Rolf Potts is one of the most famous travelers and travel writers of our day, and he’s also a good friend of BootsnAll, so we were thrilled that he included us on his virtual book tour for his new book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer. His first book, Vagabonding, has become a modern-day classic within the travel community, and it’s helped inspire countless trips among BootsnAll members and everyone else lucky enough to read it.

We asked people to send in the question they’d most like Rolf to answer, and he chose his twelve favorite below. Those whose questions were chosen have won a free copy of his new book, so congratulations and thanks to everyone who participated.

Without further ado, here’s Rolf:

First
off, let me say I got an amazing batch of questions,
and I wish I had the time to answer them all.  If for some reason I
didn’t
answer yours, it could be that I already answered a similar question at
one of
the previous stops on my virtual book tour.  Be aware that I also
answer
questions (albeit without the promise of a free book) via my "Ask
Rolf" column at World
Hum, so feel free to send your question there if I
didn’t address it here!

Anyhow, here goes with some of the questions that caught my imagination
today…

Question 1: How can I convince my parents to let me travel?

jyfeliz: My question is I am only 17
years old, I have been saving about 4,000 dollars to travel, but I face the
problem that my parents don’t want to let me go, and don’t seem to plan to. I
am also a female. How do you believe I can convince them on this?

Rolf:  This is a natural reaction on the part of
parents, because parents naturally have all these instinctive concerns that
something will happen to you, or you’ll do something stupid, or both.

The secret is to just be patient with them.  Convince them you’re serious
about travel, and that travel needn’t be a frivolous activity where you go
overseas and party your time away.  Tell them how travel is educational,
how you’ll have chances to volunteer and learn about yourself.  Tell them
travel will help you grow in ways that would never happen if you spent that
time working or going to college.  Tell them they can meet you
someplace along the way for a week or two of family bonding.

In short, convince them your travels will be a serious, soul-enhancing
undertaking.  In fact, have them read my first book, Vagabonding, which has calmed many a concerned parental conscience
about long-term travel.

Heck, since we’re in the spirit of giving my books away
today, I’ll send you a copy of Vagabonding
to give to you parents!

Which means I still have ten copies of my new book to give away…

Question 2: How do I summon the courage to go vagabonding?

karl: As a middle-aged man who in
the past ten years has really been infected with travel virus, I’d like to know
how one can summon the courage to leave it all (for a year or more) and go
a-vagabonding? I guess I’m more interested in the psychological/emotional
requirements than the nuts and bolts.

Rolf:  The early chapters of my first book, Vagabonding, vividly examine that psychic
process of building up courage to make your dream trip happen.

So I’ll just send you a copy of Vagabonding
— it’ll make that travel virus get worse in the best way.

And that means I STILL have ten copies of my new book to give away…

Question 3: Is there anything wrong with staying ON the tourist trail?

Dylan Whitman: I’ve mainly noticed
two types of travelers – those who travel and stick with homogenized preplanned
tours, well known monuments and tourist kitsch, and those who are almost on a
mission to prove they are different and stay away from anything mainstream. Do
you feel there is something to be said for taking in both the cliche
destinations, as well as those sights off the beaten path?

Rolf:  Absolutely!  There is plenty to learn
from standard "tourist" activities, just as there is tons to learn by
getting off the beaten path.  Tourist kitsch has its own charm, and just
because you enjoy it every once in a while on your trip doesn’t mean you have
to seek it out every day.  You meet some interesting people in tourists
zones as well (just watch your back, since targeted petty crime is usually
worse in tourist areas than off the beaten path).

One advantage of preplanned tours and such is that they are often used by folks
who haven’t traveled much and are seeing things with fresh eyes. Just last
summer my parents flew out to join me in Paris
(where I teach a creative writing class each summer).  It was their first
time in Europe, and their excitement at the
most basic things — from the Louvre to the way Parisians walk their dogs —
was infective.  Their naïve sense of wonder helped my jaded traveler eyes
see the city in a whole new way!

Question 4: Do you set objectives when you go to a new destination?

Nancy Brown: Do you have any set
objectives when you visit a destination or do you simply let your experiences
guide you at the moment? By that I mean, not everyone has the opportunity to
learn the secrets of Tantric sex in an Indian ashram. How do you find yourself
in these situations?

Rolf:  I usually travel with some vague objectives
when I go to a new place, but I’ve found that the key to really experiencing
the place is the willingness to dump those pre-planned objectives at a moment’s
notice if you discover something more compelling along the way.  I think
travel planning is a great way to get a taste for what’s to come, but you’ll
learn more about that destination during your initial hours there than you did
in all your days of travel planning.  So be sure to trust in the world’s
capacity for providing you with the kind of wonders and experiences you never
would have imagined in your research!

My Tantric ashram escapade in Rishikesh,
India is an
example of something I stumbled into by accident.  Before I went to India I knew
almost nothing of Rishikesh, but a friend of mine insisted that I travel there
because it’s this iconic center for yoga practitioners.  I wasn’t really
into yoga, but I thought if I was going to try it in the yoga mecca itself?  When I arrived in Rishikesh, however, I
found an advertisement for the Tantra class, which of course became the thing I
remember best and ended up writing about.  You’ll have to check out the
story in my new book — it’s a very funny and telling misadventure.

Question 5: What kind of camera should I bring traveling?

greg ebersole: I
like to travel in places like Colombia,
Uganda, Cambodia, and Brazil among others. I like to walk
around the towns I’m in looking for photos. I never know whether to take a
small point and shoot camera or stick a 35mm camera with a couple of lens in a
day pack. I don’t like to draw attention to myself. What do you find works best
for you?

Rolf:  I’d go with a small point-and-shoot, for
several reasons.  First off, a small camera without the bulky lens is a
lot easier to slip into your pocket and use when a moment strikes you, whereas
there are times when you’re not going to want to carry around a bigger and more
expensive camera (which, I might add, is more likely to advertise you to petty
thieves as a tourist with a lot of money).  Second, they make some great
digital point-and-shoot cameras these days — ones that can take some really
amazing photos that compare favorably to those of bulkier cameras. And finally,
the components that go into taking a good picture often have less to do with
fancy equipment than a willingness to choose subjects well, frame your shots
effectively, and use the light that’s available.

Question 6: How do you record your travels?

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Liz: How do you
keep track of all the things that happen while you are on your travels? Do you
take a laptop with you or do you write in notebooks and transcribe when you get
home?

Rolf: 
These days I quite frequently carry my laptop with me, since I often
have stories or essays stacked on top of each other and I’ll need to write one
while I’m researching another.  But that’s just the cross I bear for
making my living as a travel writer.

When I have a choice, I’ll just keep notes on a small notebook I stow in my
pocket, and write my stories when I get home.  Often, when I feel these
notes are particularly sensitive and important, I will transcribe them into an
email draft or Google document online, so that they don’t get lost if, say, I
fall into a river or lose my daypack.

Because I write for a living, I don’t typically keep a formal travel journal —
just notes — as I’ve found the day-to-day narrative sensibility that goes into
a journal can throw off the narrative sensibility of my stories (which are
rarely structured along a day to day arc).  That said, I do encourage
people to keep travel journals; I just don’t do this myself.

By the way, I have a whole tub of little pocket notebooks from various trips
stored at home, and sometimes it’s fun to go back and read them.  In fact
I frequently used them to research and write the "commentary track"
endnotes to my new book.

Question 7: Do you feel a place like Kansas can be as exotic as Bhutan?

dove: You
have a house in Kansas. Do you ever feel that places like Kansas
are, in some ways, more exotic than, say, Laos or Bhutan, because they
are so off the backpacker radar?

Rolf:  I definitely feel
that Kansas can be as exotic in some ways as Laos or Bhutan.  Too many
times, independent travelers make a cultural fetish of what "off the
beaten path" means.  The reason "off the beaten path" destinations are
more interesting than the ones of the tourist trail is because these
places have a way of providing you with uncommon experiences and
teaching you unexpected things.  This can happen anywhere.

Sometimes
I get irritated when I hear some backpacker brag about the time he’s
spent on some rice farm near Vang Vieng, and then in the next
breath bag on the sensibilities of people who live in "Red States" he’s
certainly
never visited.   How can you consider hanging out with a
Laotian farmer a virtue when the idea of a Kansas farmer brings a sneer
to your face? Don’t answer "because they vote Republican," because
that’s a dumb
generalization that you’d have no way of knowing if
you’ve never met a Kansas farmer.  I live in the Kansas countryside,
and I know of at least one horse-owning, boot-wearing Marxist within
two miles of my house.

Stereotypes can be pretty thin, and the
great thing about travel is that it opens your mind in ways you hadn’t
expected — and this holds as true for those who visit the prairie as
those who visit the Himalayas or the Libyan Desert.

Question 8: Has travel helped you see familiar places with "new eyes"?


Kaushik:
Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes". In your own writings
you have defined vagabonding primarily as an ‘attitude’. Have you had
an experience that you would like to share of discovering some new
insights in an otherwise ‘familiar’ place through having ‘new eyes’ ?

Rolf:  Following
the previous question, I once visited the little town of Minneapolis,
Kansas (not to be confused with the major city in Minnesota) right
after I’d gotten back from this amazing journey to Burma.  I was still
on my Burma buzz and I wasn’t expecting much from a nondescript little
prairie town, but what I discovered in the town museum that day made me
appreciate the place — and museums in general — in a whole new way.

Chapter 19 of my new book tells the full story of what happened in that small-town Kansas museum.

Question 9: Does writing about travel limit the way you see places?

Charlotte:
We all know those people who view their surroundings solely through
the lens of the camera, missing half the world because they can’t shoot
it. How does one avoid viewing the world solely through the travel
writer’s lens, or looking to turn everything into a "story" and thereby
missing the actual impact of the experiences one encounters?

Rolf:
That’s a really good question.  I’d reckon the best way to avoid
trapping one’s travels into the lens of a potential story is to save
the story for later.  That is, throw yourself into a given travel
experience, and write the story (if there’s a story to be told) in
retrospect.

That’s one disadvantage, actually, of formal
magazine assignments. Because the story is pitched and approved in
advance, you are kind of trapped into the parameters of that story.
You can always manage some experiential wiggle room, of course, but
not in the same way you could if you didn’t have the assignment.
That’s what I always tell my fellow travelers when they say they envy
my job:  In short, your average traveler has all the advantages and few
of the limitations as a travel writer.  The trade-off, I guess, is that
story assignments tend to be funded by the magazine.  The experience is
less prone to serendipity — but hey, it’s free!

On a final
note, I’ll point out that even people who travel with a mind to writing
a certain story often stumble into an even better story they
never expected.  In the endnotes to chapter 16 of my new book I recall
a situation where I was having this great little time goofing off with
kids in a village in northwestern Cambodia, yet I kept absently
wondering how this might tie into a serious story I’d dreamed up about
the legacy of genocide in that country.  As if turned out, my
happy-go-lucky little sojourn in the village ended up being the story
itself — and it was probably a truer story than if I’d tried to
shoehorn it into some template about the tragedies of Cambodia.

Question 10: How do I keep from becoming an annoying travel blogger?

Orlagh: I’m
off on a world tour in 4 weeks, overland, terribly excited! How do
I stop myself from becoming one of those smug traveling types who
send emails about how fantastic life is on the road? I don’t really
want to blog, and I don’t want to maintain a Facebook page because that
has the same effect!

Rolf:  Well the easy answer is to
just go old-school.  I mean, it wasn’t that long ago when we had
neither email nor blogs nor Facebook to bug our friends with.
Travelers just threw themselves into the excitement of the road and
sent home the occasional cryptic postcard.

That’s still a great
way to go, if you’re up for it — and personally I think there’s more
to experience on the road if you aren’t always racing to your in-box or
Facebook page to alert people about that amazing bhang lassi you just
drank.  Why not just chill with your bhang lassi and enjoy a day in
India and call it good?

If you absolutely have document your
travels in some kind of public capacity, I’d go with a blog.  That way
your friends and acquaintances can drop in to confirm you’re still
alive without wading through unsolicited in-box messages or enduring
those chirpy little Facebook updates about how you just ate some tasty
hummus in Wadi Musa.

Question 11: Do you pay attention to travel warnings or follow your gut?

Canuck Girl: When traveling do you pay attention to travel warnings or do you go by gut instinct at the time?

Rolf:
Both.  Plus I inquire at online message boards before I travel, and I
seek local information when I’m on the road — which is typically more
useful than official warnings or gut instincts.

For instance,
government travel warnings are worth checking — but they also tend to
be very general and/or quickly dated.  So the State Department posts a
warning because there’s political unrest in Lima, Peru. OK, how long
ago did it happen?  Did it affect other parts of the country?  Usually
these kinds of problems are of a short duration and confined to a
specific location.  Since if you’re like most people you’d rather skip
Lima and go to Cusco or Iquitos or Arequipa anyway, it’s good to check
the Bootsnall
boards or the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree and see what travelers
to those places are saying.  Then, when you get to those places, you
can just ask around about security issues as you go.  Chances are
the guy who owns the restaurant or the backpackers at your guesthouse
will be happy to tell you what things are like just up the road.

Question 12: Do you ever meet people who regret having gone vagabonding?

donnaleed:
My husband and I are considering a 2-3 year RTW. We are trying to get
up the courage to quit our jobs and sell our belongings…My question
to you is, in all your years of vagabonding and meeting fellow
travelers, have you ever met anyone who has regretted their decision?
Someone who feels as though they’ve made a mistake in their life by
taking the time to see the world?

Rolf:  In a word, no.
I’ve met people for whom travel was more difficult than they’d
expected (at least at first), and people who had a bit of
struggle getting re-started when they returned from their journey, but
nobody who has literally regretted the time they spent traveling the
world.

In fact, all of the people I know who entered into their
first vagabonding journey full of anxiety ultimately returned home to
become happy, productive, well-rounded members of the society they left
(and most of them are already planning their next journey).

Cheers everyone, and happy vagabonding.  I hope you enjoy my new book!

You can follow the rest of Rolf Potts’ virtual
book tour online, or see him in
person at one of 20 cities nationwide as he celebrates the release of Marco
Polo Didn’t Go There (Travelers’
Tales, 2008).

We
encourage you to ask for the book at your favorite local
bookstore or Amazon.com,
and
follow Rolf’s tour diary at Gadling
starting Sept 29^th. 

Tomorrow’s virtual book tour stop will be at Vagabondish.
To read yesterday’s tour stop, go to Budget
Travel’s This Just in.