Rolf Potts's Blog, page 123

James Clark

http://www.nomadicnotes.com

Age: 39

Hometown: Melbourne, Australia

Quote: " For me, I have created my dream lifestyle. I get to travel around the world while working on a business I love."



How did you find out about Vagabonding, and how did you find it useful before and during the trip?

Vagabonding is like a familiar old friend to me. I can't remember when I first discovered the site, probably when I was living in Dublin in 2002. I was happy to find a site about long term travel and articles I can relate to.

How long were you on the road?

My first long term trip was on a working holiday visa to the UK from 1999 to 2001. I then did one year in Dublin in 2002/03, and I have been working online and traveling since April 2003.

Where all did you go?

When I was based in London I got to travel around the UK, Europe and USA. Since that time I have been to 40+ countries.

What was your job or source of travel funding for this journey?

I saved up before I left, then I did temp work in London between trips.

Did you work or volunteer on the road?

When I started out I was working to travel, saving up everything I could to go on the next trip. Now I work while I travel, running my web design and marketing business while on the road.

Of all the places you visited, which was your favorite?

Ahh favorites. I can't say I have favorites, I tend to think more along the lines of influentials. For example living in London and Dublin proved to be the most influentual periods of my life. More recently spending time in Chiang Mai in Thailand has also been a good influence on my life.

Was there a place that was your least favorite, or most disappointing, or most challenging?

I'm aware that an opinion of a place can be determined by how you are feeling at the time or who you meet. For example when I first went to Munich didn't like it, but that was because I just came from an overnight train where I didn't sleep, and the weather was terrible. I spent half a day there walking around in a miserable state of mind. The next time I went back it was in Summer during the 2006 World Cup. The city had an electric atmosphere and I had a great time. Still the same city, just different circumstances. For that reason I am always reluctant to tell people what my least favorite place is, as everyone will have a different experience.

I try and find a redeemable feature out of every place I visit, no matter how seemingly horrible the place is.

As far as challenges, my greatest challenges are finding places to work that are comfortable and well connected. In this regard India (where I am doing this interview) is the most challenging place to be a working vagabond.

Did any of your pre-trip worries or concerns come true?  Did you run into any problems or obstacles that you hadn't anticipated?

On my first extended trip away I was concerned about money. I ended up running low on funds by the time I got to London, which meant I had to find work fast.

I have run into visa issues a couple of times In Europe. Before the EU Schengen Area expanded I arrived at border posts thinking an Australian passport would get me into Latvia and Romania and I was denied entry.

Which travel gear proved most useful? Least useful?

My laptop and phone are the most used gear in my possessions. Much of my travel planning is done online. Having a phone and getting a local sim card is good for connecting with local contacts rather than giving out an international number, which is expensive for everyone involved to call/text to.

What are the rewards of the vagabonding lifestyle?

For me, I have created my dream lifestyle. I get to travel around the world while working on a business I love. I have met a lot of like minded people in terms of travel and work as well.

What are the challenges and sacrifices of the vagabonding lifestyle?

Challenges are working productively while on the road. Constantly looking for wifi enabled accommodation and a comfortable office space is time consuming if you are constantly moving around.

Sacrifices are not having quality time with friends and family, as well as leaving behind new friends.

What lessons did you learn on the road?

I hope that I am constantly learning something. Being on the road has made me aware how good my life is. I knew that before hand, but I am confronted with this fact everyday. Every day I need to remind myself to practice patience and tolerance. Some days are better than others. When I want to yell at a persistent rickshaw driver to jump off a bridge, I have to remember he might be living under the bridge.

How did your personal definition of "vagabonding" develop over the course of the trip?

My original definition of a vagabond would have been one of someone with no home or income. That was me at the start. I was working dead end jobs to pay for travel. I now run a business, but have no office. I own 2 homes (or the bank does), but I am of no fixed address. Today I define vagabonding as long term unconventional travel.

If there was one thing you could have told yourself before the trip, what would it be?

Say yes to invitations – you never know where they will take you.

Any advice or tips for someone hoping to embark on a similar adventure?

It's not as hard as it first seems. Immerse yourself in the online long term travel community and find out tips and tricks while you are planning.

When and where do you think you'll take your next long-term journey?

As I am on the road full time I am just heading to wherever the adventure takes me. I attend a few work related conferences every year, usually in the UK/USA, so I usually plan my travels from where I can go from there.

Twitter: nomadicnotes
Website: www.nomadicnotes.com

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 [email protected] and tell us a little about yourself.

Bethlehem, Palestine

On Sunday, CBS's 60 Minutes aired film footage of San Francisco in 1906. The footage, taken by a camera attached to a cable car going down Market Street, is less than 12 minutes long, and it is mesmerizing in a way a still photo cannot be. We see bodies moving, faces moving, vehicles and pedestrians weaving all over the place in an era few of us ever bother to think about. There is a hauntedness to it all, in part because we know what the people in the video don't: many will die in just a few days in what will be called the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Some years ago I used to take a lot of video footage in my own travels, and I'm glad I have it today. On those rare occasions when I watch some clips, they evoke time and place in a way my still photos do not. A photograph can't capture the crickets at night in Yanjing, Tibet, or the giggles of an innkeeper's little girl as a radio plays Chinese classical songs in the background.

I've not traveled with a proper video camera since 2005. I feel I just don't have the time to do video when I'm focusing on still photography — and trying to do decent writing at the same time. But my Nikon D300s does have a video function, and I'll kick it on once in a while. The quality is poor, but it is enough to capture something that a single picture can't. For this post I've uploaded to youtube a few video clips taken in the past year. If any of the following capture your attention, you're most welcome to check it out (the girl in the photo above is in the first clip):

Wall and Playground in Bethlehem

Cat Attack in Jerusalem

Tel Aviv Sidewalk Scene

World Cup in Syria

Camels Clopping in Petra at Dusk

Prayers on a Ship

River Crossing in Ethiopia

Walking near Jinka, Ethiopia

It's Time for Africa

Dancing Kids (Lalibela, Ethiopia)

February 2, 2011 — Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt)

 

"Riding in a commercial jetliner simply isn't traveling, as far as I'm concerned. It's teleporting from point A to point B. You spend the entire time in the air just waiting to land, and afterward you speak of the flight only if it's to complain about the turbulence or the snoring of the dude who sat next to you. The trip itself is nothing. A blank. A means of skipping ahead instead of wading through. And it's precisely when we're wading through that we often stumble upon the joy, misery, serendipity, and disaster of a true adventure."

–Seth Stevenson, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World (2010)

Buddha statue in India. Photo: watchsmart / Flickr

Let's face it: most archaeology work can be quite boring, compared to the Indiana Jones fantasy. You're more likely to be dusting off pottery than exploring lost cities.  However, sometimes reality can trump fiction.

The New York Times had this incredible news: Beneath a Temple in Southern India, a Treasure Trove of Staggering Riches. As a routine matter, a court ordered several vaults under the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple to be examined to assess the temple's assets. They got much more than they bargained for: a fortune in jewels, gold, jewels, and statues worth billions of dollars.

Where did all those valuables come from?  For centuries, devotees and wealthy patrons have donated cash and gifts to temples.  The treasures must have accumulated in the vaults over a long period of time.  Somewhere along the way, the record-keeping must have stopped.  A hoard of cultural artifacts beyond imagination lay unnoticed while the temple ran activities as normal.

Expect the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple to become a major attraction on Indian itineraries in the future.  There is already talk of setting up a museum to house and catalog the priceless pieces.

Do you want to get in on the action?  I've dug up some resources for those who want to do archaeology fieldwork:

Earthwatch Institute Expeditions

Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunities Bulletin

ArchaeologyFieldwork.com

Have you participated in an archaeology project?  Please share your experiences in the comments.

Years ago, I used to be the major planner on my trips. I'd do extensive research of the area I planned to visit, complete with restaurant reviews, entertainment schedules and seasonal activities. When my feet touched the ground in my destination, I intended to know exactly what I was going to do.

Skip forward to the present day, and I've changed a lot. I still do a good amount of research since I write about my travels, but I leave a lot open to spur-of-the-moment serendipity. If I planned everything out, I'd miss the magic of letting things unfold on their own.

That said, I still struggle with the "clipboard side" of my personality—as my family likes to call it. In packing my bags for a return trip to Colombia this week, I was plagued with the notion that I didn't know enough about the bus trip from Bogotá to Villa de Leyva, where I planned to visit a friend. What if I missed the early morning departure? What if I had to wait all day to get on the next bus? What if I had the schedule all wrong?

When I stopped my brain from spinning like a hamster wheel, I realized that things weren't a big deal. Sure, I might miss some quality time with my friend, but only a few hours. It wasn't worth the angst I'd visited on myself, getting stressed out over a little bit of time.

It's a valuable travel lesson, and I suppose life lesson as well, to constantly remind yourself where your plans fit in the larger scheme of things. Learning to loosen your grip on the steering wheel can allow you to open up and enjoy what's around you. And that's one of the reasons why we travel in the first place.

"Coming back from [a trip overseas] means re-entering a world you have known and lived in, but doing so without feeling the charm you might expect at returning to a former life. You had left that world behind in the hope it might be thoroughly transformed in your absence, but nothing of the sort has occurred. It got along quite nicely without you and it adjusts quite smoothly to your return. People and things conspire to make it seem as if you had not been away. … People are a thousand times more preoccupied with their own little lives than with the strangeness of another world. You are best advised, then, to land discreetly, to come back politely into this world keeping anything you may have to say — along with the few sights still gleaming in your memory — strictly to yourself."

–Jean Baudrillard, America (1986)

As we've mentioned in the past, the RTW ticket deals we post each month here at Vagablogging are rarely literal round-the-world trips. We call them "multi-stop trips" around the office, but that's not really a common enough term for people to know what we mean immediately, so we default back to "RTW tickets" just to give people the sense that it's a longer trip we're talking about.

Along those lines, there are differences to how the idea of long-term travel is expressed. In some parts of the world, the idea of a "gap year" is widely understood – but in others, it draws blank stares. More people may know what a "sabbatical" is, but those are usually granted by a workplace and not claimed by the traveler. If you've been paying attention, you've probably heard about the newer effort to add "career break" to the national lexicon in the U.S., spearheaded by the Meet, Plan, Go! team.

However you describe your long-term trip, many of the logistical and planning challenges are the same. The life you leave behind may be one you've established and wish to return to, or it may be that your trip is the transition to a new life – either way, what unites long-term travelers is that they recognize the importance of the trip itself.

Not only that, every long-term traveler needs a plan for getting from Point A to Point B – which is where BootsnAll comes in. This month, the multi-stop tickets include two that cover highlights of Asia plus a couple of European stops, and one that concentrates almost exclusively on India.

Here are the new special deals on multi-stop airline tickets available through BootsnAll – these deals are good through July 31, 2011:

Focus on India: San Francisco – Bangkok – Calcutta / Kolkata – Madras / Chennai – Cochin / Kochi – Bangalore – Goa – Bombay / Mumbai – Delhi – London – San Francisco, from US$1449 plus taxes

Australia-Asia-Europe RTW: Vancouver – Sydney – OVERLAND – Perth – Bali (Denpasar) – Singapore – OVERLAND – Bangkok – Saigon / Ho Chi Minh – OVERLAND – Hanoi – Guangzhou / Canton – Beijing – OVERLAND – Shanghai – Paris – OVERLAND – London – Reykjavik – Vancouver, from US$2399 plus taxes

Asia to Europe: New York – Bali (Denpasar) – OVERLAND – Yogyakarta – Singapore – OVERLAND – Chiang Mai – Kunming – Beijing – OVERLAND – Shanghai – Rome – OVERLAND – London – New York, from US$1899 plus taxes

If none of these sample itineraries is what you're looking for in your round the world trip, then start planning the trip that suits you with our RTW trip planner And don't forget to sign up for BootsnAll's RTW newsletter, delivering RTW trip planning advice and resources via email every single month.

Woman computer scientist reading in the pool. Photo: aeter / Flickr

In the United States, the self-help business is a multi-billion-dollar industry.  People throw down lots of cash to lose weight, gain confidence, and find happiness. But whenever I see that stuff, this thought springs to mind: "Travel solves all of those problems, and a whole lot more."

Lonely Planet author Robert Reid laid out the case for travel being the best self-help program: How travel makes you smarter, sexier and more productive.  Moreover, he backs up his points by citing experts and research studies.

Let's look at each point, one by one.

Travel makes you smarter

Immersion is the best education. You can't travel without learning tons about geography, history, culture, economics, art, architecture, the list goes on forever.  You're not just reading about it in a book, you're going to see a place and interact with people. Take economics for example, currency exchange takes a whole different meaning when your buying power boosts or drops depending on which country you're in.  No amount of lectures on purchasing power parity can teach you to appreciate that.

Not to say that reading is bad.  You couldn't pay me to slog through academic textbooks on these subjects.  But if I know I'm going to that destination, I'll happily read shelves of books about any place.  During my time living in China, I must have devoured a dozen books on the history and business culture of that country.

Most important, travel conditions you to be resourceful and think on your feet.  You have to adapt to survive, or you won't make it.  You'll pick up bits of the language, learn how to spot scams, and improve your bargaining skills tenfold.

Travel makes you sexier

Reid says in his blog post, "According to one recent ItsJustLunch.com survey, the best first-date conversation topic was hobbies, with travel following second."  From my point of view, a traveler is attractive.  It show they're open-minded, adventurous, and more likely to be well-read.  Almost every traveler I know is also an avid reader.  Smart is sexy, right?

Perception of people is different too.  When you're in another country, the locals can seem more attractive than the folks back home.  Conversely, the locals may find you more attractive.  Who hasn't been seduced by a sexy accent?

On a purely superficial level, being on the road makes you look better.  All that walking, climbing, and running to catch trains will make you healthier.  You'll also get more sleep, since you don't have a morning commute to worry about.  Many countries also use fewer chemicals and preservatives in food, which makes it better for you.  I can't tell you how many times I was amazed at the quality of things like bread, cheese, rice, and beer in other countries.  I've actually returned to countries multiple times, just for the food.

Travel makes you more productive

This may seem contradictory at first.  How does going on vacation make you more productive?  Reid links to a slideshow from Businessweek magazine titled Vacations Worldwide vs. Economic Success.  Many countries match or even beat America's economic competitiveness, despite working shorter hours and taking longer vacations.

I've posted it before, but this TED talk by Stefan Sagmeister is worth watching.  It's called "The Power of Time Off."

Sagmeister is a designer who talks about how his time off and travels have sparked his creative juices.  The fastest way to get new ideas is to get out of your comfort zone and experience new places.

These are only a few of the many benefits of seeing the world.  How has travel helped you in your life?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

When I'm choosing what book to take along on a trip, the destination always dictates what I'm inspired to read. The Moviegoer went with me on my first trip to New Orleans. Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy has accompanied me throughout a handful of trips in Latin America. The Popul Vuh was in my bag as I visited Mayan ruins in Honduras. Somehow, reading something set in the place I'm visiting (whether fiction or non-fiction) makes the journey complete.

Joel Carillet addressed this a bit recently, with his "Reading books on the road" post. But it's made me wonder: How much does your destination inspire what people choose as reading material? If you're on an extended trip and picking over paperbacks in a hostel library, do you just grab what sounds interesting, or do you hone in on something that has to do with where your body is at the moment?

I'm headed back to Colombia soon, and sitting next to my suitcase is The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories. I may not have much time to read, but just having it along gets my brain in the right place.

For the last year and a half that I have been living in Asia it has been a constant expensive struggle to maintain regular use of vitamins and supplements. It is a bit difficult to find bottles of vitamins here in Korea.  If they are found it is little more than a basic multi-vitamin and they come at a ridiculous price. And it isn't just supplements that are hard to find. If you're looking for anything from the artillery of natural living remedies, you will likely come up short for these as well.

Sure I could just forgo taking supplements, but why compromise my health and energy? There is a vast difference between my mood, health, and energy level when I do not maintain a regular regiment of certain supplements.

Someone recently pointed me in the direction of the great website iHerb.com. iHerb is an "online store, supplying a vast selection of brand name natural products". Customers can go online and choose from countless supplements, brand names, natural beauty, and natural living products. Product details and reviews are listed right there on the website.

The entire website is available in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese and the company ships world wide. The best thing about iHerb is that shipping is always a standard $10 fee. If you are planning to make large orders of $80 or more, they offer a reduced shipping deal.

If you are living abroad and having a hard time finding your typical range of vitamins or other natural living supplements, iHerb could be exactly what you're looking for.