Here is a book summary and a selection of quotes from the book, Vagabonding by Rolf Potts. 

I’ve formulated question themes for the quotes / highlights from the book.

Is travel only for the wealthy?

Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom. With this kind of mind-set, it’s no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts and the idle rich. 

If you have limited funds, consider the trade-off:

Vagabonding is about using your prosperity and the possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

Earning your Freedom to Travel

Ironically, the best litmus test for measuring your vagabonding gumption is found not in travel but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. Earning your freedom, of course, involves work – and work is intrinsic to vagabonding for psychic reasons such as financial ones.

Work & Vagabonding can co-exist

“I don’t like work,” says Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.” 

Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire; it’s the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together.

Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it’s also the time to tie up your loose ends.

Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from.

Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts – so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life. 

Experiment with different facets of yourself

In living so far away from home, you’ll suddenly find yourself holding a clean slate. There’s no better opportunity to break old habits, face latent fears and test out reprieved facets of your personality. Socially, you’ll find it easier to be gregarious and open-minded. Mentally, you’ll feel engaged and optimistic, newly ready to listen and learn. And, as much as anything, you’ll find yourself abuzz with the peculiar feeling that you can choose to go in any direction (literally and figuratively) at any given moment. 

Be cautious but believe in the good of mankind

“We see as are,” said the Buddha, and rarely is this quite so evident as when we travel. Unlike a simple vacation (where you rarely have time to interact with your environment), vagabonding revolve around the people you meet on the road – and the attitude you take into these encounters can make or break your entire travel experience. “If you view the world as a predominantly hostile place, it will be,” wrote Ed Buryn. By this same logic, of course, a positive worldview can lead to inspiring, human-centred road experience.

Listen more than you speak 

Cling too fiercely to your ideologies and you’ll miss the subtle realities that politics can’t address. You’ll also miss the chance to learn from people who don’t share your worldview. If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband is more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world as much as giving you an opportunity to see hers. 

In this way, open-mindedness is a process of listening and considering – of muting your compulsion to judge what is right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper, and having the tolerance and patience to try to see things for what they are .