As I announced earlier this year, I will once again be teaching a creative nonfiction workshop at the Paris American Academy during the month of July (this Paris workshop also entails fiction and journal-writing classes, taught by novelists John Biguenet and Lauren Grodstein).

New to my teaching slate in 2010 is an intensive travel-writing workshop in Reykjavik, Iceland from August 1-8. Organized in conjunction with Angela Ritchie’s ACE Camps, this small-group workshop is a great way to experience Iceland while fine-tuning your travel-writing skills in the company of other writers. Class size will be limited to 10 people.

I will also be speaking and/or serving as a panelist at a number of events this spring in various parts of the U.S. A rundown of upcoming events is as follows:

KANSAS CITY AREA

• March 30th, 2010, Lawrence, 7:00pm
  University of Kansas, Mallot Hall. Lecture on travel writing and long-term travel (non-students welcome). Queries can be sent to tlorenz [at] ku.edu.

ST. LOUIS

• April 2nd, 2010, St. Louis, 2:30pm
  2010 National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations Conference, travel-writing panel with Jason Wilson and Jim Benning. Conference takes place in the Renaissance Grand Hotel, 800 Washington Avenue (314-621 9600). Queries can be sent to marcuspg [at] hotmail.com.

OHIO

• April 27th, 2010, Springfield, 7:00pm
  Wittenberg University, Hollenbeck Hall. Lecture on travel writing and long-term travel (non-students welcome). Rolf will also speak in English classes on the 26th and 27th. Queries can be sent to kdixon [at] wittenberg.edu.

PARIS

• July 1st-28th, 2010, Paris
  Paris American Academy Summer Creative Writing Workshop, Creative Nonfiction seminar; queries can be sent to info [at] pariswritingworkshop.com.

ICELAND

• August 1st-8th, 2010, Reykjavik
  Travel Writing Workshop, organized by Angela Ritchie’s ACE Camps; check website for registration information.

If you’re ever curious to know if I have events in your area, please drop by my Events page.

To schedule me for speaking engagements, travel-writing seminars, vagabonding seminars, book events, or writing classes please send inquiries to events [at] rolfpotts.com.

I can’t count the amount of times I heard, “Oh yuck—too crowded with drunk college kids” when I told people I was going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The problem is, the folks who commented had never been there, and their perceptions of the annual event stemmed from TV news footage of just one thing during an entire season of Carnival. While I was in New Orleans, I avoided the jam-packed crowds on Bourbon Street and was able to have some genuine offbeat experiences in a city at the height of peak tourism.

It reminds me that it’s completely possible to go to a major city or tourist destination, and still have an exceptional experience. We don’t always have to go off the beaten path to have a life-altering vacation memory. Don’t think, “I’m going to breeze through Cusco, because the Amazon rain forest is going to knock my socks off.” Yes, it will knock your socks off, but so might the candlelit midnight parade through the streets of Cusco that you just happened to catch because you forgot how to get back to your hotel. Do both.

The ability to have an offbeat moment in a non-offbeat place merely requires that we keep our eyes and minds open. Keep the scheduling to a minimum and just wander and notice things. Get up early and see things you’d miss if you were sleeping in. Stay up late instead of going back to the hotel to watch CNN. We have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves a little, each time we travel. Why not start with challenging our perceptions of what it means to be in a particular place at a particular time?

If I’d chucked the notion to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, I may have missed walking with the North Side Skull and Bones Gang early Mardi Gras morning, after I just happened to open my front door when they passed by. I grabbed my camera and ran after them, and am left with a lifelong memory.

When you consider your next destination, stop before you rule out anything. Rethink the experience you want to have and take a hard look at your options. You just may be skipping over your next great discovery.

Trans-Siberian Railway. Photo: yeowatzup / Flickr Creative Commons.

It’s one of the great train journeys: the Trans-Siberian Railway.  The train makes tracks from Europe on one end to Asia on the other.

If you can’t make it out to Russia anytime soon, you can get a sample of the trip from the comfort of your computer.  Here’s the NY Times article: Trans-Siberian Railway Views, a Click Away.  For more information, check out this website: The Guide to Trans-Siberian Railway.

Have you ever ridden on the Trans-Siberian? Please share your stories in the comments.

Gulf of Thailand

There are no icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand, but at any given moment there is, in this and many other seas, someone thinking about the Titanic—or at least about Leonardo Dicaprio.

I almost didn’t take this photograph. For most of three hours I had been lying on a bench on deck, seeking out that elusive position where a severely herniated disc wouldn’t make me wish there were icebergs in the Gulf of Thailand. On top of my physical pain, there was the psychological terror of knowing I still had 20 hours before I reached Bangkok – 20 hours of ship, bus, and train, some of that with 75 pounds of cargo hanging from my shoulders. Only the day before did I come out of a 17-hour gala of agony in which it felt like a herd of elephants had collapsed on my lower back. The possibility of returning to that state somewhere between here and Bangkok was all too real.

I was alone on this portion of deck except for two German university students on a three-week holiday to Thailand. Feeling eight times their age (and almost eight times my own) as I navigated my bad back on the bench, we didn’t engage each other that much. But when the girls turned giddy as they conspired in German to reenact the Titanic bow scene, I eased myself into an upright position and grabbed my camera. The bow was off limits to passengers—the girls seemed unaware of this—and I thought the expression on their faces would be priceless when the captain roared out the window from the bridge above us.

But the better picture, I think, is the one I’m posting here. Taken three seconds before the captain got the bridge window open to commence his roar, I love how it seems to capture the feeling of youth, freedom, and lightheartedness. It was a fleeting moment in time that will never be repeated.

By the end of the week they would be back in university, and the week after that I would be on an operating table in Bangkok. Two years have passed since then, and I imagine their Thailand experience, like my pain, now feels pretty distant. As the wise old narrator in Wendell Berry’s book Hannah Coulter says as she looks back on her life:

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

(Note: Wendell Berry’s novels, though not travel writing per se, are some of the best books I’ve read because of how they speak about values, community, and remembering. Concerning the idea of living in the now, many have found Ekhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment helpful.)

We’re rolling out some new features here at Vagablogging, and one of the most exciting will be regular Vagabonding Case Studies of past and future travelers, highlighting the reasons behind their trips, how they made them happen, and what wisdom they learned from the experience.

Have you been on a vagabonding journey in the past?  Are you planning one now, or are you currently on such a trip?  Has Vagabonding inspired you to cast off the familiar shackles of home and set off on your own for months on end to parts known and unknown?  Are you a Nu Nomad who wants to redefine home as wherever you are?  We’d like to hear from you!

We’re reaching out to everyone who might have something to say about their experiences as vagabonders.  We have a separate set of questions for pre-trip and post-trip, and while it makes for a great story to have both, it’s not necessary.  We’ll talk about how you’ve funded your travels, what lessons you’ve learned, where you’ve traveled, what you chose to take with you, and how Vagabonding may have influenced you.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, there is a growing trend in long-term travel, and it is our hope that these case studies will help to build a community of world travelers who share their excitement and knowledge with each other.  For those who are in the planning stages, this could be an opportunity to get feedback or to promote their blog.

Our first Case Study will premier next Wednesday, and will be of a woman who was bitten by the travel bug two years ago, saved up, and just quit her job in anticipation of traveling for 10 months through South America and Southeast Asia.  She’s currently in Peru celebrating her birthday.  We look forward to introducing her, and many more vagabonders over the months to come.

Are you a Vagabonding reader planning, in the middle of, or returning from a journey? Would you like your travel blog or website to be featured on Vagabonding Case Studies? If so, drop us a line at casestudies@vagabonding.net and tell us a little about yourself.

Two days ago, I spent all 14 hours of the New York – Delhi nonstop flight worrying that my seatmate was quietly infecting me with something nasty.

He stayed bundled in his ski parka and wool hat the enitre flight. He had a telltale IV drip bandage on the back of his hand, sat eyes closed with a grimace, and didn’t eat a bite (except for the occasional pill from the bag in his pocket).

Has anyone else ever borne the weight of travel-induced hypochondria?

Maybe it comes from the battery of shots the docs recommend for going almost anywhere these days. Get ‘em and you’re attuned more closely to the threats; skip ‘em and add a dollop of risk to that awareness.

Maybe it’s an unavoidable side effect of Western culture, obsessed as we are with hand goop and Airborne and sneeze technique.

Maybe it’s just me. But I’d like to chalk it up to travel’s tendency to push us to find the story in any given detail — to make us reach for reasons and explanations to make sense of it all (no matter how quixotic it feels).

Pursuing countless such paths per second, it’s no wonder some of them swerve into fear. Some rightly so, some as false alarms. Moving forward, the goal becomes keeping the number of alarms roughly equivalent to the number of legitimate threats — and thus eliminating that pesky brick-in-the-backpack known as travel hypochondria.

Photo by Jaako via Flickr.

The most difficult long-term travel question is also perhaps the most common: how much does it cost?

It’s almost impossible to answer that question because it depends where you’re going, when you’re going and how exactly you plan to travel. Tiny variations in how you travel can have a huge impact on your trip costs. Do you plan to eat street food or sit down to five-course spreads every night? Love to hit the local bars? Sharing a room? Traveling alone?

We’ve pointed to a few good, example budgets in the past and suggested that $14,000/year is a good average, but we recently stumbled across a new site, Budget Your Trip, that’s hoping to make it even easier to figure out how much cash you need for your dream trip.

Budget Your Trip is a bit like general personal finance and budget tracking websites — like Wesabe or Mint — but geared specifically toward travelers.

Plug in your destination and Budget Your Trip will show you an average of how much the site’s members spent there. Budget Your Trip also breaks down those costs into common categories — food, accommodation, water, transportation, etc — so you can see where your money is going. There’s also a handy currency converter so you can quickly see the average in local or your own currency.

The planning tools allow you to create a trip from scratch (based on, for example, how much money you have set aside) or build your trip budget using the site’s existing averages and sample budgets.

One potential problem with using Budget Your Trip as planning tool is that there’s no indication of what sort of travelers are adding their costs to the site. For example, Budget Your Trip’s Bangkok averages suggest it costs $40 a day to get by, when in fact we, and many people we know, have gotten by on far less. Have prices in Bangkok gone up recently or are not-so-budget travelers skewing the results?

Currently there’s no way to tell the answer to that question, but fortunately, fixing that is on Budget Your Trip’s short-list of coming improvements.

Laurie, who founded Budget Your Trip with her husband after the two returned from a round the world trip last year, says that there are plans to add tools for narrowing estimates according to your budget. Currently, when you “estimate costs” for a potential trip you can only search by city or country. Laurie says they will be adding additional search parameters including “budget type” (budget, mid-range, or luxury), “trip type” (personal or business) and “group size” (solo traveler, couple, or group) in the near future.

The ability to narrow cost projections by budget and group size will no doubt make the site more useful for vagabonds.

We should also point out that Budget Your Trip isn’t just a planning tool. Once you’re actually on the road you can keep track of your costs, entering the data into your budget and making adjustments as you go. For example, you might find you’re spending less than you planned in Thailand, leaving you more to spend in Vietnam or perhaps just allowing you to extend your trip.

The site also offers graphs, charts and other very nice visual breakdowns that can quickly show you where your money is going. Not really the type of traveler that keeps receipts? As Laurie says, “it may not be necessary to track your expenses to the last penny, but seeing a breakdown of what percentage you’re spending on accommodation, food, or souvenirs can motivate you to save a little more.”

For example, becoming aware of that one thing that busts your budget everyday is a great way to stop the excess spending, potentially extending your time on the road.

If, like us, you tend to avoid the internet cafes while you’re on the road then Budget Your Trip might be more useful as a planning tool, however, Laurie did tell use that eventually the site is hoping to offer a spreadsheet you download and print for offline budget tracking.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for yet another data source to help answer the age old question of how much it costs to travel the world, check out Budget Your Trip.

Nomads front page

The Portland-based small publisher Bedouin Books define themselves as “publishers of handmade works of literature and poetry, fiction and non-fiction.”  The selective and tiny publishing house began in 2003 and has released a semiannual literary journal (swap/concessions) and several editions of quailty, handbound books, each designed and printed using innovation and artistry.

They have now started a travel imprint, Nomads, featuring new non-fiction work in travel writing, memoir, essays, and philosophy.  Got some great stoies you’d like to see in print? Go for the small, creatively artistic publishing company and get some beautiful finished products.

If you find yourself more intrigued by a place’s cemeteries than by its museums, here are a few ghastly destinations around Europe that you might want to check out:

Paris Catacombs – Deep below the city of Paris visitors can wander the old cramped city quarries lined from floor to ceiling with human bones. The walls are packed with skulls and bones in various decorative shapes and patterns.
With the removal of the Saints-Innocents Cemetery in the late 1800s, the remains were transferred to a section of the Quarries of Paris creating Municipal Ossuary or, as it is referred to today, The Catacombs.
Entrance is 8€, with reduced ticket prices available to seniors and students.

Sedlec Ossuary – The Sedlec Ossuary is a small chapel in the suburbs of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. With the expansion of the surrounding cemetery in the 14th and 15th centuries, older graves were exhumed and the bones went on to create this grim chapel.
The Sedlec Ossuary is ornamented everywhere in human bones. A large chandelier of skulls and bones hangs from the ceiling, while a multitude of other skeletal embellishments line the stairs, ceiling, and walls.
Admission: 30CZK, and 20CZK for students.

Capela dos Ossos – This Chapel of Bones, built in the 16th century, is located in Evora, Portugal. Here skulls and bones are set into cement, while perfect human skeletons are recreated in several corners.
Admission: 2€.

Hallstatt Ossuary – The Austrian city of Hallstatt, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is home to the Hallstatt Beinhaus, also called the Charnel House. This ossuary was established in the 1700s in order to make room for more graves. This small Beinhaus is crammed with some 1200 exhumed human skulls that have been bleached in the sun and painted with the names of the deceased, colorful flowers, or personally symbolic images.
Admission: 1€.

Capuchini Bone Chapel – The Capuchini Crypt is located beneath the Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins in Rome, Italy. Five of the six rooms of this are decorated with the bones of Capuchin friars, with some rooms dedicated to specific bones of the body. Working chandeliers of bone throw light on the skeletal designs of this crypt.
Entrance is by donation

I recently got an email from a woman who suffers from a diagnosed case of social phobia and is worried that this might compromise her travels.

“I am afraid that my introverted personality is going to effect the way I travel, and I won’t be as opportunistic when it comes to the social aspect of traveling,” the woman wrote. “Do you have any advice? Will solo travel help me better experience my host culture and meet locals? Besides going to therapy, do you have any suggestions that may help me be a bit more outgoing when it comes to social situations abroad?”

This is what I told her:

I have always been a bit introverted, and solo travel has helped make me into a more social person. I don’t know much about formally diagnosed “social phobia” and what it entails, but I can tell you that traveling alone can really force you to break out of your shell and engage your surroundings. It’s not always easy, and there are times where you’ll be lonely and frustrated — but it’s worth it when you make connections. It is, in short, an interesting learning process, and it’s rewarding when you make breakthroughs.

My best strategy for being more of an extrovert when you travel is to go to the developing world instead of the industrialized world. In Europe and North America people might not always have time for you — but in places like Asia (which is nice and cheap) or Africa (which is not as cheap, but amazing just the same) and the Middle East, people are more likely to take note of you as an outsider and make friends. I did some of my earliest vagabonding in Asia, and it’s amazing how many people I met just by being the only white guy in a little village. There is a language barrier to overcome, of course, but that process can actually be fun, as even introverts can tackle the art of speaking simple English, utilizing a phrasebook, and/or using improvised sign language to get a point across.

Another option would be to join a formal study or volunteer program (the Peace Corps being a good example) that will give you a structured community of people you can be with, and a “business” oriented pretext to meet local people. For more info on working or studying or volunteering overseas, check out the resources at Transitions Abroad.

In addition to this advice, introverted vagabonders might want to check out Sophia Dembling’s World Hum article “Confessions of an Introverted Traveler,” including her tip sheet, “Six Tips for Introverted Travelers.”