Essays & Travel Stories

Rolf sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.

The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in…

By Rolf Potts Most any journey can, at moments, have a way of making a traveler feel like he’s navigating a blurred line between present and past. Walk through the urban slums at the outskirts of modern Mumbai, and you can get a sense for what New York’s Lower East Side might have felt like…

The “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast gives me the pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore most any topic that interests me — and often I end up exploring affecting and meaningful episodes from my own life. I have, for example, produced episodes about my childhood fascination with the 1976 Sears Christmas…

There is this sense from Before Sunrise that life, when it adds kinds of completeness and continuation, never equals the potential those youthful moments once contained.

An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums.

News analysis: Rolf and writers like Pico Iyer and James Fallows speculate on what travel will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cultural criticism/personal essay: Rolf reflects on the journals he kept between 1984 and 1986 – a time when he played D&D, bicycled everywhere, and pretty much watched the same movies as the boys in Stranger Things.

Cultural criticism: During a journey across south and southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the changes he’s seen over the course of 20 years as a vagabonding traveler.

Literary criticism: Travel writing has long been a part of our serious literary fabric, and perhaps more than ever, the power of travel writing to create a dialogue across cultures is crucial.

Cultural criticism: Rolf Potts on tourism, kitsch, and the eternal tchotchke. Excepted from his 2018 book Souvenir.

Poetry: “A well-known circus man who was reputed to be immune from snake bites, died at the County Hospital after having been bitten by a rattlesnake.”

Cultural criticism: The Sears catalog might well be considered a great work of American literature, having influenced the syntax of advertising, transformed mail-order commerce, and catalyzed America’s (decidedly democratic) language of desire.

Writing craft: Studying a show’s pilot script is a useful way for aspiring scriptwriters to get a sense for how its creators chose to establish the world of the story, introduce its characters, and leave the viewer wanting more.

Poetry: “At least, not in the pages of Billboard Magazine / Which chronicled showbiz scuttlebutt in the days / When entertainments were an in-the-flesh affair.”

Sports commentary: As a die-hard fan, seeing your team lose in the postseason is a rich source of speculation and mythology. Seeing your team win it all makes for a much better story, save one key conundrum.

Cultural criticism: Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single “Gangster of Love.” The racial implications weren’t so simple.

Cultural criticism: The Geto Boys’ self-titled third album rattled America’s cultural gatekeepers, making N.W.A and 2 Live Crew look like a society luncheon.

Lyric essay: This prose poem jumbles passages from slave narratives and self-help books, Walden and the Hadith, online therapy forums and celebrity memoirs, weaving together a series of age-specific moments that shed light on the boundaries of memory and the complexities of self-presentation.

Satire: “Hey there, I’m a TV show set in New Orleans. I’m about art and integrity, and I don’t give a shit what you think of me.”

Found poetry: “I loved drawing out / the symbols / of the alphabet. / They were all / their own kind / of monster with / their own kind of tongue.”

Sports commentary: During Kansas City’s inspired 2014 playoff run, social media only heightened the gloriously irrational, neurotic nature of baseball fandom.

Graphic memoir: Aided by illustrations by his adolescent nephew, Rolf plumbs the humiliations, triumphs, and idiosyncrasies of his own adolescence.

Personal essay: Thirty years ago, Rolf and a friend from elementary school created a vision of the future—a space opera put to tape—and buried it in a time capsule. Listening again today reveals how we remember the present as it never quite was.

TV criticism: HBO’s series about post-Katrina Louisiana obsessively works to prove it’s not a tourist in New Orleans. It ends up losing the city — and the viewers — in the process.

Cultural criticism: Dennis O’Rourke’s 1988 documentary “Cannibal Tours”, which probed the absurdities of global tourism, was as brilliant and cringe-inducing as any episode of “The Office” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Twenty-five years after its initial debut, the rise of social media self-documentation has made the film feel more relevant than ever.

Cultural criticism: When, two generations ago, Susan Sontag wrote how “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” she very well could have been making a prophetic observation about “selfies.”

Commentary: A Chinese teenager defaced the Luxor Temple. That’s bad, but scribbling on Egyptian antiquity is as old as tourism itself.

Long-form reportage: In September of 2012 a Kansas small-college football player was beaten to death outside a late-night house party, allegedly at the hands of players from a rival school. Rolf takes an investigative look at the 125 years that led up to the murder, and how small prairie-town colleges stay alive through sports, often importing inner-city kids to fill out rosters.

Media criticism: Compared to the “Generation X” media frenzy of the early 1990s, the online chatter surrounding HBO’s Girls is a refreshingly diverse inquiry into what it means to be young in recession-era America.

Cultural criticism/personal essay: Why do we take pictures when we travel? And what has been lost and gained as our photo albums move from hard copy to digital?

Literary criticism/collage essay: In his literary manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields argues for artistic plagiarism and the end of traditional narrative. Rolf’s response — embedded in a story about getting drugged robbed overseas — appropriates its own flavor of plagiarism to counter Shields’ argument.

Interview: Rolf talks with travel writer Pico Iyer about his book “The Man Within My Head,” and how art can help us identify parts of ourselves we never otherwise could have articulated.

Commentary: The same travelers who insist on dropping the “s” from Laos in the interest of linguistic accuracy would never call Egypt “Misr” or Finland “Suomi.” What factors influence the names we give to the places we visit?

Interview: Rolf talks with the legendary travel author about technology, traveling light, reportorial accuracy, notions of home, and the “Tao of Travel.”

Essay/Reportage: When allegations surfaced that parts of Greg Mortenson’s memoir “Three Cups of Tea” had been fabricated, reports noted that the book is “required reading” for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Various other branches of the military promote titles like “Freakonomics” and “Starship Troopers.” Why is this the case, and what do these non-military books offer to combat-bound soldiers?

Media criticism: Where does the Travel Channel take us? To find out, Rolf locks himself into a Vegas hotel room and embarks on a one-week experiment in gonzo-criticism.

Literary Criticism: Between 1996 and 2002, a spate of British-authored pulp fiction portrayed self-absorbed 20-somethings trying (and failing) to use travel in Asia as an escape from the superficial, directionless, consumerist lives they lead back home. What did these novels predict about the way travel was changing?

Advice: There is an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well. This excerpt from Vagabonding explores the notion of simplicity.

Advice: Travel has a way of slowing you down, of waking you up, of pulling you up out of your daily routines and seeing life in a new way. This new way of looking at the world need not end when you resume your life at home.

In a five-part series, Rolf Potts joins Trekkies aboard a “Star Trek” theme cruise to Bermuda.

A video teaser for Rolf’s “Star Trek” fan-cruise series. Original music by Rolfe Kent and Meredith Meyer; edited by Mike Marlett.

In an essay about the merits of global budget travel, Rolf uses his experiences with a group of Cuban bagpipers to illustrate how wandering on the cheap can lead to the kind of unexpected encounters that make a journey memorable.

Commentary: “In Cuba, Guevara’s ubiquitous image appears to fill the role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald — a sainted martyr of unwavering purity who also happens to promote a standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu.” An analysis of Che’s legacy in light of Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 movie biopic.

What makes someone want to be the world’s most traveled man? Rolf reports from from the back-roads of East Africa.

Media history: How one nearly forgotten 1920s Kansas publisher’s “Little Blue Books” created an inexpensive mail-order information superhighway that paved the way for the sexual revolution, influenced the feminist and civil rights movements, and foreshadowed the Age of Information.

Film commentary: To mark the DVD release of In Bruges, Focus Films asked Rolf and a panel of select travel writers (including Pico Iyer, Heidi Julavits, Tony Wheeler, and Ayun Halliday) to outline their favorite cinematic portrayals of cities. Films mentioned in Rolf’s profile include Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, and Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt.

Media criticism: In recent years, the most vivid legacy of B-movie gimmickry has been the emergence of “mockbusters” — cheaply produced straight-to-DVD films with names like Transmorphers and Snakes on a Train. What sets mockbusters apart is that these films are deliberately released on DVD just as their blockbuster namesakes hit the big screen, thus creating a niche market based on simple consumer confusion.

Book review: For men, reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book is like traveling the world with a lovely and intelligent girlfriend who can’t stop talking about herself: You’ve come to admire this woman — and you wish the best for her — but you wish she’d stop yapping about emotional minutiae so you could both look out and enjoy the scenery from time to time.

Satire: Rolf repackages the 17th century philosopher’s ‘Of Travel’ essay in the manner of a 21st century magazine feature

Book review: Chuck Thompson’s ‘Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer’ slams modern travel writing as mediocre, if not dishonest. But glossy magazines aren’t the only venues that create a fictional matrix to lure audiences: Books like Thompson’s tend to sell themselves on overstatement, as well as the exaggerated sense that the reader is getting privileged information.

Rolf finally found a place to call his own — a bunkhouse overlooking the Kansas prairie. It’s infused with the lessons he’d learned from 13 years living out of a backpack.

Why your video store stocks “mockbusters” alongside the blockbusters: A look at how one Hollywood B-movie studio stays in business.

Commentary: Though innovative and inspiring, “On the Road” is a bad blueprint for life on the road. Kerouac’s characters might cover a lot of miles between San Francisco and New York, but their adventures along the way are rarely more remarkable than what one might encounter in the freshman-pledge wing of a fraternity house.

Commentary: Regardless of how you try to sugarcoat the flight experience, planes have functionally become flying buses — and the only people who would consider having sex on public buses are invariably on their way home from serving 18-to-24-month prison sentences for crystal-meth possession.

Literary criticism: 50 years on, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” reads like a drug-addled, homoerotic variation of “Jackass.” If we aspire this year to recognize the anniversary of a Ginsberg poem that still seems relevant and challenging, we should fast-forward ten years to 1966, when the iconic Beat poet penned “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”

Museums honor achievement, but finding original travel experiences amid their exhibits can sometimes be a challenge.

Korean-born U.S. filmmaker Wonsuk Chin is making a movie that is partially inspired by Rolf’s 1990’s expatriate writings about Busan. With the movie in pre-production, Rolf travels to Korea to meet Chin and reflect on the expat experience.

Travel-culture essay: Disparaging one’s fellow travelers by national stereotype is a time-honored parlor game. Does it serve any purpose?

Literary criticism/travel anthropology: How One Egyptian’s Bad Haircut from a Greeley, Colorado Barber in 1949 Provided Ideological Fuel for 9/11.

As a traveler, what’s the best response when people ask you for money?

Travel-culture essay: Within certain hipster circles of indie travel, announcing that you patronize McDonald’s is kind of like confessing that you eat your boogers. But the contempt sophisticated travelers hold for McDonald’s has less to do with ethical principle than the fact that fast-food franchises ruin the fantasies of otherness that are an inherent part of travel.

Why do places grow vaguely annoying once they become travel destinations?

Book reviews: In a round-up of top travel books for the Travel Channel’s World Hum, Rolf sings the praises of Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (#8), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (#11), Tim Cahill’s Road Fever (#21), Tony Horwitz’s Baghdad Without a Map (#26), and Jeffrey Tayler’s Facing the Congo (#28).

Travel-culture essay: Souvenir hunting is not a meaningful examination of place so much as it is a litmus test of our own whims and preconceptions as travelers. At a certain level, buying an electric blender is more representative of day-to-day Indian life than buying Kashmiri silk (though, admittedly, a blender would not look as good in your living room).

What could possibly be bad about an on-the-road romance? Try rekindling it when you get home.

What’s money worth? In Myanmar, Rolf discovers that travel has a way of putting “cash value” into a new perspective.

He traversed an entire nation in a long weekend. Now, Rolf shows how you can impress members of the opposite sex and write a textbook-perfect travel article in eight easy steps.

Commentary: Though the outgoing Harper’s editor’s opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, Lapham would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker — someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.

Travel-culture essay: The rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity: it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash.

Travel-culture essay: As alarming as it can be to find “Fried Rice With Crap” on a menu in Asia, bad translations can go both ways. Indeed, it’s only a matter of time before someone travels to China and discovers that the “Crouching Tiger” Chinese ideogram on his butt cheek (purchased in good faith in Seattle) is provincial slang for “Adult Diapers.”

When Rolf picks up a traditional, skirt-like lungi in Myanmar, he has no idea the fashion faux pas that will ensue. A meditation on “going native.”

Book Review: As David Tomory’s A Season in Heaven reveals, the wanderers of the 1960s and 1970s were creative and intrepid — but they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding. In short, they had the same charms and weaknesses as any self-conscious, authenticity-seeking counterculture movement of the last half-century.

Central Laos has all the makings of travel’s last frontier: An unmapped wilderness, a lost city, and villagers unaccustomed to visitors. What’s at stake when tourists arrive?

The Mergui has some 800 (largely unmapped) islands, a population of elusive sea gypsies (the Moken), and, because it belongs to repressive Myanmar, almost no visitors. As the junta in Yangon inches toward political reform, Rolf plumbs a final frontier.

Sometimes you have to travel halfway around the world to find out how American you are.

Taken under the wing of a Lebanese detergent tycoon, Rolf learns that there’s a fine line between hospitality and kidnapping.

Armed only with curiosity and a stained pair of pants, Rolf tries to make sense of the Islamic Feast of the Sacrifice in Aqaba, Jordan.

With Flaubert’s 1850 letters as a guide, Rolf explores the enduring allure of opera, orgasm, belly-dancing and other Cairo clichés.

Leo’s new movie may be fiction, but its portrayal of a crowded travel world is based in fact. Rolf reports — from the unlikeliest of places — on just what is happening.

Rolf retraces the thin threads that led to his being drugged and robbed in the heart of Istanbul.

In his first dispatch from an epic Beijing-St. Petersburg train trip, Rolf explores the mysteries of Mongolia.

Amid an epic Beijing-to-St. Petersburg train trip, Rolf parties with librarians, tracks down the fate of Genghis Khan’s testicles, and (among other things) embarks on a madcap race to catch up with the train after getting stranded on the Mongolian-Siberian border.

As he leaves Southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the evolution of the middle-class travel revolution.

Wandering off the Vietnamese budget travel trail in search of authenticity, Rolf finds that authenticity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In a quixotic attempt to re-create Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” in Southeast Asia, Rolf invests in a Laotian riverboat and attempts to drive it 800 miles to the Cambodian border.

On the pleasures and paranoia of being a mostly clueless white guy in the company of Third World hosts.

Our correspondent reports from behind the scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie.

When he tries to infiltrate a movie set on a heavily guarded Thai island, Rolf embarks on a rollicking post-modern travel adventure, somewhat starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Koreans and Americans both love dogs — they just have a different way of showing it.

Poetry: “Looking at a steer and / imagining balls is not / nearly so hard as / looking at balls and / imagining a bull.”

Political commentary: Dissident politician Kim Dae-jung was not (as Time declared upon his inauguration) “Destiny’s Choice” to lead Korea into the new millennium, but the beneficiary of mudslinging, opportunism and circumstantial luck amid a wacky 1997 election season.

Rolf goes to Las Vegas with $5 in his pocket, discovers the Mystical High Church of Luck — and ends up losing $100.

Commentary: Simon Peter once found that a relatively small amount of faith allows a man to walk on water, but he was never faced with the more relevant prospect of navigating intersections in a city where 15.5-ton Hyundai buses careen four abreast down streets originally designed for oxcarts.

Book Review: Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society is the latest doom-oracle for those born after the advent of polyester clothing. Conveniently, society is never as good as it was during the time when a given doomsayer came of age, and everything since has been a slippery slide on the downward spiral.