Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6606 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

The perfect book for travel inspiration and planning
Though there are many books out there to help you plan long-term and "gap-year" travel, Vagabonding stands out in its unique blend of philosophical inspiration and straightforward planning advice. If you've ever harbored a desire to take a few months or years off to travel, Potts' book will stoke your wanderlust and fill you with newfound confidence to hit the road.

The philosophical core of Vagabonding revolves around the idea that time -- not money -- is the truest form of wealth. How you spend your time is more important to true living than accumulating "things" -- and travel is a deep resource for acquiring rich life experience. A flexible and open-minded attitude, Potts insists, is the best travel tool you can acquire -- and this attitude starts before you ever leave on your journey. In other words, be prepared to take your travels slow. Don't over-plan your travels in advance. Learn as you go and be open to new experiences. Don't obsess about how others travel; just find your own way.

Beyond inspirational matters, however, Vagabonding is a great resource for the practical issues of travel planning -- offering a nice mix of print and online resources without being laborious or redundant. The book is not encyclopedic or exhaustive in this regard, but in the age of the Internet and Lonely Planet-style guidebooks, it doesn't need to be. Potts' resources point you in the right direction, advising and informing your online and guidebook research without presuming to do it for you -- a nice, intuitive information-age touch that (unlike other travel-planning guides) keeps the book from bogging down in superfluous and outdated information.

On a final note, I'll confess I probably wouldn't have written this review had it not been for the misleading two-star review below. With all due respect to the reader from Kent, Vagabonding is in absolutely no way philosophically rigid or closed-minded ("Research your own experiences for the truth," says Potts in the introduction, quoting Bruce Lee. "The creating individual is more than any style or system."). Moreover, having read the book several times, I've found that Potts' evenhanded approach "ridicules" nothing (save perhaps the idea of spending too much money on your travels, or of micromanaging your itinerary in advance) and his quotes from other thinkers dovetail seamlessly with his own ideas.

In short: If you choose only one book to plan a year abroad, this is the one to get. (It's worth a re-read when you get home, too.)

How to not feel trapped
I read this book before I set off travelling through Europe with my husband and 7 year old daughter, at the time I was concerned that I had not organised enough of our itinerary and we were walking into a disaster. What I find now, looking back, was that this book gave me the confidence to take the journey as it came rather than intensively plan it. That doing that gave us a lot of the highlights of our travels, although in all honesty we walked into a few problems because of it also. That said - had it just been adults travelling the problems would have been adventures but with a child we had less freedom to be flexible on some things. But it can be done and it doesnt have to cost the earth. This book inspires you to live with a different attitude to life, one that I have willingly integrated into, and that at times has nothing to do with travel. Potts is non-consumerist to the point of being almost anti-consumerist, and that attitude is like a relief in comparison with the market messages that we in the west inevitably live in the middle of. As others have said, this is not just a travel book it is a philosophy of travel book. If you want to travel freely without being tied down in your mind to the obligations of a 'gap year' or your 'OE' then this book encourages that freedom. You should read it!

The Bible
Anyone who has ever thought about travelling, this book will make you go! Anyone who has ever been travelling, this book will make you want to go again and anyone who is travelling whilst reading this, this book will make you that bit more adventurous when ordering food in a cafe where a squat toilet is another eating area! It's definitely a case of, if he can do it then so can I!

Of course if your not a travelling type then the book will mean as much to you as a tin of baked beans to a kipper, but for those who yearn for life as one of the wandering nomads of this world, this book will seem like the travel bible in as much as it suggests a life less ordinary!

This book is about working to live and not living to work!