Vagabonding by Rolf Potts: A game plan for traveling in Bali

Travel writing is as common these days as blogging, with the 2 often combining. Nowadays people can get travel blogs, visit exotic places and elf publish their work, offering insights and experiences to anyone who is interested. One modern day travel writer who has his head screwed on is Rolf Potts, a young guy from the American Midwest.

I met Rolf 3 years ago in Bangkok and read his book. Re reading it recently inspired me to comment on it. Rolf’s book, Vagabonding is about independent world travel, but the subjects covered could be applied to someone visiting Bali for the first time. Rolf has a squeaky clean persona, butter wouldn’t melt in the crack of his ass. It would melt in mine, plus a lot of other things. Rolf says all the right things, don’t pollute, be respectful, be open minded, learn the language etc. He is the kind of guy your parents would love, but I’d hate to be in his position, I mean who the hell can live up to all that stuff?

Naturally a cynic, I once again started reading Vagabonding wondering how many times he could ‘say the right thing’ and have me keep reading. The fact is that Rolf managed to capture the essence of independent travel and does offer true tips that will bust your trip through to the ‘other side’. Like breaking through the ‘Matrix‘, a traveler / tourist has to break through the layers of crap that have been piled on to make money for people in the tourist industry, to actually find the experience they are looking for. How many times have I met first time visitors to Bali who stay a week to 10 days and tell me ‘I guess I had a good time, but Bali didn’t turn out to be what I expected’. On further inspection, I find out they spent the first week in Kuta / Seminyak, made one trip to Ubud, thought about renting a car, but decided on getting a tan instead. Their visions of rice terraces, ancients villages, Balinese women in sarongs gracefully carrying baskets of fruit, nowhere to be seen.

RTW travelers have a bigger decision to make than people on a 10 day vacation. The way they start out on a year long trip might be the way they end, so figuring out the kind of trip you want, and how to make it happen is important. Just as with a RTW trip, certain things will have a great bearing on your Bali trip. These are: duration, budget, travel partners, weather and transportation. Some of these you can control, others you can’t.

Rolf Potts suggests traveling light and the beauty of this is: money saved on expensive gear, less to carry, less to lose, less to worry about, more mobility and more likelihood of ‘loosening up’ and enjoying the trip. Throughout Vagabonding, there are many short comments by famous travelers from Mark Twain to Robert Louis Stevenson. Many of them have something to offer, but I like the comment made by author, Robert Pirsig ( Zen & the Art of Motorcycle maintenance) where he says “I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous 20th Century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.”

I think that’s a great thing to think about for daily life, not just travel. I am one of the worst offenders in this regard, always searching for new things to write about, grabbing photos and contact info and wanting it to be over, so I can run off and find the next one. In a travel environment this does not lead to satisfaction, it leads to frustration and a sense of not penetrating the ‘Matrix’ or being able to see the forest for the trees.

Rolf understands that at some point you have to let go of the known, take a chance, let go of a time line and let your trip unfold. In one quote I love, he says “Thus, on the road, you should never forget that you are uniquely in control of your own agenda. If the line for Lenin’s tomb outside the Kremlin is too long, you have the right to buy a couple of bottles of beer, plant yourself at the edge of Red Square and happily watch the rest of Moscow swirl around you. If Indonesia’s Kuta Beach feels too much like a strip mall, you have the right to toss your guidebook aside. take a bus inland and get lost in the sleepy mountain villages of Bali.”

He’s totally correct. Stepping off of the main tourist trail is the first step (and the biggest step) to having a unique experience and one that breaks free of the prescribed, money making tourist experience that we unconsciously get fed by travel agents and main stream media.