Pottering about for a living

Travel writer Rolf Potts shuns the 'where-to-go-and-what-to-see' brigade in favour of long-term stays to 'reveal a place in all its richness', he tells PETER MURTAGH

ROLF POTTS is a 40-year-old single man who spends most of his life doing what the rest of us can only dream of. He goes to fascinating places all over the world, spends a lot of time there meeting unusual, interesting people and writing stories about them.

So much of travel writing is of the “how to get there/what to see” guide book variety. Potts’ is different: he travels independently, immersing himself in his subject, often becoming part of the story, and seeks to communicate a sense of place, warts and all. He calls it vagabonding. “It’s long term travel,” he says, “that is, more that just a vacation; it’s where you are basically taking the time to make your travel dreams come true. If you do it this way, travel is much cheaper and you have time – the truest form of wealth in life.”

Stripped down to basics, Potts is essentially a reporter, a journalist doing an old fashioned story telling job, using all available means of communication – both with his audience, and back and forth between the subjects about which he has written.

You can find what he has to say on his blog, vagablogging.net, and at his website, rolfpotts.com. You can read him also from time to time in salon.com, slate.com, The New Yorkermagazine, the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, National Geographic Travellerand Condé Nast Traveller.

Among his travel exploits, Potts has piloted a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong river, hitchhiked across eastern Europe, crossed Israel on foot, cycled across Burma, and has just gone around the world without luggage . . . and blogged and written about it all.

He’s turned many of his pieces into books, notably Vagabonding - an uncommon guide to the art of long-term world travel, and the more recent Marco Polo Didn’t Go There – stories and revelations from one decade as a postmodern travel writer. Next weekend, he’ll be at Immrama, the Lismore Festival of Travel Writing, which runs from June 9th to 12th.

Like many successful careers, Potts’ began by happenstance when he was in his mid-20s. He was born and grew up in a family of teachers in Kansas (where he still lives near his parents and married sister when he’s not travelling) and hadn’t much notion of what to do when he graduated.

“After university, I worked as a landscape gardener for a while and then travelled around north America. I realised it was a lot easier than I thought and so I just continued,” he said in a telephone interview this week.

Instead of getting it out of his system like so many young people before settling down to a “real job”, he just carried on, making travel his life. He went to Asia and spent over two years there, starting to write for US outlets. “I see travel writing as something that is in the middle ground between journalism and promotion travel writing. Good travel writing is more than talk about pretty beaches. Good travel writing will reveal a place in all its richness.”

Or, as he put it in a recent interview with The Atlantic: “A talented writer can make a stroll to her strip mall feel like an adventure, while a death defying Andean ascent can sound downright dull in the hands of an unimaginative writer.”

In Potts’ hands, his adventures produced a wonderful stream of stories in the 1990s for salon.com with seductive headlines such as Helen of Troy is in my taxi; Stranded in Serbia; Getting stoned with Mr X; and Goodbye, Khao San Road, his reflections on leaving Thailand after an extended stay.

Each is essentially reportage infused with humour, wit and insight, together with Potts’ observations on the people he had met, the scenes encountered and some backpacker generation observations about travel.

Although he is probably most widely known because of his blogging, Potts has an ambiguous relationship with modern communication technology.

“Gadgets have become the umbilical cord that connects you to home in a way that impedes travel – that is, being immersed in a place fully,” he says. “It’s hard to achieve that if you are texting a friend back home.”

On the other hand, blogging and the two way conversation that it allows between writer and reader, and between writer and subject, is what has made his career and what he calls postmodern travel writing.

“Travel is less beholden to place than it was before,” he says. “In the 19th century, for instance, you went to Africa or Asia and you were pretty much beholden to where you were. Today, you go to Burma and, hey, there are refugees from there back in your home town; or back home, people there are listening to the same music as you in some far off place.

“People in Peru can go online and read what you are writing about them and challenge you. So postmodern travel writing is more of a two-way conversation.”

So much travel writing can be superficial – a random accumulation of instant impressions, garnered with practical information. “I’m a big proponent of slow travel,” he says. “If you have a week to travel, get to know one city. The nuanced experience of one place is better than the superficial experience of 40 different countries in a couple of weeks and a load of passport stamps.”

* Polf Pottswill talk about his work in Lismore on June 11th at 8pm; "I hope to leave them with an idea of how travel writing works and how you can best experience a place," he says; tickets (€25). See lismoreimmrama.com. Other participants include Conor O'Clery, Manchán Magan and Anthony Sattin.

* Peter Murtaghis co-author, with his daughter Natasha Murtagh, of Buen Camino! - a father-daughter journey from Croagh Patrick to Santiago de Compostela;(Gill and Macmillan, 2011).