Lessons from a Vagabond: Travel, Culture, and Story with Rolf Potts

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Hey, I'm Luke. I'm an author of Archeological Adventure Novels. I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story Podcast with five acclaimed books including the world famous Vagabonding and bylines in publications from National Geographic Traveler to the New Yorker, Rolf Potts knows a thing or two about turning real life adventures into unforgettable narratives. If you've ever wondered what really happens before a perfect travel story lands on the page, you're about to find out. Rolf, welcome to the Adventure Story podcast.

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e, so like I jumped trains in: 1992

But like who jumps trains anymore? Actually, um, Alexander Supertramp from Into the Wild, he jumped trains that same summer. Fortunately I lived. Yeah, so, so that was such an important part of my life. But really to be honest, it was my very first Vagabonding trip. Affected me. I lived in a van for seven and a half months.

I traveled around North America and I've said before that you can only travel intensely when you're 23 years old once, right. Um, there's something that, it wasn't just what I did, but it's how old I was every day was really special, and I was just amazed to be having these adventures and it wasn't. It wasn't super crazy adventures, but I was sleeping in a van and climbing mountains and staying in monasteries and partying at Spring break celebrations in Florida, and that planted a seed that hasn't gone away.

I.

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A morning watching the sunrise at age 23. Uh, and this is just a bigger percentage of your life than when you do it at age 53, but at the same time, I would imagine doing it at age 53 when you've never done it before, the gratitude that you would have, I think you just have a better sense of perspective when you're older.

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And suddenly you're having these adventures even though you're in your seventies or eighties or whatever. And then, and then you can think, wow, this is really fun to take advantage of.

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Absolutely. In Vagabonding then you, you are, I think you, you'll admit that's your most famous book. And then later on into the vagabond's way, you champion slow, deliberate travel, slowing down, sort of taking things as they come. Why does that attitude, why does slowing down make a difference?

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Encounter a surprise and serendipity. I think if you're too itinerary driven, if you're too worried about scheduling and going from point A to point B to point C, then you'll just be able to find what you hope to find. You're not gonna be able to find, you're not gonna as easily find something by accident.

Or just have this weird set of circumstances that seems miraculous, where you're suddenly watching the sunrise with these amazing people that you didn't know existed the day before. And so I really think it allows you to take advantage of the environment rather than an itinerary. 'cause if you travel fast, then you're, you're always looking down at your itinerary.

You're always thinking about where to go. Next. Whereas if you're not trying to rush yourself, you can deal with your environment. You can draw from your environment its own wisdom and its own adventures in a way that is way more exciting than whatever you could have planned before you left home. I.

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Yeah, I find that's completely true. I suppose that leaves the door open for those strange things to happen, which are the things that end up becoming the adventure. As writers, we quite often say that truth can be stranger than fiction. And have you experienced any of these real world encounters, perhaps unplanned ones that felt so surreal, they felt like they were lifted straight from the pages of a book that you later wrote, or a book, one of the other classic adventure writers as written?

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It's not really. Your life ways are not tied to a specific environment. Whereas most of human history people haven't lived in that weird way. They haven't been western, industrialized rich or democratic. For example, I went into this valley, a very remote valley in Laos. Uh, I was on magazine assignment. I.

Um, it was an area that they were sort of trying to develop for tourism a, a tour operator outta Thailand. And this woman became possessed by the spirits and everybody in the village is like, oh yeah, the woman is, is possessed by the spirits. 'cause the chief didn't give a sacrifice when you came into the village.

And so by our western standards it could be well. Maybe she's just a middle, a little bit mentally ill, and she's pissed off that the headman didn't give a sacrifice because it's fun to have a feast when guests come and she's just sort of shaming him. But no, they honestly believe that the spirits had had entered her and were speaking through here.

the Northridge earthquake of: 1994

I was in Brentwood, which was a very rich. Part of the city. Um, we had a friend of a friend who was staying there. And so sort of seeing rich people standing in line, like refugees outside the supermarket was, was quite surreal.

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That's when things get really stranger

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It is stranger for you. You know, I mean, there's, there's earthquake refugees somewhere in the world, uh, several times a year. There's people who believe in spirits and live through the spirits all the time. It's just, it's strange to. Than fiction for your point of view. And I think as writers, this is something we can interpret for people who, it never occurred to them that there are people who genuinely believe that the spirit world is an active thing and that their environment is an active part of their life.

And that even the trees have opinions on who these guests are. And if you can write the story in a way that the Western audience can appreciate, but it's also honors the way that people live in that part of the world. Uh, and that's pretty cool. And you can create adventures around that.

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'cause your books are distributed internationally. Would they pick this up and go, wow, this, this Westerner coming through our village, you know, scoffing at this or whatever. Is there a, is that a part of your concern, a bit of a push and pull, I suppose?

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I put Endnotes and I talk about that in the in introduction, is that this book came out. Or the stories that were contained in the book came out at a time when, for the first time you could instantaneously through the internet connect with the other side of the world and, and not even through a formally mediated level, just through discussion boards of social media.

And I realized that if you say that, oh yeah, my guest house owner in Cambodia gave me some free taco sausages. You just open yourself up to all this criticism, like the guest house owner's like. Why did you say that? Now everybody's gonna want free sausages, you know, and, and the academic is like, actually that's not the correct pronunciation of Waco.

That's, that's inaccurate and, and culturally insensitive. And so I think this is just the way we are right now. And I think one thing about, uh, travel writers or people who write about travel in the context of adventure is realizing that you're, you're sort of in a liminal space. You're interpreting one place.

The people who live in that culture. They have their own stories, right? They don't need me to write a story about them, but if I can honestly represent it for, uh, an audience in my own home culture, then I can sort of humanize what it's like in that part of the world, and I can use sort of my own disorientation and awkwardness to illustrate true things.

And as part of that adventure, because oftentimes the adventure. You know, good narrative, as you know, is about sort of moving from imbalance to balance or from not understanding to understanding, and that's something that can definitely be done in a way that benefits both the host community and the guest who is going there.

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They're trying to solve an internal conflict or resolution or figure something out. What's something that you've sort of found or discovered you feel on the. Travels that has led to that, that has, that has allowed you to experience that.

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If there's something that you really want to find on the other side of the world, then a quest is a great storytelling vessel. And it doesn't even have to be a pot of gold. It can be just like somebody to play racketball with and catman do, or, or whatever captures your imagination. Maybe there's a recipe that you wanna find or you wanna find your old, you know, ancestral village in Central Asia or wherever you go.

Um, then you end up. Having these really interesting experiences. For example, my wife and I went to Kenya a couple years ago looking for this old camp that was established by some Americans who were from the same part of the US as, as we are who were documentary filmmakers like a hundred years ago. And it was really new to make documentary films.

t of. They were famous in the: 1920

I say the old Dark Room, actually the ruins of this place. We found old nails that once held together. Boards there. And by the time we got there, it really wasn't even about finding the place. It was about all the experiences we had along the way. It was the, it was getting scared by the water buffalo down by the lake and meeting our military escort in this national park type area.

And the, the soldier assigned to us was this really cool woman who was about 30 and she had kids and she was funny. And, and so I think that sometimes the quest is ultimately not about what you end up finding, but it's about the meanderings that and the, uh, serendipities that come along the way.

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Sounds like something Paolo Culo would write, isn't it? Is what you've gotta at the beginning, you know, you had it all along, perhaps the thing you were looking for. Yeah, for sure. So, so travel writing, I think does give the perception or can give the perception that the writer aimlessly wanders around stumbling into these amazing situations.

Is this true or do you find that you have to cultivate those experiences like thinking about your. Kenyan trip there. There must have been an an element of planning that in advance of just sort of rocking up.

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And the woman almost died. This is a hundred years ago. Well, now there's a, there's like a trekking industry there, so we climb Mount Kenya, no problem. It's not like we're stronger than they were a hundred years ago. It's just that we had the advantages of a commercial adventure travel industry, and that's worth keeping in mind, that right now you can buy an adventure.

It used to be that you just had adventures, you flew your plane into the bush, or you, you went down the river for two weeks. Well, now you have commercial planes that you can do the same, or commercial boats that do the same thing as well. And I'm not, I don't wanna knock the commercial travel industry, but I think that sometimes if you don't allow yourself to meander a little bit, then you're only going to find what you hope to find.

You're not gonna find those, those wonderful accidents, and this is why going slow is. A good thing to happen, like when I took the trans Siberian train, I knew I was gonna write about it, but I didn't know that there's gonna be a really boring seven hour stop on the Russian Mongolian border. And I was gonna wander outside and sort of meet some people and hike around and come back, and the train was gone.

So my cousin and I went, we realized that when you take the trans Siberian train, the timetable is only on Moscow time. So even if you're in Siberia, even if you're seven time zones away. The train is going according to Moscow time. And so we are just these dumb Americans who completely misunderstand something that's no secret about how the Trans Siberian train works.

And so we had to hire a taxi to catch up with the train, which sounds like this cinematic wild adventure until you realize how slow the trans Siberian train goes. But we didn't know that. And so we hired this guy to, well, yeah, it, I wrote about this, but like this really cool Siberian lady who spoke English.

Introduces to this taxi driver, and she's like, well, be careful because, because, oh, I can't remember. I can't think of what it is. And it's like, well, what he, he might break down. It might be late. He is like, oh, kill, he might kill you if you're not careful. And it's like, what? And, and so I think something was lost in translation where she was telling us not to trust everybody.

And the crazy thing is that I feel like the taxi driver was a little bit more afraid of us. Than we were of him, because I think this woman said, you need, you need to be good to these Americans. And he was trying to catch up with the train. And then he also, they have these animistic beliefs, like every time he crossed a mountain pass, he would throw out coins or like cigarettes out the window.

So for the first hour of the trip, it's like, why is this guy throwing money outta the car? Anyway, we caught up with the train and it was no problem at all, but. That was not an organized part of the adventure, but because it was a misadventure it made it way more interesting from a storytelling perspective.

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They just liked the thought of. Of what it would be like to travel the world. And people said, oh, I wouldn't wanna sit next to you on the plane. You know, it's like, I'm not, I didn't say it was the no bathing challenge, it's the no baggage challenge. It was as clean as ever. 'cause I had to wash my clothes constantly because I only had one backup set of clothing.

And so that's a big example. But I think anytime that you sort of give yourself an obstacle, like once I walked across the north part of Israel and so I just had to go slow. I think walking anywhere is gonna give you an adventure simply because. It is by nature inefficient to walk from one place to another.

So Americans and I bought a riverboat and we took it down the Mekong River in in Laos for three weeks. And that was an amazing adventure that was structured, but it was only, it was structured only in that it is like, oh yeah, we're driving down the river in a boat. I bicycled across Burma once and so, or Myanmar.

And so I think anytime you can structure the quest, but as long as you don't micromanage the quest, it's gonna give you these amazing experiences that you had no idea existed before you. Went off on the quest, be it a quest with no luggage or trying to ride a one speed bicycle across Myanmar.

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Telling it as it is and sort of making it a compelling story, trying to to, to tell it in a way that's really engaging to the reader. How do you balance those two interests in your writing?

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Uh, whereas in nonfiction, I, I think travel writing has a bad reputation because historically it hasn't been super reliable. Uh, and I, but I think that the metric on where you can sort of cut corners in terms of what literally happened is that you could condense time and you can condense characters or you can leave things out, but you can't put things in, I think in nonfiction it's sort of.

You're not, you're not being honest if you talk about something that didn't happen or a person that didn't actually exist. Actually, it's narratively hard to describe 10 interesting people that shared a train card with you. And if you maybe condense them a little bit, if you, if you take the best lines and you have them coming outta the, the mouth of two people rather than 10 people, I think that's a fair way to tell a narrative nonfiction story without vending the truth too much.

Uh, but it's a tough, I teach travel writing classes in Paris each summer, and this comes up every year like. Um, it feels like this story could be more interesting if all of these happened in one day instead of one week. Is that ethical? Well, let's talk about that. Uh, usually you're not really stretching the truth that much if you're just condensing time or condensing characters a little bit.

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That's the nature of

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No, you don't. You start right in the middle. There was a fight, like when you go home and, and you tell your friends about it. You don't start chronologically tell all the details. You start in the action. You simplify the chronology and you start in media res that. That's fair game when telling stories.

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Although I amp it up to 12. You know when, when doing those things too. But then that's fiction. That's the wonder of it. Yeah. So as travelers and as writers, I feel like we do often walk that line between skepticism and wonder, and there's a balance there. Have you ever encountered something though that.

Left you genuinely amazed, like, like speechless, like, uh, you just didn't know how to explain it in that moment or to, to sort of justify it in that moment?

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I was with my wife, but I went drinking kava. Do you know what kava is, Lou? No. Nice. It's sort of, it's an intoxicated drink. It's sort of a narcotic drink that they drink in the Melanesian South Pacific. Uh, and it's very, it's, it's a very mellow high. It sort of relaxes you and you become a, a little bit mystical.

It's the ritual. Women can drink it now in Vanuatu, but usually it's. A men only ritual and it's, it's sort of bro time. It's like we go and you figure out the universe. And actually in Vatu they encourage people to drink kava instead of alcohol because people drink alcohol and they get in fights. People drink a lot of kava and they just talk about the, the nature of the universe.

Right? And so I was hanging out with these guys at a kava bar on the island of ma and they were just sort of talking about different things and you know, they were curious about me. They were talking in Bislama, but I was with a guy who could translate for me, and then they just pivoted and they started talking about magic and about how this guy jumped into the rock and the rock took him to another island and then he flew back and it's like, I don't think there's an airline.

No, they were talking about flying through the air as if they were talking about the weather. Right. You know, and so this is a world where magic is still much more a part of the way they interpret how the world works. And it was just really weird. It was sort of a weird privilege to be a part of this conversation where these people, they weren't showing off, they weren't trying to dazzle me.

They were just sort of matter of fact talking about, you know, the, the news from the week. And I've never been in that situation before. There've been other situations like I went to the mental Y islands off the coast of Sumatra, which is still sort of stone age in the way they live and. Even just being in a place where there's no plumbing on the entire island.

I think that sometimes, again, you compare with the modern world, you just are really amazed by how people see the world. Like one guy before he fell asleep, he was singing to his father. His father died the year before, and so he was just sort of singing a morning song. It's really interesting how connected, like before we ate the chicken, they thanked the chicken.

For giving us dinner. Right? It's like, well, you, you've lived Well, I, I don't know exactly what they said 'cause I didn't speak their language, but their attention to food, you know, we eat meat unthinkingly in the industrialized world, whereas they were acknowledging that this chicken had lived a good life and it was gonna enhance their life.

And so that's the kind of thing that really blows me away when you ask that question. I was thinking that sometimes there's western rituals that might mystify other people from other cultures like spring break. In the United States when college students go to the Coast and party, or, or Mardi Gras To an extent.

I mean, in New Orleans, Mardi Gras is a, is carnival like they have in Venice. Just the way that, I guess the sort of the touristic approach, the, the hedonistic approach in the 21st century with which people celebrate Mardi Gras and Spring break, I think would mystify people. Uh, I think that the ba analia is, is recognizable across history, but the very specific consumer culture of ba analia in the United States would, would mystify other cultures in the same way that people talking about jumping on a rock and flying to another island mystified me.

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Absolutely. I've heard that before. Even when I was in my twenties and, and traveling through Asia, it's like, oh, uh, where's your wife? Oh, I'm not married. Oh, you're 27 and not married. That's, oh, I'm so sorry. Like just family is the starting point for people's happiness in so many parts of the world. Not just their happiness, but their way of interpreting the world.

That it's sort of funny to sort of take one's individualist assumptions into parts of the world where individualism is. Sort of seen as an embarrassing, self-indulgent thing.

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Just let that you know, the, the feeling of the moment, take you and, and control your itinerary. Probably my favorite

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I've done that before. It's, it's this big, clumsy, awkward, mid-westerner learning how to dance in Latin America. And I went there and I, I, I took some dancing lessons, but I ran into a friend of a friend who played the bagpipes, and he introduced me to the Bagpiper Club. And the longer I stayed in Cuba, the less interested I became in dance and the more interested I became in.

In these cool Bagpiper people, and they were just the, and they were in their twenties. They were hip, they were good looking. They were a lot of fun. And so instead of learning to dance, obviously I never wrote this book. Luke. Instead of learning to dance, I just made some great friends and sometimes we would be out until five in the morning.

I, I learned how to play I a few very poor songs on the, on the Gian bagpipes and we would stand outside and the Cubans thought it was really cool and Cubans will dance to anything. And so we would go out and. Play the bagpipes and, and meet people at three in the morning. And it was a terrific time that I never would have assumed, you know, I think people go to Cuba and they think, oh, I'm gonna dance so, and I'm gonna smoke a cigar and drink a mojito.

Well, no, actually, I played the bagpipes and it was one of my most memorable travel experiences ever.

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You know, if it feels like I'm sort of in an Indiana Jones scenario, then it feels really exciting to me, even now that I'm in my fifties. So I wanna tip my cap to those. Sort of adventure movies from when I was young. But actually, you know, I started out, uh, doing Van Life. My first journey was in North America.

And when you think about North American travel, you think Jack Kerouac and Dean Morty traveling across America having these amazing experiences. But actually a big influence on me was William Lee Heat Moon, who wrote a book called Blue Highways. Have you heard of this book?

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When I was a young man that interested me, like there was a structure to the way he traveled that was more influential to me than this crazy Madcap Jack Kerouac journey that happened. And so it's, it's funny, looking back to those early influences, blue Highways was a big influence to me just because it sort of showed me that this van Life.

Was possible before there was a term called hashtag Van Life. And then when I was traveling around Asia, I really loved video Night and Catman Dew by Pico Ire because his was a travel book about Asia that acknowledged that people in Asia play baseball and they watch movies like Rambo. And it just felt really relatable.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's really fun. I can actually. Um, do you know the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off? I do, yes. Yeah, it's a great travel movie. The guy quit skips school and goes to downtown Chicago. It doesn't go very far, but it's sort of proof that you can, you can have these adventures close to home if you just risk to take the adventure.

And so there's a, there's movies like Before Sunrise, which is all about getting off a train in, in Europe with an attractive stranger and just sort of letting things happen. Stories sort of are part of all of our. Imaginative lives. Even as people like you and I create stories, we were relying on the stories that inspired us.

Sometimes they can be counterintuitive, but they're always, they're always fun. I think the stories that we read sort of teach us how to tell stories.

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n the book club Luke, back in: 2023

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And of course, if you're a big fan of adventure stories like the one I've told today, check out my books@lukerichardsonauthor.com bon voyage. Enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.