Rolf Potts Travel Quotes & Sayings

Long-term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way. — Rolf Potts

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. — Rolf Potts

Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. — Rolf Potts

Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. — Rolf Potts

Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you're forced to look for meaning within yourself Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you 'find yourself', it's because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true self. — Rolf Potts

Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you. — Rolf Potts

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. — Rolf Potts

In a way, simplifying your life for vagabonding is easier than it sounds. This is because travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don't believe this, just go home and try stuffing everything you own into a backpack. This will never work, because no matter how meagerly you live at home, you can't match the scaled-down minimalism that travel requires. — Rolf Potts

As you get past the first few weeks of your travel experience however, you'll discover that partying on the road is different from partying at home. At home, partying is a way of celebrating the weekend or taking a pause from the workaday world. On the road, every moment is a weekend, every day a break from the workaday world. Thus, falling into a nightly ritual of partying - as can easily happen in traveler hangouts anywhere on the planet - is a sure way to overlook the subtlety of places, stunt your creativity, and trap yourself in the patterns of home. Granted, you can have plenty of fun in the process; but if you travel the world merely to indulge in the same kinds of diversions you enjoy at home, you'll end up selling your experience short. — Rolf Potts

Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire; it's the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it's also the time to tie up your loose ends. Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts - so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life. — Rolf Potts

You should view each new travel frustration - sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict - as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure. — Rolf Potts

Those who travel the world hoping to get "blinded by the light" are often blind to the light that's all around them. — Rolf Potts

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you'll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you'll discover that "adventure" is a decision after the fact - a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can't quite explain. — Rolf Potts

Thus, it's important to keep in mind that you should never go vagabonding out of a vague sense of fashion or obligation. Vagabonding is not a social gesture, nor is it a moral high ground. It's not a seamless twelve-step program of travel correctness or a political statement that demands the reinvention of society. Rather, it's a personal act that demands only the realignment of self. If this personal realignment is not something you're willing to confront (or, of course, if world travel isn't your idea of a good time), you have the perfect right to leave vagabonding to those who feel the calling. — Rolf Potts

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. — Rolf Potts

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you're conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule. — Rolf Potts

They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value. — Rolf Potts

In reality long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics, age, ideology, income, and everything to do with personal outlook. — Rolf Potts

For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory - a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture. — Rolf Potts

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations. — Rolf Potts

Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there. — Rolf Potts