What I Learned Today

I recently picked up Vagabonding (by Rolf Potts), a quick, enjoyable, and inspiring read. It is about the process of changing your mindset to allow yourself the freedom to be an explorer. Vagabonding involves generally longer trips than one might take for a regular vacation, permitting immersion and exploration and true learning about the world and yourself.

“Your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.”

Many lament not having the opportunity or the money to travel, but this book points out that in fact we all have (or can create) both things, and that often what’s really needed is a mental shift in attitude, to embrace simple living and be flexible and open to unplanned experiences. When you make the decision to embark upon adventure, you “… begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.” Oh, I know that feeling!

Vagabonding recommends doing research and preparation for your trip—but not too much of it. Some joys arise purely from surprise and discovery, and some disappointments come from overly built-up expectations. The book also recommends not being too tied to your guidebook, instead encouraging you to approach locals and experience the place directly. It even advocates refraining from any travel plans beyond getting you to your first destination, reserving later plans for after you’ve arrived, to preserve maximum freedom (and often get better deals locally—again if you’re flexible). Here the difference between vacation and vagabonding manifests; they operate on different timescales. And they have different goals: the book emphasizes freedom as vagabonding’s ultimate aim (and not just during the experience, but in how it frees and changes you as an individual).

“A vacation merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.”

This has been an excellent book to read on the plane right now, as I travel to Canada. This isn’t vagabonding by any means—I had to reply “for business” when the Customs agent asked my purpose for entering the country—and yet the same open, flexible mindset is useful no matter where you go or why. On my first solo vacation trip, to Hawaii, I planned out where I’d stay each night and pre-booked everything. On my second trip, to Japan, I pre-planned the first part and then deliberately did not book anything for the last few days. When that time came, I grabbed my rail pass, stepped on a train, and went wherever I felt like, finding places to stay each night as the need arose. And indeed, it was a fun adventure (even if a little scary at times), and everything worked out despite the language barrier, and now? I think my next trip will involve even more of that delicious feeling of freedom. Perhaps someday I’ll even take a true, longer-term, vagabonding trip.

As the Indigo Girls say:

“Get out the map!
Get out the map and lay your finger anywhere down —
Let’s leave the figuring for those we pass on the way out town.”

Traveling holds such a tingling allure, rising up out of the promise of new views, new experiences, and exploring into your personal unknown. I’ve previously written about the concept of vagabonding, an extreme form of travel that involves really living in some new world, not just visiting it, and often for extended periods of time. An isolated page in Vagabonding (by Ralph Potts), titled “The Pioneering Women of Vagabonding,” listed 14 women vagabonders, only one of whom I recognized. Neither did this book provide any information about them—which I took as an opportunity to do a little fun research on who these women were. Here are summaries of and excerpts from the first four on the list:

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an accomplished author, philosopher, and feminist. In 1796, she published Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, based on a trip she undertook with her infant daughter, Fanny, to address business negotiations for Fanny’s father, Gilbert Imlay. Truly a courageous vagabonding experience, if ever there were one! An excerpt from one of her letters:
  

  “The cow’s bell has ceased to tinkle the herd to rest; they have all paced across the heath. Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments. Worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of, and reveries, mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love or the recollection of lost enjoyment, carry the hapless wight into futurity, who in bustling life has vainly strove to throw off the grief which lies heavy at the heart. Good night!”

  She later married William Godwin, who among other things was drawn to her because of this same book. They also had a child together: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), who wrote Frankenstein.

• Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) is already a great favorite of mine; I’ve very much enjoyed her stories of traveling through Japan (Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1880) and Colorado (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1879). Born in England, she wrote about visits to America, Hawaii, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Sinai, Persia, Kurdistan, Tibet, Korea, and Morocco. (Really, is there anything beyond her?) She is eloquent, fearless, curious, polite, adventuresome, and successful, and her descriptions of the scenery in which she finds herself are unfailingly, soaringly poetic. You can listen to two of her books read aloud: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (delightful!) and The Englishwoman in America (I haven’t read this one yet). She also offers a description of evening:
  

  “The sinking sun is out of sight behind the western Sierras, and all the pine-hung promontories on this side of the water are rich indigo, just reddened with lake, deepening here and there into Tyrian purple. The peaks above, which still catch the sun, are bright rose-red, and all the mountains on the other side are pink; and pink, too, are the far-off summits on which the snow-drifts rest. Indigo, red, and orange tints stain the still water, which lies solemn and dark against the shore, under the shadow of stately pines. An hour later, and a moon nearly full—not a pale, flat disc, but a radiant sphere—has wheeled up into the flushed sky. The sunset has passed through every stage of beauty, through every glory of color, through riot and triumph, through pathos and tenderness, into a long, dreamy, painless rest, succeeded by the profound solemnity of the moonlight, and a stillness broken only by the night cries of beasts in the aromatic forests.”

• Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) was born in France, but by age 18 had embarked on solo adventures in England, Switzerland, and Spain. She later traveled to India, Tunisia, China, Japan, and others, but seems to have been most drawn to Tibet (and Buddhism). She first crossed into Tibet in 1916, was discovered and sent away, and then re-infiltrated the country in 1924, disguised, for two months.
• Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) found the opportunity to vagabond in Africa only after both her parents died, freeing her from caring for her invalid mother in England. She collected fish, studied cannibals, and climbed Mt. Cameroon (an active volcano more than 13,000 feet tall). Her Travels in West Africa is available for reading online. She begins with:
  

  “I succumbed to the charm of the [Gold] Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me worth doing down there. So I warned the Coast I was coming back again and the Coast did not believe me; and on my return to it a second time displayed a genuine surprise, and formed an even higher opinion of my folly than it had formed on our first acquaintance, which is saying a good deal.”

Reading their writings, it’s hard not to feel the pull to follow in these women’s footsteps, and enter one’s own foreign lands, wherever they may be.