Rolf Potts

I’ve featured author and digital-culture pioneer Kevin Kelly in a number of podcast episodes over the years — in large part because he is so insightful on topics like travel, technology, and life in general.

Trained as an anthropologist with a degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Michael Engelhard worked for twenty-five years as a wilderness guide and outdoor instructor in Alaska and on the Colorado Plateau.

Though I’ve never aspired to be a visual artist — or even studied art history in a formal way — I’ve always been enchanted, as a traveler, by modern art museums.

Kiki and I visited the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg in Alsace, France, the same week I watched Orson Welles’s quirky 1973 essay-film F for Fake, where, in the context of another French cathedral, Welles noted: This has been standing here for centur…

It was very cool to see my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There alongside titles by the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Orhan Pamuk, and William Least Heat-Moon (as well as Marco Polo himself) on the Kerkermeister Pension’s “Travel Writing Stairs” in Auerbach, Saxo…

Earlier this year, I posted a “partial list of ‘best of’ lists where Vagabonding landed on the list,” which outlined where my debut book had appeared on various “best of travel” roundups in recent years.

Kathleen Hughes writes for the Travel Report of the Wall Street Journal and has written first person stories about open water swimming in Turkey, the social dynamics of group tours, medical emergencies on planes, souvenirs and extreme travel.

The first copy of Vagabonding I ever held in my hands sits in this display case at The Atlanta Hotel in Thailand.

The following is an outtake from an email Q&A interview I had with travel writer and filmmaker Ash Bhardwaj, for his 2024 book Why We Travel.

Dustin Grinnell is an American travel writer, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in Boston.

One advantage of reading a book in the twenty-first century is the diversity of ways a person can engage with that book on a multimedia level.

1) “Don’t create things to make money; make money so you can create things.

When I visited Bangkok’s iconic backpacker travel ghetto Khao San Road during my round-the-world “No Baggage Challenge” back in 2010, the experience was, at the time, something of a “walk down memory lane” that channeled an earlier chapter of my vagabondi…

Blake Boles is a traveling writer, experiential educator, and advocate for self-directed learning.

It’s easy to forget, as travelers, that what feels “inauthentic” by our own cultural standards doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not authentic to the culture we’re visiting.

For more than a generation now, the promotional literature for American universities has painted a picture of diversity that rarely corresponds to actual diversity on campus.

One humbling aspect of climbing Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu is that the rest houses on the mountain are supplied by indigenous Kadazan-Dusun porters who use the same trails as recreational hikers.

Kiki and I didn’t set out to find a satirical Balinese “tourist” mask (which appears 30 seconds into the video below) in the workshop of I Wayan Muka & Mang Mega Mask Product in Ubud.

Tania Romanov is the author of four memoirs and a travel collection.

While my first book had published was Vagabonding in 2003, and the first travel book I wrote (but did not publish) was Pilgrims in a Sliding World in 1995, the first book I ever completed was Dinosaurs, a whimsical (yet completely earnest) hand-illustrated

The shift from spending a few weeks traveling in Vanuatu to spending a few weeks traveling in Bali made for a curious transition.

When my first book, Vagabonding, hit bookstores early in 2003, it didn’t make many bestseller or Top-10 lists — though it did find an enthusiastic word-of-mouth following that has slowly grown in the two-plus decades since it first debuted.

Lucas Peters is an award-winning writer, photographer, and travel expert with a portfolio that includes hundreds of travel articles, radio interviews, and podcasts.

If there’s one twist to our taking a 16-hour industrial ferry from Port Vila to the South Pacific island of Malekula when Air Vanuatu went out of business, it’s that — if we wanted to leave the country as scheduled — we had to find a way to get back to Po…

Last year around this time I wrote a post called “Rolf’s Top-10 ‘Reverse-Bucket List’ experiences from 2023,” in which I confessed that I’ve near really been one to create “bucket lists” so much as decide, after the fact, that a given experience was extra…

From the moment I left home for the South Pacific, my intention was to give my gray One4Us cap away to a local person who I felt embodied the inclusive vision of the brand.

Pier Nirandara is an award-winning author, travel writer, film producer, and underwater photographer.

Pilgrims in a Sliding World, my first attempt at writing a travel book, was (and will always remain) never completed.

Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap (a kind of stone-cooked yam-paste pudding) is so unphotogenic that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to eating it on my trip to the South Pacific.

For all of the shortcomings I’ve identified in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at writing a travel book), it’s worth pointing out that it contained some of the earliest seeds of what later did become my first book, Vagabondin…

Read any number of travel memoirs about Vanuatu, and you will find repeated use of such hard-K words as kava, kastom, cargo cults, and cannibalism (as well as such non hard-K words as volcanoes and land-diving).

Troy Nahumko left Canada at an early age, first as a traveling musician around the United States and Europe, then as a writer and teacher in countries as diverse as Yemen, Azerbaijan, Libya and Laos.

In re-reading Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at a travel book), I’m often struck by how young the narrator seems.

Reaching the village of Tenmaru in the Melanesian South Pacific was quite the task.

Jenny Inzerillo of High Plains Public Radio’s “High Plains Morning” chats with actress/writer Kristen Bush about her film THE GAME CAMERA, the Rural Women Films initiative, and its artistic mission to uplift female voices in rural America.

Though travel writing is sometimes viewed as its own, self-contained genre, its core task can pertain to all manner of prose writing, since any good narrative (fiction or nonfiction) needs to establish an effective sense of place.

Laura Kiniry is a freelance journalist specializing in travel, food, and culture.

Travel writing has long been considered to be one of the least reliable forms of nonfiction narrative.

The video below doesn’t contain a narrative arc — it’s just a series of slice-of-life moments from a half-day cage-truck trip around the northern rim of Malekula Island, en route to the isolated Big Nambas village of Tenmaru.

When I teach my travel memoir classes each summer in Paris, I often do a lecture based on Thomas Swick’s “Roads Less Traveled: Why so much travel writing is so boring.”

This photo of “kastom” dancers was taken our second full day of traveling through Malekula Island (and its surrounding islets) in the Vanuatu archipelago.

Rosie Bell is a location-independent freelance writer, editor, and author of Escape to Self.

Having touched on the task of depicting myself as a character in the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-finished first attempt at writing a travel book), I will now examine the task of depicting other people in nonfiction writing.

I’d heard of the ritual of drinking kava before I traveled to Vanuatu, but I didn’t realize how pervasive the practice was (particularly among men) until I traveled to the outer reaches of the archipelago.

When teaching my creative writing classes in Paris, I typically begin my memoir-themed craft lecture by writing these words on the whiteboard: Author | Character / Narrator The vertical line between “Author” and “Character/Narrator” is in part meant to un…

Although the word “locavore” has something of an upscale-foodie connotation in the US, to “eat foods grown locally whenever possible” (as Merriam-Webster defines it) is pretty much the only option for people who live in the outer islands of Vanuatu.

James Michael Dorsey is an award-winning author, explorer, and lecturer who has spent three decades researching remote tribal cultures in fifty-six countries.

Rolf sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.

For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author.

Our arrival in the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu just so happened to coincide with Air Vanuatu, the nation’s flagship airline, going out of business.