Tomorrow I will debut a RolfPotts.com Writers page interview with Karin Muller, who is the author of three books — Hitchhiking Vietnam : A Woman’s Solo Journey in an Elusive Land, Inca Road: A Woman’s Journey into an Ancient Empire, and Japanland : A Year in Search of Wa — all of which she simultaneously produced as television documentaries for the likes of PBS, MSNBC Explorer, and the National Geographic’s global channel.

Here are a few outtakes from the interview:

“Nobody who decides to become a brain surgeon just picks up a scalpel and expects to start cutting - why do people think they can pick up a pen and immediately write a bestseller?”

“My first book [was] picked up by Globe-Pequot after being turned down by 72 agents and publishers. Tenacity, tenacity, tenacity.”

“When I’m writing the challenge is to be as absolutely fair as I can be to all characters involved - knowing that I have the pen in hand and therefore, the last word.”

“Very, very few people can make it as either authors or filmmakers. I write articles. I give lectures. I sell photos. I try to create as many income streams as possible from each project.”

“If you are going to write, read. Read voraciously. Read great literature. Take whatever you like and incorporate it into your writing.”

“Learn to love living in basements and eating ramin noodles. Second to poetry, it is probably the most difficult career to make a living. You must be utterly obsessed with it — more than you want a new car, a house, a family, a dog, houseplants — because you are competing with those of us who are willing to give up all those things in order to write.”

For a sneak preview of the complete Karin Muller interview, click here.

My newest Ask Rolf column at World Hum involves a question from an American named Mike, who wonders when he should take the leap to go travel the world. He writes:

I’m in the U.S. Coast Guard, and I constantly daydream about traveling throughout Southeast Asia and Australia and too many other places to name. My problem is that I cannot decide whether to go now, or retire from the Coast Guard (I have 14 more years to retire) and then go. Retiring would allow me to travel forever. However, I fret over the political future of the world and whether it will be safe or even possible in the future. Which prods me to go now. What are your thoughts on this? I’ve asked friends and family, but they all think I’m either crazy, or not really serious about doing this.

My first advice to Mike was to not take too much stock in the pessimism of his friends and family:

For starters, don’t take too much stock in the negative feedback from your friends and family. Most everyone who’s ever set off on a long-term journey away from the workaday world, including me, has had to put up with skeptics among our closest friends and family members. In the end, ignoring these folks is easier than arguing with them. Just quietly persevere with your travel plans, and send a few polite postcards home when you’re having the time of your life on the other side of the world.

Past that, I tell Mike that sooner is usually better when it comes to making vagabonding plans — but, just to be sure, I call in on some advice from my old travel pal and Coast Guard vet, Al Ribera.

For the full take on what Al and I tell Mike, click over to the World Hum column here.

Last month, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books of all time included Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which weighed in at #20 on the list. Curious to know Hessler’s take on the Top 30 — as well as his own suggestions for books that might have been included — I contacted him by email as he toured the U.S. in support of his latest China book, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.

This is what Pete told me:

Thanks, and I’m flattered. As for additions ­ I’d definitely mention Blue Highways. And maybe On the Road. I guess that’s technically fiction, but it’s probably more “true” than The Road to Oxiana. I think that Bryson’s The Lost Continent is his best book, better than A Sunburned Country. Maybe The Great Railway Bazaar should be on the list two or three times. I’ve always felt like that’s about the perfect travel book. The Long Walk might belong as well. Capote’s The Muses Are Heard. Out of Africa. Darwin took a big trip. Christopher Columbus left some interesting journals. What’s the policy on works in translation? The fiction/nonfiction issue is also an odd one. It seems wrong that writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, who wrote so much about displacement and movement, aren’t on the list. The Martian Chronicles. Science fiction, at some level, is a type of travel writing, a response to the shrinking world. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a travel book. It’s about a journey, and it’s about that tension between settlement and movement, the sense of frontier and loss, that is at the heart of the American experience.

You know, I’m never certain how I feel about travel writing. I never conceived River Town as a travel book; it’s more about living and working in a place for two years. And although some of my New Yorker stories have been reprinted in travel writing anthologies, pretty much all of them are about a place where I’ve spent a decade. I have a Chinese driver’s license and I pay taxes to the People’s Republic. I live there. Usually I’m not traveling far for my research, and the stories aren’t about my personal experience; they are generally focused on Chinese people. But it seems that anything written about a foreign country automatically falls under the category of travel. Why isn’t Desert Solitaire on lists of great travel books? People generally don’t think of McPhee’s Coming into the Country as a travel book, but they would if Alaska happened to be in Russia.

Sometimes it seems that the idea of a travel book matters more than the book itself. There are certain classics of the genre, like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which I don’t really connect with on a literary level. The writing isn’t particularly great; the journey isn’t particularly incredible; and the writer doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t bring much knowledge to his subject. But the book reflects the way that British adventurers and travelers perceived faraway places during that particular period ­ a certain post-Empire, post-war mood. It’s about a moment when the British were coming to terms with a world that was suddenly much bigger and imposing than they had ever imagined during the years of Empire. And because of that quality, the book has acquired a certain extra-literary value. There’s a lot of meaning that isn’t necessarily contained within the pages.

The “genre”, at least as it’s defined, tends to be quite male dominated. I guess that’s partly because our concept of travel writing generally involves adventure and struggle; in many of these books there is a sort of combative relationship with the place. The risk is that it can become a sort of exotica. And another risk is that travel books sometimes don’t age well, because readers often need to connect with that extra-literary dimension. I guess this is why people sometimes wonder if travel writing is dead. I wouldn’t say that, but I sense that the “genre” is becoming more fluid and hard to define. Is Istanbul, by Orhan Pamuk, a travel book? He’s a native of Turkey and he’s lived in the same apartment building for fifty years. But he’s traveled between floors, so maybe it counts.

This week in Yahoo! News, my “Traveling Light” column gives a nod to the upcoming Independence Day weekend with a subjective list of my top ten travel destinations in the United States. In roughly west-to-east order, they are:

1) Olympic National Park, Washington

2) Big Sur, California

3) U.S. Highway 50, Between Maryland and California

4) Pike National Forest, Colorado

5) The Flint Hills, Kansas

6) Sun Studio, Memphis

7) The French Quarter, New Orleans
Key West, Florida

9) Yankee Stadium, The Bronx

10) No comment (coast to coast)

To read the full details behind these USA travel choices, click here.

“People don’t want to change unless forced to. We’ve been conditioned to structure and control our lives in order to resist change, to stop change altogether if possible, to be secure, to make rules, to make plans, to organize, to enforce, and so forth. The problem with all this is that it doesn’t work anymore. We’re de-energized and confused, afraid of the world, unsure of ourselves. Why? Because our sense of control is a complete illusion, however complex and pervasive. It doesn’t square with the world as it is, just some obsolete and chicken-shit version we made up so we could “control” it. * Vagabonding is an effective technique for trashing this illusion, one that works because it makes you feel good. You can again make your life fun instead of fucked, and you do this by paying attention to change and chance, which manifest everywhere, in all persons and places. The vagabond accepts change and welcomes chance, for they are the sure signs of energy flow, and the center of life. * Serving change and chance, which is vagabonding, automatically and unfailingly elevates you and expands your potentials so that you can meet their delightful demands.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)

Last month, World Hum posted its list of the Top 30 Travel Books of all time, to which I contributed a number of reviews. After the dust settled and readers weighed in with their own recommendations, it occurred to me that I correspond with a number of the authors who made the list. What, I thought, would Pico Iyer or Peter Hessler or Tony Horwitz or Tim Cahill or Jeffrey Tayler think of World Hum’s selections?

Curious, I queried these five writers, all of whom gave me thoughtful replies. I will share comments from each of these writers in coming days, starting today with Pico Iyer, whose Video Night in Kathmandu weighed in at #8 on the World Hum list. Pico replies:

It’s a highly, highly quirky list — Shiva Naipaul right up there and V.S. Naipaul for his most laughable book at the bottom! — but I’m flattered to be in such company, and anyone who loves The Golden Earth is automatically a hero in my book (also very strongly weighted towards the contemporary, though I’m very glad to see Peter Hessler so highly recommended).

I thought last night of a few of the travel-books that I would always keep close and put on any list of inspirations:

• Colossus of Maroussi , by Henry MIller
• The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
• The Inland Sea, by Donald Richie
• The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong, by Somerset Maugham

All of those books would be in my Top 15 ot Top 20 list. Additionally, I highly recommend:

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
• Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer
• Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen
• Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal , by J.R. Ackerley
• Watermark, by Joseph Brodsky
• Istanbul: Memories and the City (a recent entry), by Orhan Pamuk
• Westward Ha!, by S.J. Perelman
• Sea and Sardinia, by D.H. Lawrence

…and, I think, lots of others that I’m not remembering right now.

Thanks again, so much, for sending me this fun and fascinating list.

It looks like the in-flight magazines are being good to me this month. Last week, I reported that I was a part of AirTran magazine’s dream-jobs article; this week, I got news that a recent issue of Singapore Airlines’ SilverKris magazine listed Vagablogging.net at the top of their travel blog roundup.

In an article called “In Blog We Trust,” Tao Ai Lei May writes:

This blog is by award-winning travel writer Rolf Potts who has written on more than 50 countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler and Conde Nast Traveler. There are links to his articles, which are more well-written, polished and informative than most blogs. Well-presented, funny and original, this site is also a wealth of information.

Potts also posts useful news about travel destinations, and has quirky sections like the Narcissus Gallery — a tongue-in-cheek photo collection of himself. Relics from the Road features interesting and bizarre knickknacks from around the world. His stories and photos will definitely inspire would-be travelers.

Thank you, Tao Ai Lei May!

“Classist distinctions are conventionally made between travel and tourism. Popular wisdom has is that educated middle-class travelers, more aristocratic and superior, pursue the distant and unexpected, gaining insights as they ply their graceful and god-given way across others’ terrains; while common tourists, traveling in bulk on packaged tours, just gawk, go too fast to see, and are more interested in taking pictures than living in the moment.”
– Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track (1999)

I recently got an email from a fellow named Chris, who will soon be moving to Korea for an expat stint. Hoping to get the most out of his overseas experience Chris wanted some pointers on how to explore Korea for the first time.

Off the top of my head, here were my top-five pointers for life in Korea:

1) Read up before you go. I always wished I’d done this before I first journeyed to Korea in 1996. A guidebook is a good place to start. Moon makes a great Korea guide, and the Lonely Planet is not bad either. Also look for a book called Culture Shock: Korea, which can prepare you for certain matters of culture and etiquette.

2) Remember that culture is instinctual, so a bit of culture shock is inevitable, no matter how well you have prepared. So just be patient, and be prepared to roll with all the seeming weirdness of living overseas.

3) Stay active, make Korean friends, and don’t spend all your time in bars. The big expat cliché anywhere in the world (and especially in Korea) is that expats are drunks. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s easy to fall into the habit of hanging out at the expat bar all the time (I know I did my first year). The best way to avoid this habit (and the mild depression that can ensue) is to throw yourself into your Korea experience. Join a gym or swim club or rock-climbing club; study Korean history; visit temples and hike in the mountains; go to lunch or on excursions with students or friends. The more you do, the more you’ll learn and the more positive your experience will be.

4) Learn Hangul. The Korean alphabet is very logical and easy to learn, and within a week of applying yourself you should be able to read signs and write people’s names.

5) Study Korean. Speaking the language itself can sometimes be a challenge, but it’s worth it to try, a little bit at a time.

This month’s travel featured story in World Hum, a New Orleans dispatch called “The Places We Find Ourselves,” was written by my sister Kristin Van Tassel. Kristin, who teaches American Literature at Bethany College in north-central Kansas, has written about literature for American Studies, mothering issues for AlterNet, and the environment for the Prairie Writers Circle — but this is her first published travel narrative.

In an essay that subtly examines several layers of a New Orleans travel experience, Kristin meditates on the unexpected surprises of life as an adult, juxtaposing the displacement of travel with the displacement that local residents were feeling after Hurricane Katrina. Recalling a series of enounters — at a Bourbon Street gay bar, at Louis Armstrong Park, at a Royal Street mask shop — Kristin moves us along toward her oddly wise epiphany, which is moving not because she’s established herself as a person who is well-traveled, but because she’s made it clear that she isn’t.

I’m tempted to outtake the final paragraph of her essay here, but I’d reckon it simply won’t have the same effect unless you read the rest of the essay first.

[On a tangential note of trivia, that really is Kristin and her mask in the photo. I should know: I took the picture and added the Photoshop effects myself.]