Vagabonding - Rolf Potts

For Potts vagabonding is …

about time - our only real commodity - and how we choose to use it

An example is the Thoreau quote on how people are

spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it

and the statement Someday I will

[…] Someday […] is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Ok. How to finance the trip?

Again Thoreau’s Walden gives us the answer.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Simplicity and thrift.

In the beginning we get the anecdote of people that want to get out of the working racket to finally be able to ride a motorcycle across China. Potts responds with how anyone could work for a few months as a toilet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China.

The book offers a wide array of experiences, things to do and things to avoid. As for marijuana.

[…] it’s the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones.

personal sensation of unmediated reality - an experience far more affecting than any intoxicant can promise

Leaving you with

the most singular experiences of travel come in not finding what you’d hoped to discover

Truly a book through which notes one should go before the start of an adventure.