Vagabonding Reflections

---

Geo: 37.7792, -122.42

Vagabonding -n. (1) The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.

---
I set out on this trip thinking it'd be a 2-3 month tour of Asia. I didn't buy any tickets in advance; I wanted to buy them as I went to afford me the utmost freedom to change my itinerary and change my length of stay in any given place on a whim. As Rolf put it in his book, "enrich your travels with the vivid joys of uncertainty" viewing vagabonding "not as an escape buy as an adventure and a passion - a way of overcoming your fears and living life to the fullest." I've really tried to keep this in the forefront of my mind this year as I traveled. Rolf also wrote, "Vagabonding is about using the prosperity of and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions." "Vagabonding about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure." I can't tell you how many times I took a picture of something and got a funny look from a local person watching me. Every time I wanted to tell them, "OK you see this every day, it's a totally pedantic item to you, but I've never seen one before and I'm fascinated by it."

I've read a whole lot on this trip, safe to say more leisure reading than I've ever done. I spent many hours on/in trains, planes, buses, tuk-tuks, cars, jeeps, cable-cars, mini-vans, super-mini-I-don't-believe-there-are-11-of-us-in-here-vans, ferries, long boats, bamboo rafts, canoes, and even an elephant or two. OK I didn't read while I was on the elephant, but I read a lot.

Buddhists believe that we live our everyday lives as if inside an eggshell. Just as an unhatched chicken has few clues about what life is truly like, most of us are only vaguely aware of the greater world that surrounds us.

- English has become the lingua franca for the world.
- Tarzan English.
- You can learn as much about the culture of a Non-American travel companion as the culture you are in.
- As I grow into a saltier vagabonder I hone my skills of innovation and persistence, curbing my fear the unfamiliar and the unsettling and challenging myself to ever-more daring acts and bolder choices with fewer expectations. Opening myself up to unpredictability and seeing adventure in the simple realities of a world that defies my expectations has allowed adventure to creep into my daily life of vagabonding. The process of stretching my boundaries has been challenging, but is there any other way to do it? The other day I surprised myself completely by noticing and then instinctually and casually flicking a huge I-don't-know-what-kind-of-bug off my arm without any panic; 6 months ago that bug would have had me up on a chair shrieking and sweating.
- Austrailain Aborigines have a ritual called a "walkabout", when they leave their work for a time and return to their native lifestyle in the outback. It is thought to act as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life case a separation from one's true self. They simply leave behind all posessions (except survival essentials) and start walking, there is no physical goal, it merely continues until one becomes whole again.

Quotes from my reading list:
Bruce Lee: "Research your own experience for the truth ...Absorb what is useful...Add what is specifically your own...The creating individual is more than any style or system."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, an endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him."
Edwin Way Teale on John Muir, Autumn Across America, 1956 " Freedom as John Muir knew it with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude choice...such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each passing generation."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, "The more our life options get paraded around as consumer options, the more we forget that there is a difference between the two."
Pico Iyer, Why We Travel: "Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: One the road, we often live more simply, with no more possessions that we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" - disruption, in other words (or emancipation), from circumstances, and all the habits behind which we hide."
Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There (1993) "I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses."
Tim Cahill, Exotic Placed Made Me Do It, " A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea... Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, we a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against our-selves gravely."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " Vagabonding, is, was, and always will be a private undertaking -- and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: "My greatest skill has been to want little."
Paul Fussell, Abroad: "Before the development of tourist, travel was conceived to be like a study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind the formation of the judgment. The traveler was a student of what he sought."
Kurt Vonnegut, "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
Lavina Spalding, an Arizona Teacher "Don't ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live."
Antonio Machado, Cantores: "Traveler, there is no path paths are made by walking."
Ed Buryn, :"Travel in general, and vagabonding in particular, produces an awesome density of experience."
Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage: "When you travel you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. ...You begin to be more accessible to others, because they may be able to help you in difficult situations."
John Flinn, "One of the essential skills for a traveler is the ability to make a rather extravagant fool of oneself."
Paul Fussell, Abroad: "But the traveler's world is not he ordinary one, for travel itself, event he most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " Vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal...an openness to anything that comes your way....if you set off with specific agendas, you will at best discover the pleasure of actualizing them...if you wander with curiosity you'll discover the pleasure of possibility that hums from every direction."
The Buddha, "We see as we are."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " Much of whats memorable in meeting people from faraway lands is how these interactions wind up teaching you about your own, culture-fed instincts...if you view other people through your own values, you'll lose the opportunity to see the world through their eyes. Americans, for example, value individualism, whereas most Asian cultures see individualism as a selfish betrayal of duty and family. To read about such cultural differences is one thing, but to experience them is quite another. After all, cultural identity is instinctive, not intellectual."
Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions: "We do not need to understand other people and their customs to fully interact with them and learn in the process; It is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, that allows us to grow."
Freya Stark, Perseus in the wind: "The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at east among their fellow locals."
Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: "The simplest fact of our neighbors lives may read like a fairy tale to us. The forgotten, tonic appendix to that is that our lives, in their tiniest details, may seem marvelous to them, and one virtue of is so strange a place is to be reminded daily of how strange I seem to it."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " Most cultures, aren't familiar with the rigorous American standards of customer service, and few people in the world make a fetish of personal "rights" quite like the way we do in the industrialized west."
George Santayana, The Philosophy of Travel, " We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what."
Aristotle, Ethics, "The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " ...much of our concern about the evils of change with premodern cultures is less an interest in the quality of local life than our own desire to experience an "untainted" culture. ...The purest way to see a culture is simply o accept the experience as it is now..cyber cafes. faster food restaurants .
Claude Levi-Strauss, "...mourning the perceived purity of yesterday will only cause us to miss the the true dynamic of today."
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding, " Watching television...replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences."
Michael Crichton, Travels, "Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am...Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."

Reading List:
Credit for most all of the quotes and many of the ideas from above:
Travel
- Vagabonding; An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, By Rolf Potts (All)
- The Rough Guide to First-Time Around the World, Edition 2, by Doug Lansky (San Francisco)
- Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bali, Indonesia)
- Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World, by Rita Golden
- Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho (India)

GuideBooks, can't get anywhere without'em
- Let's Go Southeast Asia, 9th Edition
- Frommer's Southeast Asia
- Lonely Planet: Vietnam Cambodia Laos & the Greater Mekong
- Let's Go India & Nepal

Leisure, wouldn't want to go anywhere without'em
- Love in The Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Indonesia)
- Prey, by Michael Crichton (Singapore)
- The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (Penang)
- State of Fear, Michael Crichton (Thailand)

---