my encounter with the World’s Most Persistent Pimp in Diu hardly seem worth mentioning.
Most of these Indian adventures will find their way into the pages of my forthcoming book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, but I plan to debut a few such travel tales much sooner — in places like Islands magazine, National Geographic Traveler and National Public Radio’s Savvy Traveler program. I’ll be sure to send out an update when each of those specific projects come to fruition. I’m also still waiting for a publication date on my Laos piece for Conde Nast Traveler — odds are it will debut sometime this summer.
My Travel Writers page continues to feature monthly interviews with intriguing personalities from the travel writing world. This month, travel humorist Doug Lansky — author of the forthcoming book Last Trout in Venice — is our featured author. In June, we will feature best-selling author and travel writer Simon Winchester. And if you didn’t click the Travel Writers page in April, be sure to check the archives for my online interview with Sacramento Bee travel editor Janet Fullwood.
Interested travel writers and aspiring travel writers are also advised to check out a new literary travel narrative site called Word Hum. Started by freelancer writers Jim Benning and Mike Yessis (who have written and/or edited for such magazines as Outside, Men’s Journal, and Playboy), World Hum aims to fill the void left by the departure of Salon Travel. As Benning said to me in a recent email, “The idea is simple. We’re going to try and publish a new literary travel story on the front page every week or two. We don’t intend to make money from the site. We want to provide a forum for great travel writing.” For current stories and a list of submission guidelines, surf your way over to http://www.worldhum.com.
On my Books page this month, I am featuring Salon.com’s Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance. Edited by Don George (with a foreword by Pico Iyer), this book features travel tales from the likes of Isabel Allende, Simon Winchester, Jeff Greenwald, Tim Cahill, Laurie Gough and Peter Mayle. Of this book, Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “The 40 stories are all quick, attention-grabbing, first-person narratives — as short and direct as a shot of espresso. The best work here uses irony to convey the complex nature of travel in the age of the Internet, where much of the world is only a mouse click away, Rolf Potts’s story ‘Storming the Beach,’ for example, contains daily e-mail dispatches about the author’s attempt to replicate the events from Alex Garland’s novel The Beach by substituting the fictional beach with the actual Thai beach where a film of the novel is being shot. Salon has always been a self-consciously literary Web site, so it is no surprise that these stories survive the transition from the computer screen to the printed page.”
Finally, I have decided to start using these updates to draw some attention to the Vagabonding Profiles portion of my website, which features interviews with everyday Americans (from all walks of life) who live to travel. Though they may not be professional travel writers or tour operators, these people have taken the vagabonding ethic to heart — and their profiles provide some of the most genuine travel insights you’ll find in cyberspace. Linda Rose, for instance — a fiftysomething Oregonian who spends her winters doing volunteer work on the South Pacific island of Yap — offers vivid encouragement to reticent would-be travelers of all ages: “You can drown in your bathtub, get hit crossing the street to get the mail, catch on fire in your kitchen. Do you want to be ruled by your fears or your dreams?” Also featured this month is Tom Bourguignon, a twentysomething Toledo, Ohio native who spent the first year of the New Millennium traveling through Asia, “Once in a while,” he says, “I just start laughing or beaming — thinking about how there’s stuff going down around me that I never new existed. Seeing the beauty in every little dirty thing: every slanted, corrugated roof; every dripping canvas and smoky temple; beat-up rickshaws and sweaty amputees shaking Dixie cups. Blowing smoke rings on a dock over a lilypad-covered lake, knowing there’s no hurry, nowhere to go and nowhere to be. Granted, half the time I’m cranky and frustrated and don’t like anything around me — but it’s worth waiting for those moments of real connection and appreciation in everything you see.”
I’ll end this update on that note. Be sure to check back to this page for new news in coming weeks.
And in the meantime, cheers — and happy vagabonding.
Rolf
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