“Your time off is a measure of the quality of your life. Setting yourself the goal of more personal freedom is as valid as — and ultimately more practical than — a goal of financial riches and material abundance. Today, our society provides more opportunities than ever before for survival with style, for living well without having to become a cultural robot. Living on the fringe of society is easier and much more rewarding than living in the pressurized statistical middle, where all the rules are. But beware, a taste of freedom almost inevitably leads to a craving for it. It hooks you, and it’s wonderful. Most people can’t understand this, because they’ve forgotten what it was like to be free. They think it’s impossible, whereas the truth is that freedom is right in front of you; you simply have to want it enough to take it. People fear the struggle for freedom, but never credit the rewards.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

Ever since my days as a travel columnist at Salon.com, academics and graduate students have occasionally contacted me to comment on the state of independent travel, travel writing and literature, and globalization. These topics fascinate me, so I’ve always enjoyed these dialogues.

Since my comments always end up in small-circulation dissertations and theses, however, I rarely get to sound these ideas to a general audience. Thus, I’ve decided to start posting these academic dialogues on this blog. My first such transcript, an email Q&A between myself and Lea Teuscher (a journalism grad student at City University in London), is detailed below. Teuscher’s full thesis, “Global nomads & The art of travel journalism”, can be found in pdf form here.

Lea Teuscher: According to your experience on the road, what kind of people are today’s travellers? Have you noticed a change in the numbers or type of independent travellers and vagabonders?

RP: Today’s travelers are middle and upper-middle class people from developed countries — Western Europeans, North Americans, Aussies, New Zealanders, Japanese, Koreans, Singaporeans, Israelis, South Africans. Some Mexicans, Brazilians, Chileans, and Argentines, plus growing numbers of Eastern Europeans and Russians. A few Indians and Chinese. I’d say there’s a slight increase in the numbers of independent travelers and vagabonders, but nothing revolutionary. As I say in my book, the decision to go on a long-term trip is just not something that everyone chooses to do.

LT: Do you think that people are thinking about travel in a different way nowadays, thinking about it more as a way of life than just 2 weeks per year?

RP: Some people are, but not people in general. In the United States, travel is still seen in fairly confined terms. There are plenty of vagabonders — folks who seek out long-term journeys and live in such a way to make regular travel possible — but they are a minority. They may well be a growing minority, however, as the Internet helps bring people with wanderlust together and demystify the process of travel and vagabonding.

LT: Do you feel that a new traveller community is emerging, thanks to the different travel blogs and websites?

RP: Definitely, just like online communities have arisen around certain sports or hobbies or technologies. Travel blogs and websites demystify the travel process — they make it apparent that vagabonding or travel in general is something a normal person can do. That is, you don’t have to be a student or a hippie or a rich person to hit the road for several months or years, perhaps mixing work in with leisure as you travel.

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“It may sound blazingly obvious, but the best preparation for a career in travel writing is travel. Take a year off and travel round the world.”
–Stanley Stewart, in Don George’s, Travel Writing (2005)

This month marks the release of the latest edition in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Travel Writing series, edited by Jason Wilson, with novelist Jamaica Kincaid serving as the guest editor. As is the case each year, the volume provides a fascinating vicarious read for armchair travelers, and a nice sampling of great writing for aspiring (and working) travel scribes to study and emulate.

“And what of the essays here?” writes Kincaid in the introduction. “Every one of them reminds me of two of the many sentiments attached to the travel narrative: curiosity and displacement. None of them are about a night’s stay in a nice hotel anywhere; none of them chronicle a day at a beach. They were not chosen to say something about the state of American travel writing; they were chosen because I simply liked them. …These essays stimulate my curiosity; they underline my sense of my displacement.”

Writers who landed essays in this year’s edition include Tom Bissell, Peter Hessler, and Kira Salak — a trio whose regular appearance in the Best American series make them the top three talents to watch among the younger generation of travel writers. Other prominent writers making an appearance in the anthology include J. Michael Fay, Ian Frazier (who guest edited the 2003 edition), Jim Harrison, William Least Heat-Moon, Pam Houston, Mark Jenkins, John McPhee, Robert Young Pelton, David Quammen, Seth Stevenson, William T. Vollmann and Simon Winchester.

I managed to land three of my own travel articles on the “Notable Writing of 2004″ section — “Jolly Good Excuse for a Party”, which appeared in Conde Nast Traveler; “A Desert by Any Other Name”, from the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine; and “Signs of Confusion” from World Hum. This marks the sixth consecutive year I’ve made the Best American short-list, and the first time since Paul Theroux’s 2001 edition that three of my essays were nominated in the same year. Other authors of note with essays on the short-list include Christopher Hitchens, Don George, Pico Iyer, Wendy Knight, Thomas Swick, and 2005 Paris American Academy guest speakers Elisabeth Eaves and Jeffrey Tayler.

A few years ago, when the tide of war was shifting in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance troops began using a contemptuous moniker for the Pakistani, Uzbek, and Chechen militants who were fighting alongside the Taliban. “The [Afghan] people,” Alliance commander Ustad Mohammed Atta told TIME magazine, “want to kill these tourists.”

Not “terrorists”, mind you, “tourists”. Obviously, the pejorative sense of that word had come a long way since European elites first sneered at the English commoners who took Thomas Cook’s inaugural group tours in the 19th century.

Moreover, it seems we have come to the point where “tourist” — like “asshole”, or “politically correct” — has no meaning but the pejorative, and would never be a term anyone would apply to oneself. As John Flinn noted in his recent San Francisco Chronicle column, “among the status-conscious, the word ‘tourist’ has come to mean ‘anyone who travels in a style I consider inferior to the way I like to think I do it.’”

Or, as Evelyn Waugh put it a couple generations ago, “the tourist is always the other chap.”

Flinn goes on to make a good argument for dropping the tourist-traveler debate altogether — but somehow I doubt the travel milieu will ever lose its snarky obsession with “tourists”. An illustrative case in point would be that of travel writer Daisann McLane, who made a well-stated case for why we’re all “tourists” in a 2002 interview with World Hum. “We think a ‘traveler’ is cool, the ‘tourist’ is not,” she said, “and there’s a lot of snobbery attached to identifying oneself as the former. But I think we should let that go. We are all tourists. If you can afford a round trip ticket to Laos, and you go there for personal stimulation, not for a job, even if you end up staying for six months on the floor of a Hmong hut in a remote village, you’re still a tourist.”

This kind of logic might have been devastatingly conclusive were it not for the fact that McLane’s own column tagline at National Geographic Traveler was, “How to be a Traveler, Not a Tourist”.

As is the case with Anthony Bourdain (who I recently skewered for his similarly insipid Travel Channel promotion), I’d wager that this slogan was never McLane’s idea. Still, it points to the fact that — like a case of genital herpes — the tourist-traveler dichotomy will never go away, no matter how irritating it becomes.

The heart of this dichotomy, of course, lies in our own insecurities about travel. In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character, who has been crashing support-group meetings to boost his self-esteem, drops the t-word when another crasher, named Marla, starts showing up at the meetings. “Marla, the big tourist,” he mutters. “Her lie reflected my lie.” Similarly, we all travel with the knowledge that, by definition, a person journeying to a foreign place is an outsider, a dilettante, a superficial presence. Other travelers (i.e. “tourists”) only remind us of that fact.

And that’s why we go to such great pains to make distinctions and split hairs. Six years ago, while working on the set of Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Beach, I was amused to discover that 21st Century Fox’s handlers were dividing all the extras into two groups, “tourists” and “travelers”. No actual travel credentials were required; the production assistants simply made their decisions on the basis of fashion. That is, if you had dreads or wore a sarong or sported tattoos or clutched a set of bongos, you were grouped together with the “travelers”. If kept your hair short or wore nice clothes or had a reasonably neat appearance, you spent your on-camera time as a “tourist”. Though my suntan was lacking at the time, I made the cut as a “traveler” on the basis of my hair (which was longish) and clothing (which, while not suitably ethnic, was a bit tattered).

Despite such reductive methodology, however, I’ll admit I felt a small flush of pride as I took my place in the extras’ tent with the other “travelers”. Just like being picked first for a game of kindergarten kickball, I had proof that I had made the cut: I was a member of the elite.

Ultimately, the rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity; it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash. After all, Paul Fussell and David Brooks have gone so far as to make fun of the people who make fun of tourists (Fussell calls them “anti-tourists“; Brooks calls them “travel snobs“) — and it’s only a matter of time before someone else writes a rant making fun of the people who make fun of the people who make fun of tourists.

When this happens, I know I’ll have my bases covered, since no less an authority than 21st Century Fox has already determined that I am a traveler. That is, not a tourist.

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The Independent recently ran an entertaining review of Adam Jacot de Boinod’s new book The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. “Learning a foreign language is, of course, the surest and fastest track to becoming familiar with another culture,” writes John Walsh. ” But the words themselves offer hundreds of revealing clues to the preoccupations of that culture. Everyone knows that Inuit-speaking races can call on 30-odd words for snow. Adam Jacot de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for “moustache” in an Albanian dictionary – and another 27 for “eyebrows”. A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes. He began hanging out in second-hand bookshops, looking for foreign dictionaries and the tiny revelations contained therein. He made lists of his favourite “words with no equivalent in the English language” – like, say, tsuji-giri, a Japanese word from samurai days meaning, “to try out a new sword on a passer-by” (thanks a bunch, Toshiro), or the stoic German term Torschlusspanik, meaning “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older”. …These are more than funny foreign vocabularies; they are tiny windows into the way other people live, and the obsessions that drive them. We may be amused by their lexicon of everyday words – but we can be certain they’d be equally amused by our vocabulary of “multi-tasking” and “sound-bite” and “over-sharing”. By our unguarded linguistic displays shall we be known.”

Here is a brief list of unique international words from de Boinod’s new book:

ZHENGRONG (Chinese): To improve one’s looks by plastic surgery.

BAKKU-SHAN (Japanese): A girl who looks as though she might be pretty when seen from behind, but isn’t when seen from the front.

MAMIHLAPINATAPEI (Fuengian language, Chile): A shared look of longing between parties who are both interested yet neither is willing to make the first move.

POMICIONE (Italian): A man who seizes any chance of being in close physical contact with a woman.

QUEESTING (Dutch): Allowing a lover access to one’s bed, under the covers, for a chit-chat.

GHALIDAN (Persian): Wallowing, tumbling or rolling from side to side as lovers do.

MAHJ (Persian): Looking beautiful after having a disease.

NARACHASTRA PRAYOGA (Sanskrit): Men who worship their own sexual organs.

KORO (Japanese): The hysterical belief that one’s penis is shrinking into one’s body.

SENZURI (Japanese): Male masturbation (literally “a hundred rubs”). “Shiko shiko manzuri” is the female version (literally “ten thousand rubs”).

SACANAGEM (Brazilian Portuguese): Openly seeking sexual pleasure with one or more partners other than one’s primary partner during Mardi Gras.

ALGHUNJAR (Persian): Feigned anger of a mistress.

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“If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect. …Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life.”
–Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2003)

The latest Editor’s Choice column at Frommers.com just gave me (and this blog) one of my best reviews of the year. “Award-winning travel writer Rolf Potts’ blog is smart, funny, and original,” writes Jennifer Anmuth, “and his connected website of stories and photos is a wealth of inspiration and ideas to get you going on your next trip. Plus, Potts mentions up-and-coming travel writers and posts timely news about travel destinations. Potts is arguably the best, and most consistent, individual travel writer/blogger on the web.”

Many thanks for that, Jennifer, and welcome to all of you who are finding me through Frommers!

Elsewhere in the editorial, Anmuth expounds on what makes for a good travel blog. “Maybe it’s the wanna-be-spy in me,” she says, “but the best part of discovering a good blog is the sense that you’re reading insider information. If a blog’s any good, it will make you feel like you’re reading your coolest friend’s diary. Of course, most of our real-life acquaintances don’t have the time or money to travel all the time, so who else can we turn to for unique, up-to-date travel advice besides a blogger? Point being: I like to hear an author’s voice in a blog — after all, that’s what makes a blog truly different from an edited magazine article, newspaper column, or guide book.”

Jen Leo’s Written Road is mentioned alongside Vagablogging — and Gridskipper, Travel Post, TravelBlog, BootsnAll, National Parks Traveler, Gadling.com, OneBag.com, and BiddingForTravel.com get props as well. Full article online here.

My travels to Greece made me a little late in pointing this out, but my longtime friend Jen Leo is once again on book tour, promoting her third (underwear-themed) women’s travel-humor book, The Thong Also Rises. A sequel (of sorts) to the bestselling Sand in My Bra and Whose Panties Are These?, Thong features travel tales by the likes of Laurie Notaro, Susan Orlean, Jill Conner Browne, Ayun Halliday, and Jennifer Cox. Jen’s up-to-the-minute book tour blog can be found here, and a list of upcoming events (starting with tonight’s gig at LitQuake in San Francisco) follows:

This month at my RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page, I interview adventure scribe Shanti Sosienski, who has contributed to Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, FHM, Shape, Dandelion, Sports Illustrated Kids, and Stuff, among other titles.

Personally, I can identify with Shanti’s take on the business/promotion side of writing. “The problem with writing,” she says, “is that no matter how many pieces you get, you could always do more — and so I feel like it’s a constant ‘breaking in’ with every new story. Things are easier than they were two years ago, but I am still a ‘pitching-machine’ and I find that work is not assigned easily because editors are really busy, and if you don’t stay in their face they forget about you. …[I] wish there was some kind of agent out there for writers like me who could shop me around to magazines so I don’t have to do all of my own PR.”

Later in the interview, Shanti offers some advice for aspiring adventure writers. “Don’t do it for the money,” she says. “It’s all about the love of adventure. Don’t let yourself be limited in thinking what a travel story is. It’s amazing how creative you can get with what a travel story is all about.”

For the full Shanti Sosienski interview, click here.