The Vagabond Travel Ethos
Episode Stats
Summary
Travel can often be approached as just another consumer.Good travelers quickly dive in and out of a place, check off the things they want to see, harvest the requisite pictures to prove they were there, and wear their trip as a status symbol. My guest, Rolf Potts, thinks there s a better way to approach travel. After exploring the world for years, he wrote a book called Vagabonding which laid out the practicalities of how to execute long-term travel. 20 years later, he s back with a new book, The Vagabond s Way, with reflections on the more philosophical side of that kind of travel.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast travel can often
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be approached as just another consumer good travelers quickly dive in and out of a place
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check off the things they want to see harvest the requisite pictures to prove they were there
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and wear their trip as a status symbol my guest rolf potts thinks there's a better way to approach
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travel after exploring the world for years he wrote a book called vagabonding which laid out
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the practicalities of how to execute long-term travel 20 years later he's back with a new book
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the vagabond's way with reflections on the more philosophical side of that kind of travel which
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you take on any type of trip today on the show rolf explains the vagabonding ethos which involves
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slowing down being open to surprises and really paying attention to your experiences he first
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discusses how taking an overly romantic view of travel can actually diminish the enjoyment of
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traveling we then turn to the idea that seeking to take a more authentic approach to travel
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shouldn't mean trying too hard to differentiate yourself from the quote-unquote typical tourist
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and how to approach stereotypical tourist stuff with a nuanced view we discuss how to use the
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idea of pilgrimage behind its religious connotations as a pretext for choosing places to visit we also
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delve into how to deal with the culture shock that can come both from visiting a new place and
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returning home from a long trip we enter conversation with how the attentive adventurous attitude which
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underlies the vagabond's way can also be applied to exploring your own backyard after the show's over
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check out our show notes at awim.is slash vagabond
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rolf potts welcome to the show glad to talk to you brett so you are a travel writer and you've
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written a lot about a travel lifestyle that you call vagabonding and you got a new book out
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called the vagabond's way it's 366 meditations on wanderlust discovery and the art of travel
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so it's one of these books you can just pick up and read a passage a day it's really nice
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really quick hit so let's talk about vagabonding how do you define what is vagabonding and how does
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it differ from a just like a two-week vacation somewhere yeah vagabonding is about sort of
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intentionally taking time off from your normal life to travel in earnest not necessarily as a
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vacation or a consumer act but as a part of your real life not as an escape from your life but as
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an escape into your life and long term is a big factor in this it's the idea of traveling for a
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year or if you don't have that much time six weeks or six months but basically giving over a time in
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your life to travel and learning from that experience and broadening your life and sort of using that
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journey as a way to see your life options and to educate yourself about the world's riches
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so what's your experience with vagabonding how did you get started well when i was young i didn't know
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that travel was something you could just make happen you know i grew up in the middle of the country in
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kansas which is where i'm still based i didn't really know that many people with passports i thought
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that travel was something that you did at the end of your life or at the end of your working life
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when you had when time was given to you by society but my grandfather was a kansas farmer worked harder
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than anybody i knew he started farming at age 15 when his father died had an eighth grade education
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super smart guy around the time that he was given his retirement around the time that he was able to
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enjoy his time in a non-work way my grandmother his wife his true love got alzheimer's disease and so
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when i was a teenager when i was young i i saw in a very heartbreaking way that life doesn't just give
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you time if i was going to travel i would have to create my own time to travel and so in my early
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20s i worked as a landscaper for almost a year saved up all my money kitted out a van and traveled across
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america for eight months and really had this life-changing experience i realized that travel
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was not as difficult or dangerous or expensive as i thought it would be and i realized that travel
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is something that anybody can give to themselves it doesn't it's not necessarily something that you buy
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like a consumer act but it's something that you make time for whatever your means are and so one
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thing led to another i moved overseas i started teaching english as a foreign language in korea
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i started writing about travel and i traveled across asia for two and a half years and that's when i sat
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down and wrote the book about that process of living through time wealth which is now almost 20 years
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old and i've been talking about it ever since and i don't get tired of it are you still taking
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extended travel trips i am in a different way than i was when i was younger and one great thing
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about travel is that it can manifest in different ways at different ages and different things interest
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you even in the same place so this summer i traveled for six weeks to paris where i teach a writing class
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each summer and then also to norway place i'd never been to before but my wife has cousins there
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and it's really fun to see norway through the eyes of my wife's family it's something i don't have
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any connection to the immigrant sides of my family and so seeing norway through a very personal lens
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was fun for me and then we went to the faroe islands before we came home and so that was a six-week trip
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and that counts as vagabonding too so in the book you're trying to encourage this idea of not treating
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travel as a consumer experience you know there's this idea you hear out there it's like well instead
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of buying things buy experiences but you're still approaching things as consumer when you're buying
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something as an experience so what are the benefits of your approach to travel i mean what have you
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gotten out of these extended trips you've gone on you know how has it enriched your life and when you
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talk to people like what are the selling points you give them to your approach well this kind of travel
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allows you to slow down because rushing through any experience in life is a certain way to to miss out
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on its nuances and to savor it and to really enjoy it so in giving yourself say a year to travel you
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don't necessarily need to go to every continent in the world but maybe you can spend a year in a
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handful of places in a way that that really allows you to be slow and be still and enjoy those places
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you know it's funny i've been hosting writing classes in paris for many years now and a lot of
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times my friends or my students they'll come and they'll get frustrated at how slow the wait staff
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is at restaurants because they want to get out and experience paris you know they went off they want to
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get out and tick off the things on their checklist and i used to be that way too but then then what i
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realized is that you are experiencing paris by having a very slow lunch you know french people
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don't rush through lunch to get it out of the way that is a very specific pleasure in their day
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and it's not until you can relax and enjoy a three-hour lunch where the wait staff is not going to bring
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you the check until you ask for it and they're going to be very careful in in asking your recommendations
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because that's their job and they take pride in that i use that as a metaphor because that slowing
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down is something we sometimes forget to do even at home to to have full life experiences and so
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travel really taught me that long-term travel especially so i think a lot of people when they
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think about extended travel they have this romantic view of it and they think well you know that the
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golden age of travel is over that was like something that happened in the the 1890s or the 1960s
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jack kerouac it's not as romantic anymore because you got yelp and you got these travel reviews you
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got social media that's influencing people to come to these locations and everyone's got their
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smartphone out taking a picture you disagree with this notion that traveling is no longer romantic
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why is that well i think this has always been a part of the travel conversation you know years ago
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when trains started going across europe people enjoyed that convenience but they also complained about
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how it sort of took away from the experience from the immersive experience of going slow going on foot
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or going by wagon and so i think if you read travel literature going back to the early 19th century
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actually the 18th century lots of people have declared that travel was over that travel is ruined
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right so for as long as we've been traveling the world as people people have been assuming that
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that this place was more perfect a generation ago and maybe there were certain advantages a generation
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ago but i think it's it's easy as i say in the vagabond's way the golden age of travel is always
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right now that it's easy to fetishize the presumed purity of previous ages when in fact this moment is
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all we have and and someday i actually quote the anthropologist called levi strauss who says i may
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complain about the impurity of the cultures i see now but a hundred years from now another traveler may
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express frustration at the reality that i'm seeing right now but in failing to see and so i think
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that's a good that's good to keep in mind that in in in less than a hundred years in 20 years in 10
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years people might be looking back to the moment right now in a way that feels pure to them when in
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fact now is all we have so yeah i do try to discourage that cynicism that suggests that travel was
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better in a long ago time and to embrace the romanticism and the and the beauty of the moment we have now
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and you also talk about how over romanticizing travel can get in the way of having a good travel
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experience how so well i think we often it's it's an expectations versus reality thing and i think for
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all the preparation we do before we travel after a week on the road you're way smarter than any
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information you could have gotten from a computer if you don't allow yourself to adapt to the real
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world as it is as opposed to the filtered world you're going to be selling your travel short oftentimes
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in cross-cultural situations you're looking for the tribesmen wearing traditional clothing in this
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part of africa you're looking for these ancient art traditions in this part of papua new guinea
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and you feel like you're being cheated if these people are wearing blue jeans and and using smartphones
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when in fact i think human cultures have always changed and it's actually it's it's truer to those
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cultures when those people they might be interested in art traditions they might have some clothing that is
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traditional but all culture is flexible and jeans and smartphones do not ruin a culture it's just
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you're discovering that those cultures are more complex more modern more changing than you would
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have assumed before you left home so i think if you're always judging your travels through those
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two-dimensional stereotypes by which you thought they would be then you're going to be selling it
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short i think you have to be humble as a traveler and realize that the world can surprise you
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and that's a great thing about travel is that regardless of what you plan it will surprise you in
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in ways that can be amazing is that an american phenomenon to treat like travel like we expect
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it to be like it's a small world at disneyland yeah i mean that goes into the consumer experience
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that travel like they used to complain about glossy magazines now they complain about instagram it's
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like the beaches are always empty you know the cocktails are always full there's sort of this
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perfection that is a part of tourism marketing which is fine there's great experiences to be had on
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the road but those expectations are never exactly like it happens in real time and so i think
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sometimes when we go with a bucket list of sightseeing activities that's fine i have nothing against bucket
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lists but sometimes it's those those uh subtler things that surprise you that are cooler than than any
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instagram sunset photo that was probably faked anyway it was probably had 10 people in line behind
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the person who took that instagram photo well another point you made i thought was really interesting
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is to this idea that cultures are complex they're always changing and how how the cultures can respond
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to travelers right they they see what travelers want right and this is part of their economy and so
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in some countries right in africa where they're wearing blue jeans and using smartphones they'll actually
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have like places where you can go and get your picture taken with the guys you know in grass skirts or
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whatever and like the typical tribal wear because i understand that's what people want and that's part of their
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economy yeah social scientists have talked about this there's different phrases to call this but
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and actually as far back as the 70s like a governmental minister in tanzania is like yeah we created this
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tribal village it's where the tourists want to go it might be fake but it's less of a hassle than
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tourists wandering through villages asking where the real africans are when in fact real africans are the
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guys in blue jeans you know um and i think that's that's an ongoing challenge i think people always have this
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idealized image of how things should be but in a weird way it can be dehumanizing to look for the
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person in the most traditional garb as the quote authentic person when in fact you know everybody's
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authentic you know the real everything's real and you just have to understand that the world is so much
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subtler and more complex and intermixed now that sometimes i write a chapter one of the chapters in my
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new book is about how we often experience other cultures first through pop culture right and so if you're a
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rugby fan you might be you might know more about fiji or australia than your average person if you like
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anime japan if you like k-pop you might know more about korea before you go there and that's a great
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thing and it's cool that we're sort of borrowing from each other culturally these days but if you
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think that there's this absolute way that koreans or fijians have to be then that's not really paying
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attention as a traveler and i think the vagabond's way the vagabonding ethos is really about paying
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attention and listening and asking questions before you take pictures because one of the gifts
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of travel is just is seeing how complex and interrelated the world is so you mentioned this
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idea of tourists right how tourists can like it feels like sometimes it feels like a tourist can
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ruin things and so you have this there's this idea amongst people who are like well i'm going to be
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a real traveler and i'm not going to be a tourist you think that distinction is not very useful why is
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that well i think it glosses over the fact that there were all outsiders in these new places
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and it's funny i've been talking about this for 20 years ever since vagabonding i talk i try to
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diminish the travelers versus tourists dichotomy and vagabonding simply because it's sort of this
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this nightclub ethic where you're trying to be cooler than the other people in this very small space
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whereas to the people in the host culture where you are you know you all look the same you know one
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guy might call the other guy a tourist but to the to the host culture is just an american or just a
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british person or whatever oddly enough even though i've been trying to downplace this distinction for
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years people just they're trying to compliment vagabonding or the vagabonding ethos and they'll
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say oh it's about how to be a traveler not a tourist right and it's like well okay i mean let's just try
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and be better travelers in relation to ourselves instead of trying to be cooler than the next guy over
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and i'm all you know a lot of the stereotypes attached to tourism is people being rude or culturally
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insensitive and i'm i think those are bad things but it takes more than just differentiating yourself
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to leave yourself open to a place so i really try to downplay that comparison that happens among
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people who are all tourists basically that we're all we're all tourists of a sort some of us do it a
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little bit better but at the end of the day we're all outsiders and that we should be humble about that
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too and then you made this point that was interesting is that when you're vagabonding or you do sort of
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extended travel looking at the tourist economy in a nuanced way is one of those i don't know
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refreshing insights you can get when you take that slow long-term approach to traveling you just see
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this well this is also part of this country's culture as well and it's interesting to see how
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the the culture interacts with the tourists yeah and it's and sometimes tourism can be bad for places
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especially when there's tourism overcrowding it over it's sort of superimposes a service economy on a
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place that might be better served by more of a mom and pop economy but you know it can be weird how
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tourists bring their ideas to a place i use an example in the book about how there was a tv show in
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china that showed the french lavender fields and so a lot of chinese tourists started coming to france to
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take pictures in front of lavender fields and the french people weren't really sure what to do with
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them and so they sort of bent their local economy to have lavender massages and lavender products and
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weirdly even though there was sort of an awkwardness to it i think it ended up being good for the the
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economy in that part of france and it's happened in other parts of the world too i write about in the
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book uh there's a part of panama that used to be just sort of this extractive plantain economy where
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the the tribes people in this certain region would get hard currency by exporting plantains down the
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river when they realized that they could host tourists in their own community and sort of share
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their traditions in a way that outsiders would pay for and buy souvenirs and things tourism actually
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diversified their economy in that place and other parts of the world papua new guinea as well art
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traditions have been revived bali is another example by tourist interest in these local traditions and so
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that's part of the complication or the complexity of the travel experiences that i was talking about
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is that sometimes if practiced mindfully you can really support communities by just taking an interest
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in and spending time there and using local guest houses and buying souvenirs and eating at local
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restaurants and and listening and engaging this you know that dynamic can also happen here in the united
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states so my family went to a dude ranch in wyoming this summer and what i was interesting a lot of the
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guests were from south america there's like a big family from germany and i later learned that germany
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in germany cowboys and indians are like a really big deal and so these guys came to united states to
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this dude ranch they just wanted the cowboy experience like they just thought that this was
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a legit cowboy experience and you know i was thinking well no probably i know some cowboys it's this is
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not it but i mean i didn't when you talked about that made me think of that experience i had at that dude
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ranch yeah and and i've been using a lot of international examples but the same thing happens
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locally too americans can take uh stereotypes to dude ranches and in fact sometimes i'm from
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kansas i know you're from oklahoma kansas is not a very touristed place it's a place people
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mostly know from stereotypes and if it's not the wizard of oz it's some sort of political generalization
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and so sometimes they really when people visit me in kansas they ask questions that feel naive you
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know that that are sort of through the lens of you know sort of this stereotype that kansas has
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cowboys or that it's it's this very conservative and flexible place when in fact those are just
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stereotypes from outside you can find those stereotypes but it's not necessarily that way
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and i actually talk about you know germans have been interested in cowboy culture since the 19th century
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when uh actually i i use a word in the book for it i i would mess up the german pronunciation but it
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basically means indian enthusiasm and these german they basically read these pulp fictions about the
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wild west that were very popular in germany but those pulp fictions were written by a guy from
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saxony right you know he hadn't been to the united states he just read cowboy novels in english and he
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wrote german versions which were very popular and so for a hundred years or more germans had been coming
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sort of encouraged by the stereotypes from this pop culture vision of the american west
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and they they come to the u.s and they sort of demand to see it in a way and that has bent
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actually in the united states also you'll see dude ranches you'll see navajo gift shops that are really
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sort of catering to stereotypes of what those places are like more so than what day-to-day life is like
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there and so that's one thing i try to encourage in the vagabonding ethic be it in arizona or the other
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side of the world to really slow down and let your expectations take a back seat to what you're seeing
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before your eyes and to to let inquiry rather than stereotypes influence what you're going to do
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there okay so it sounds like overall don't write off the touristy stuff all together and also like
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don't try to out cool your fellow traveler because that's just not a good mindset to have going into
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something and also you know also the stereotypical tourist stuff can be fun that's why you don't want
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to shut yourself off to it completely it can also be good for the local economy but then also at the
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same time like see this stuff see the touristy stuff in a nuanced way like don't go into with
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your preconceived notions try to try to see what's what's there we're going to take a quick break for
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your words from our sponsors and now back to the show so how do you pick a place to travel to is it
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just like if you got that wanderlust for a specific place you would just follow that absolutely i think
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this is something that can be over planned sometimes people people are trying to figure out
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there's this language in the travel industry oh this place is hot you know this place is trendy this
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place is the the place to be well that's that's kind of a bad decision you know to choose your travel
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plans over right if you feel an urge to go to a place you know i use i talked about fijian rugby
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before like if you love watching uh fijian rugby well go to go to fiji talk to people fijians love
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to talk about that sort of thing just sort of follow those instincts and oftentimes there's a
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sort of two-dimensional inspiration that like we love we associate travel with the eiffel tower so we
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want to go to paris and see the eiffel tower that's great i was i hung out with my wife under the eiffel
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tower this summer it was fantastic but what's beyond that you know so i think in a way your your input
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your reason for going to a place is less important than what you do when you get there and i think as
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much fun as you can have under the eiffel tower wandering off into those neighborhoods and sort
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of following the smell of a patisserie or hearing the sounds of a music festival or just allowing
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yourselves to be surprised and humbled by a city that is going to be rewarding regardless of where in
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the world you go and oftentimes people complain about other tourists in tourist attractions and it's like
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well that's fine but just go to a place that isn't a tourist attraction you don't have to try you don't
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have to travel that far off the tourist trail to find a place that is more authentic to what you
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thought this place would be i think allowing yourself to be flexible wherever you go sort of absolves
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yourself from having too much pressure on where you go go to a place because it captures your
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imagination and then whatever happens there is why you went there well you know the point you make in
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the book that i liked was you can use these this idea of pilgrimages to help provide some structure
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for your travels so how have you used pilgrimages or have you how have you seen people use pilgrimages
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in their vagabonding well i i think you don't set limit on pilgrimage because there's there's grand
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pilgrimage traditions in all of the major world religions and they've actually created a lot of a big
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body of literature but your pilgrimage can be like going to the saint andrews course in scotland
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because you like golf right you know it can be going to a candy factory in ohio that manufactures
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your favorite candy bar that basically these pretexts are chances for you to go to a place that has really
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blown your mind like i've never properly been to kenya i was only in kenya for less than a day but i grew
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up being a runner and some of my running heroes were kenyans and so when i do go to kenya it will in part
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be a a pilgrimage that honors my young self as a runner who really saw this place as a country of
00:23:13.840
excellence that produced people who could run faster than other people and so i think my my future
00:23:18.700
travels to kenya will probably be pegged to that and that's a pretty good reason too so really a
00:23:23.000
pilgrimage can be through the lens of anything that you love or are devoted for or even interested
00:23:27.760
in and so that can be popular culture that can be old traditions you know that could be muay thai
00:23:33.800
and going to thailand it can be almost anything and what the pilgrimage does it's it's a pretext
00:23:39.320
to go it's a pretext to have the journey and the experiences that happen along the way even people
00:23:44.320
who travel with the idea of religious devotion part of what makes arriving at that you know jerusalem or
00:23:52.540
mecca important is what happens along the way the the new experience of life and the new
00:23:58.140
self-sufficiency and surprise that happens along the way that's the gift of the pilgrimage be it
00:24:04.640
for religious reasons or for whimsical reasons i've got two pilgrimages that i've been developing
00:24:10.620
my head the first one is i want so i'm a big fan of teddy roosevelt so i'd love one of the pilgrimages
00:24:16.780
i'm putting together is visit the places that he visited in the united states so i've been to his
00:24:21.920
birthplace but i haven't been to oyster bay where he lived there's places here in oklahoma that he
00:24:26.780
visited uh that i'd like to go check out go to the badlands and that would be great to do the other
00:24:32.520
pilgrimage that i thought i've been putting together is my favorite book is lonesome dove
00:24:36.520
and i thought it'd be fun to follow the lonesome dove trail that was set out in the book but like
00:24:42.500
follow it like today and see what that's like yeah well actually that i i love to hear that kind
00:24:49.120
of thing because lonesome dove is that larry mcmurtry yes yeah well there's a specific town
00:24:54.980
in texas i forget the name of it where he had he owned a bookstore with like 30 000 books archer
00:25:00.180
city yeah archer city and so that can be a part of that pilgrimage that you are going through
00:25:05.740
those fictional destinations uh you know in this work of fiction and you know again i'm from kansas
00:25:10.940
people have gone to dodge city for generations because of the tv show bonanza i think and why not
00:25:16.640
you know what you discover again is more important than what brought you there and i love
00:25:20.920
the teddy roosevelt one too because because that could be an international trip as well yeah because
00:25:25.240
he had a very famous trip to brazil he had very public trips to africa and you could probably spend
00:25:31.540
the rest of your life trying to travel in the footsteps of teddy roosevelt and so i love it i i love
00:25:36.440
and i encourage listeners to think what you know what book what tv show what anything excites me and then
00:25:42.960
go to that place go to that place for that reason i mean a lot of people go to tunisia because of star
00:25:47.140
wars why well tatooine the desert planet is named after a town in morocco right and and actually they
00:25:53.240
filmed a lot of uh star wars in morocco and so people go there people go to new zealand for lord
00:25:58.180
of the rings right they they go to dubrovnik for game of thrones which sounds silly on the face of it
00:26:03.480
but i think if you can you know if you can enjoy your your your fanboy trip or your pilgrimage within
00:26:11.180
this framework but also allow yourself to be surprised and listen and slow down and ask questions
00:26:16.780
then you'll get so many more gifts than than than the parameters of the pilgrimage itself
00:26:22.180
what's your take on travel photography because i think a lot of people that's the big reason why
00:26:28.760
they go they want they want the pick like why do we have this urge to catalog our travel and
00:26:35.520
how can we do it in a way that it so it doesn't get in the way of our experience
00:26:39.160
that's a good question and it's a big challenge now especially now that that photos are so easy to
00:26:45.120
take susan sontag wrote a book called on photography in 1977 which is before the smartphone which is so
00:26:50.720
prescient and so smart in regards to how she talks about how we put the camera between ourselves and
00:26:56.580
an experience you know if in doubt the traveler will raise their camera instead of you know really
00:27:01.800
engaging with a with a place well now it's even it's far easier than 1977 to do this i also talk about
00:27:07.780
how the notion of the picturesque goes back to a minister called william gilpin in england in the late
00:27:13.020
18th century who wrote this treatise basically arguing that the visual sense was the most important
00:27:18.180
and that we travelers should should seek the to capture these these images in their minds well
00:27:23.980
about a generation after he wrote that they invented the camera and suddenly you could literally do
00:27:29.580
on paper what he was encouraging people to see in their minds and travel has become this very visual
00:27:36.640
thing we have all five senses but we usually just see it in a visual way which is fine i take a lot of
00:27:41.700
photos myself but still we have this maybe now more than ever we're tempted to put a camera between
00:27:47.160
ourselves in that experience and oftentimes that comes at the expense of true engagement with the
00:27:53.200
culture like oftentimes there's an ethical component to this because you'll often take pictures of people
00:27:58.180
you don't know without talking to them without engaging them you're sort of just harvesting
00:28:02.720
these stereotypical pictures from a place in africa or eastern europe or wherever where people don't
00:28:09.540
necessarily look like you and you're sort of objectifying those people through your camera
00:28:13.420
because instead of engaging with them and sort of getting a sense for who you are you're again placing
00:28:18.700
the camera between yourself and the experience and this happens quite a bit in social media too you
00:28:23.680
know that often the instagram stories we see the instagram pictures we see are sort of staged experiences
00:28:30.360
that have been staged for the camera more than they are in interaction with place so i don't want to
00:28:35.860
condemn using a camera as you travel because i use mine a lot myself but i do want to encourage
00:28:41.920
being thoughtful and being more dynamic about how you use the camera lens to navigate the travel experience
00:28:48.820
you know that point about how travel is it's it's more than just visual there's a we use our other
00:28:54.200
senses as well i've noticed this so i lived in tijuana for a couple years and in certain parts of
00:29:00.380
tijuana like the the i don't know how it is now that was like 20 something years ago the utilities
00:29:05.380
aren't well developed sometimes they just build houses shacks wherever and so you don't have any
00:29:10.640
infrastructure like plumbing and so in some of these places you'd have just black water going through
00:29:15.220
the street and there's like a smell to it right y'all and and every now and then like i'll catch a
00:29:21.180
whiff of it like i'm driving by the sanitation facility here in tulsa you catch that and i i catch a
00:29:27.500
whiff of that and i'm immediately taken back to like walk in the streets in tijuana or there's like
00:29:31.760
a you know certain types of house cleaning products they used in mexico and i'll be in walmart and walmart
00:29:38.000
now here in the united states they'll have sections where you can buy stuff you can get in in mexico
00:29:42.720
right that because there's a lot of uh latin americans that live in united states and also with
00:29:46.860
that and i'm immediately taken back to like some grocery store in in mexico i mean i i i wouldn't
00:29:53.760
have had that if it was just if i just focused on my my sense of sight for my travel experience
00:29:58.980
absolutely and this this ties into uh again what byung choo han the philosopher said about the scent
00:30:06.200
of time you can't fast forward smell smell is a great great sense you know you can probably fast
00:30:12.660
forward through this podcast you can fast forward through your netflix movies but you can't fast
00:30:17.340
forward scent scent demands patience and and being there and it's also very associative it's it's very
00:30:22.920
much a memory trigger and i love that you know i spent two years in in korea when i was younger
00:30:27.700
and when i'm in a grumpy mood my wife will will fix me korean food because it's sort of my comfort food
00:30:33.560
and so that's another that's another sense taste you know which which takes smell into account too
00:30:38.000
but just the idea that the eating kimchi or eating bulgogi will suddenly bring me back to a very specific
00:30:44.000
time in my life i think scent food is something that we all seek out as travelers and so that's a pretty
00:30:49.360
common thing that's like sight there's sightseeing people also sort of travel according to their
00:30:55.380
stomach but smell is a great thing i love that you have associations with tijuana through through
00:30:59.960
cleaning detergents or even bad smells i remember the first time i went to the tropics it was in the
00:31:04.140
philippines i stepped off the plane and i knew i was in a new place internally because it smelled like
00:31:10.040
no place i'd ever been before and the complexity of smell in a place like manila in the philippines
00:31:15.960
was unlike anything i had ever experienced and so there's a real joy for me in traveling in the
00:31:21.640
tropics simply because of the smell when you're traveling for long periods of time and you you're
00:31:28.520
outside of the tourist areas you're going to you're actually going to bump up against the cultures as
00:31:34.120
they are not as you maybe you you think they are this romanticized version how do you deal with that
00:31:38.640
culture shock well you embrace it and you realize that it is culture shock i think sometimes
00:31:44.460
one neurosis within culture shock is that this new culture is doing something against you it's trying
00:31:51.000
to make your life inconvenient or it's it's it's actively giving you anxiety when in fact you're
00:31:56.640
just in a place where everything is a little bit different and so i don't think there's a quick fix to
00:32:01.260
culture shock and i just talked about korea when i first got there it was very i i felt anxiety a lot
00:32:07.560
when i was first there because i wasn't really sure how things worked and so i think patience and
00:32:12.480
slowing down is is really a good way to deal with culture shock and to know that the longer you stay
00:32:17.560
in a place the more comfortable you'll get with its otherness and then suddenly you'll be learning
00:32:21.900
things that you had no idea that you were going to learn before you went there you'll be going to
00:32:27.480
the convenience store rather than the tourist restaurant and realizing that a convenience store
00:32:31.860
in japan or in sweden is completely different than the one back home and then suddenly you're having
00:32:37.200
this again this gift of travel you're finding these experiences maybe by working through the
00:32:41.760
culture shock you're realizing how much human cultures are similar but also how they're different
00:32:47.360
and how interesting those nuances are and those are the kinds of things that you'll savor i mean
00:32:51.680
who would have guessed that after going to tijuana you would later get sentimental from the place
00:32:55.500
through cleaning the detergent or sort of a rotting smell but that happens and again that's
00:33:00.160
that's it's not often put in tourist brochures but it's really a great memory that comes out of travel
00:33:06.960
so let's talk about coming home so you say you're gone for let's say a year in a different country
00:33:12.720
what challenges do you have when you're coming home from a different culture for a long period of time
00:33:17.560
well culture shock you know we've talked about culture shock in the context of going to a new place
00:33:22.580
there's sort of a reverse culture shock that can come when you when you come back home because i think
00:33:27.320
on the road time is experienced in a different way everything is new neurologically your hippocampus is
00:33:33.060
working a different way because you're solving problems constantly you're seeing new things constantly
00:33:37.080
you don't understand everything so you're almost in a childlike mindset i think it's easy to forget
00:33:41.240
how open to everything children can be and then suddenly you're back home and you feel changed you feel
00:33:47.240
like each day should be exciting and you know your friends are living these lives of routine and not
00:33:52.180
to knock those lives but because they've been having a different experience and so oftentimes you try to
00:33:57.000
and superimpose that travel high at home and that can lead to disappointment and it can lead to culture
00:34:03.880
shock and i think you there's sort of a re-entry process when you get back home that involves some
00:34:09.100
of the same tools you know don't don't judge your friends back home just because they're living in a
00:34:12.820
different way just like you don't want to judge the people overseas who are living a different way
00:34:16.440
but just realize that you can quietly talk about your travels in a way that doesn't sound braggy
00:34:21.800
that you can take that travel attitude back home you can look for surprises which is a gift of travel in your
00:34:26.520
own home you can look for permission to slow down and live in a more interesting way and really
00:34:31.920
embrace the present in a way that happened overseas well you don't have to save that for home one fun
00:34:36.940
thing i did during the pandemic when i couldn't travel overseas is i went for a 22 mile walk with
00:34:42.300
my wife to a town here in kansas called little sweden and it was really fun it was it was really fun to
00:34:47.780
experience so much at a place i thought i knew well and arriving at a place on foot was so different than
00:34:53.500
driving there which i've done a million times yeah so i think there are tools i think it's it's
00:34:58.900
never easy to transition back home that's always going to be a little bit of a shock a little bit
00:35:02.520
of a letdown but if you can keep that open-hearted open-minded attitude of travel when you come back
00:35:08.180
home and sort of reintegrate its lessons into your home life that's sort of a way of not ever letting
00:35:12.980
the journey end yeah you have a chapter that i like avoid being the pretentious return to traveler i think
00:35:19.300
we've all met that guy who comes you know he went on the trip and he comes back and they're like well
00:35:23.480
and sweden they do it this way you're like okay yeah yeah jeff we get it you went to sweden and it's
00:35:29.460
funny this has been a thing for a long time you had this quote from adam smith the economist and he
00:35:35.740
he wrote this about britain's young aristocrats who went traveling and he said the travel this is done
00:35:41.360
in 1776 the traveler commonly returns home more conceited he wrote more unprincipled more dissipated
00:35:48.420
and more incapable of any serious application than he could well have become in so short a time had
00:35:53.860
he lived at home so the whole pretentious return traveler has been a thing for 250 years it has and
00:36:01.200
it'll probably never end and i think one thing that happened during that time is that travel is seen as a
00:36:07.160
status object it's sort of a lifestyle accessory going back to the days of the aristocratic travelers
00:36:12.520
of the 18th century and so that in a way it's travel if for these return travels can be a form
00:36:19.120
of conspicuous consumption it can be a way of saying oh well look what i did but you haven't done
00:36:23.420
and it's like getting a sports car and showing it off to your friend if if you're taking this with the
00:36:28.640
wrong spirit i think adam smith's observation may have been a little bit i don't know if jealousy is
00:36:34.960
the right word but i think travelers aristocratic travelers came back to britain with a willingness to
00:36:40.940
break the rules because they saw that other kind that people things were done differently in other
00:36:44.520
cultures and they would sort of push the mores of their own society uh and in a certain sense
00:36:49.800
travels travelers return travelers can can push back against certain stereotypes that people have
00:36:55.060
back home but at the same time yeah you don't want to flaunt your travels like it's a new maserati
00:36:59.620
sports car you want to find a humble way to engage the conversation you had with other places
00:37:04.200
to the conversation you have at home with this place that used to be very familiar and is now
00:37:09.600
a foreign place is now the new destination on your itinerary and it's it's not that different
00:37:14.860
but it's different because you've seen other places if that makes sense yeah that makes sense
00:37:18.440
so i think a lot of people might think if you're a world traveler like yourself you know they would
00:37:23.860
live in some big cosmopolitan cool city when they're not traveling but you live in a small town
00:37:30.880
in kansas why did you choose that for your home base instead of some other cool town or city
00:37:36.980
well a couple big reasons one is is what's called geo arbitrage i think you've talked about it
00:37:43.120
before on this podcast the idea that some places are cheaper than others and that you can sort of
00:37:47.980
make yourself wealthier if your daily expenses are less than they were in another place and so kansas
00:37:53.640
is a place that's just a lot less expensive than big cities in the united states and so i was able to
00:37:58.640
save money but i was also to be close to my family i'm from kansas my sister lives less than two miles
00:38:04.480
from where i'm talking to you right now my parents until recently very lived very close and they still
00:38:08.500
live within a half an hour of me and i actually learned that from travel i realized that of all
00:38:14.160
the values or the commonalities that we see around the world family is a huge one and people make
00:38:19.520
decisions to live near family all over the world and so weirdly enough i had to go away from home to
00:38:25.080
realize how important home was and i think i really identified that kansas part of myself so in addition
00:38:30.540
to saving money by getting land and having a day-to-day life that is much cheaper than if i
00:38:35.280
was in a hip city someplace it allows me to be close to my family in a way that i've seen people in
00:38:40.920
distant lands be close to their family and and really enrich my life in ways that i saw it enriching
00:38:46.180
people's lives in places like africa and asia and europe and south america so it's been a fun
00:38:52.460
dovetailing of sort of enhancing my relationship with my family while also living more cheaply than i would
00:38:58.780
in a more fashionable part of the united states and as you mentioned you you can still find adventure
00:39:03.800
even in kansas like you and your wife went on that trip that walked to the little sweden i think i've
00:39:08.660
seen billboards for that when i'm on i-70 i think yeah absolutely yeah and so i mean we have we've had
00:39:14.980
alistair mcintyre and you talk about him in the book this idea of micro adventures you don't have to
00:39:20.120
travel super long distances to foreign countries to get this experience of travel you can do this in
00:39:25.560
your own state and get a similar experience yeah alistair humphreys is his name actually yeah
00:39:30.620
alistair alistair mcintyre is a philosopher alistair humphreys right yeah no he invented he
00:39:34.780
was he was uh as a as a young guy he had these amazing adventures he like rode across the atlantic
00:39:39.760
and he walked across india and he did these amazing travels in africa but as he had kids and grew older
00:39:45.560
he found that he he sort of redefined his idea of adventure and he realized that when he was at home
00:39:51.860
being a family man he didn't have to cut adventure out of his life if he went out and climbed a tree
00:39:56.420
or if he slept in his backyard or if he went to a pub two towns over and talked to strangers in the
00:40:01.080
same way he did on the other side of the world so i love this concept of micro adventures because
00:40:05.640
it allows you in a very specific way to take that attitude of travel home to say yeah i could go to the
00:40:12.300
movies or the mall or hang out with my friends or stare at my computer this weekend but no i'm going to
00:40:16.980
go on this walk i'm going to drive to a town 50 miles away that i've never been to and experience
00:40:22.500
it for the first time and really embrace that adventurous attitude in a way that i give myself
00:40:27.360
permission to in a distant place but i have i don't always give myself permission to do at home
00:40:32.420
and i think you can see like uh there you can you can experience culture shock even in your own state
00:40:37.060
i've always been struck by this whenever our family travels west we've gone through the panhandle of
00:40:42.880
oklahoma which is just flat i mean it looks kind of like kansas in the western part of kansas super
00:40:48.060
flat you look around and it's just miles and miles and miles of fields and cotton fields and you'll get
00:40:54.300
into these towns um and you go to like to the toot and totem because of what these small towns have
00:40:58.980
and you see the people there and i i can tell like these people they see the world differently than i do
00:41:05.080
even though i'm just four or five hours away from them yeah well having having road trip to the panel
00:41:11.400
before there's a university out there that's like has like 20 national championships in university
00:41:16.740
rodeo do you know what i'm talking about i think i know what you're talking about yeah yeah i i've never
00:41:21.420
stopped there maybe i should but this is just a part of the country that takes pride in being like
00:41:26.240
as alabama is to college football this part i think it's in guyman in oklahoma this little college
00:41:33.280
takes pride in rodeo in a way that some people take pride in football right that's cool
00:41:38.300
and so yeah i think oftentimes the landscape or the culture of a specific place will differ from
00:41:43.960
town to town even even on our walk here in kansas you know every town has a little bit of a different
00:41:48.820
character it has different restaurants and businesses and and attitudes and that can happen
00:41:53.940
anywhere so yeah i think next time i go through the oklahoma panhandle i'm gonna have to investigate
00:41:58.100
this uh national championship rodeo team the thing i want to investigate in kansas is whenever we drive
00:42:03.980
through there i think i don't know if it's like on the way up on i-35 or ice i think might be i-70
00:42:08.540
there's this really tiny tiny town but there's this giant catholic cathedral there do you know
00:42:15.260
what i'm talking about yeah i think it's i think it's the cathedral of the plains there's there's
00:42:19.080
several famous cathedrals here there's a beautiful cathedral in a town called demar which was built by
00:42:24.720
like quebecois french people in the in the 1870s and it's amazing you go in there and it's it's like a
00:42:30.580
junior varsity version of a church you would see in paris right it's architecturally beautiful but
00:42:34.800
it's in this little very underpopulated town in western kansas and you drive less than an hour in
00:42:41.860
the other direction you stop in nicodemus town which nicodemus which was settled by african americans
00:42:47.120
in the 1870s and 1880s and it now has a national landmark there and so yeah yeah actually talking about
00:42:54.720
permission to do things and pretext to stop that's a great way that's a great um pretext to stop i stopped
00:43:00.220
my wife and i stopped in demar kansas to see that cathedral and we walked around the town we found
00:43:05.200
out that the mascot of the high school is called the demartians right the space alien called the
00:43:10.280
demartian and so so it was delightful to to use that as a pretext in that part of kansas also too
00:43:15.900
there's the world's second largest ball of twine in cocker city and there's a little art town called
00:43:20.800
uh called lucas which is sort of the folk art capital of kansas and it's this weird little artsy
00:43:26.500
community that just on this dried up part of the the high plains and that's in one tiny little part
00:43:30.620
of kansas a place i admittedly know pretty well and often as a traveler in distant places i try to
00:43:36.580
remind myself how even a place that doesn't seem like it has much going for it like western kansas
00:43:41.940
can and so if i'm in a boring part of of thailand or south africa or bolivia i remind myself how much
00:43:50.360
there is to see in a place like western kansas and i try to adjust accordingly well rolf this has been
00:43:55.280
a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work they can go to
00:43:59.200
rolfpotts.com it has links to everything all my books and podcasts and articles i've written over
00:44:04.500
the years or go to the local bookstore i try to encourage people to go to their local independent
00:44:08.640
bookstore and you can ask for it there if they don't have it they can order it in but yeah in the
00:44:13.020
online world you can find me at rolfpotts.com and sort of follow the rabbit holes from there
00:44:16.920
fantastic well rolf potts thanks for your time it's been a pleasure good talking to you brett
00:44:20.560
my guest today was rolf potts he's the author of the book the vagabond's way it's available on
00:44:25.080
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information about his work at his website
00:44:28.800
rolfpotts.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash vagabond where you find links to
00:44:34.040
resources we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make
00:44:45.720
sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives as well as
00:44:49.540
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