A new travel essay of mine, " Signs of Confusion ", has just been published by World Hum . A meditation on the colorful absurdities of mistranslated English overseas, it begins thus: One afternoon late last year, I went out for lunch at a restaurant not far from the south Thailand guesthouse where I'd been...

Vagablogging readers might recall that I won a Lowell Thomas Award earlier this year for " Virgin Trail ", my Central America travel series in Slate . Finally, the $500 award check has arrived, and I've decided to donate the full amount to Drive Around the World 's fight against Parkinson's Disease. Parkinson's is a...

Front Back I received the above 2-rupee bill in a Shimla, India coffeeshop a few years ago. In all my years of travel it was the most beat-up piece of legal currency that anyone ever tried to pass off on me with a straight face. I've turned down torn and tattered bills before (and I...

Well. If this isn't a stellar birthday tribute , I don't know what is.

In the house where I do my writing in Baja, there is a copy of The Book of Lists #2 , which I read from time to time in idle moments. Of the many fascinating and bizarre facts in this book, one page that caught my attention was "11-Year-Old Bradley Goldstein

This Sunday, my Chile travel story, " The Other Patagonia ", appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine . The story recounts my journey along Chile's Carretera Austral earlier this year as part of Land Rover's Drive Around the World expedition. Since we drove through Patagonia too quickly for many in-depth personal encounters, the story...

I'm currently back in Baja after a weekend trip to Los Angeles, where I had the rare opportunity to hang out with two other guys named Rolf. The weekend was initiated by filmmaker Rolf Gibbs , who read Vagabonding and decided to take a year (maybe more) off and travel India. I never knew Rolf...

If this blog has fallen silent late this week, it's because I've been at the Governor's Conference on Tourism in Georgia, where I've been serving as a media panelist along with Gary Lee of the Washington Post (and doing some kayaking on my own in the barrier islands near Brunswick). I'll be back and blogging...

My thanks to everyone who alerted me about the results of the 20th annual Lowell Thomas Awards in travel writing. My Slate.com essay Virgin Trail: Travels in the Other Central America won top honors in the "Internet Travel Article" category -- my first Gold Award in five years of entering the competition. Of my story,...

This week I was interviewed by Daryl Richel for Canada's Radio Outpost show, which focuses on adventure and independent travel. Our twenty minute discussion focused on the art of vagabonding, and how people can get the time and courage to depart on long-term global journeys. An online mp3 version of the interview can be found...

My favorite writing teacher from my college days, memoirist Laurel Lee, died of pancreatic cancer last week in Oregon. She was 58 years old. Laurel was perhaps best known for her 1977 book Walking Through the Fire , which was a Christian-themed account of her simultaneous struggle with Hodgkin's disease, a dangerous pregnancy, and the...

I have a column about travel writing in the current issue of Transitions Abroad . Entitled Advice to Travel Writers: Make Travel Itself Your First Priority , it's an updated version of the travel writing advice I posted on the RolfPotts.com Writers page some years ago. The ten basic points of advice are the same...

[ Flashback to ten years ago : Based out of a Volkswagen Vanagon, Rolf takes some journal notes during his first vagabonding journey -- eight months around North America -- in 1994.] After a couple months of living and writing on the American West Coast, I took to the road again last week to visit...

After a couple weeks of being all over the place, I'm now firmly back on the West Coast, once again splitting time between the San Diego area and Baja. In addition to writing, highlights of recent days have included sea-kayaing in the Pacific, watching a couple Padres games from the third-base line, and twisting my...

[ No, that's not New York : A shot of the sunset in northern Baja, where Rolf was holed up for the last week .] After a little over a week of working on writing projects amidst the gorgeous deserts of northern Baja (and some down-time in San Diego), I'm now headed to New York...

I

I

Well, after driving a 2003 Land Rover Discovery II across the Americas and a 2004 Lexus IS300 down the Mississippi River valley in recent months, I am now tackling the less glamorous but just as adventurous task of driving a 1984 Chevy Celebrity down the West Coast of the USA (and points beyond). My first...

I had a new article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine . Entitled " A Desert By Any Other Name ", it explores a single mystery: Why has Peru's vast and beautiful coastal desert remained nameless and virutally unknown -- not only to South America travelers, but to the very people who live there? For...

After having lived almost exclusively overseas since 1996, I've returned to the United States this month with the intention of sticking around for a few months while I work on my next book. Since my life is still quite portable, I am in a position where I could choose to live almost anywhere. American cities...