“Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel” by Rolf Potts
[su_note note_color=”#FFFEE2″ text_color=”#333333″]Note: The Book Club is still in the incubator. We’ll break down this book and more of our favourites in detail, discussing takeaways and action steps from each. Sign up to be the first to get notified when we kick things off. But for now, the here’s the Amazon excerpt and some favourite quotes from the book. [/su_note]
SUMMARY
Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life—from six weeks to four months to two years—to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on:
• financing your travel time
• determining your destination
• adjusting to life on the road
• working and volunteering overseas
• handling travel adversity
• re-assimilating back into ordinary life
Not just a plan of action, vagabonding is an outlook on life that emphasizes creativity, discovery, and the growth of the spirit.
BEST QUOTES
“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home—and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
“Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from.”
“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle.”
“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.”
“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”
“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”
“Having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.”
“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.”
“You should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.”
“Those who travel the world hoping to get “blinded by the light” are often blind to the light that’s all around them.”
“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.”
