Talking Travel with Rolf Potts, author of the new book “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There”

by Aaron Hotfelder on

Rolf Potts has inspired more people to travel than any writer working today. His first book Vagabonding motivated my first long-term trip, and I’ve run into countless travelers who have said the same thing.

Rolf’s newest book is a collection of stories called Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer. He recently took the time to answer a few questions about his newest book, his favorite places in the world, and his upcoming show on the Travel Channel.

1. Your new collection of stories and essays has a rather puzzling title: Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. Where does it come from?

I’ll give it to you straight from the introduction chapter:

[Excerpt]

The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in the footsteps of Marco Polo.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I found it necessary to say this. I guess I was just following the presumed formula of what travel writers were supposed to do.

Indeed, at the very moment I was setting out from Asia, various travel scribes were researching or publishing books that diligently traced the international footsteps of Captain Cook, Che Guevara, Moses, Sir Richard Burton, William of Rubruck, John Steinbeck, Lewis and Clark, Robinson Crusoe, Ibn Battuta, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville. Journeying in the footsteps of others had, it seemed, become the travel-literature equivalent of cover music – as common (and marketable) as Whitney Houston crooning Dolly Parton tunes.

As it turned out, my own “footsteps” ruse lasted less than one month before I found my way into the visiting room of a women’s penitentiary just outside of Bangkok. As unusual as it might sound, visiting Western prisoners was all the rage among backpackers when I’d arrived in Thailand. In cafes and guesthouse bulletin boards along Khao San Road, photocopied notices urged travelers to take a day off and call on prisoners at the various penitentiaries around Bangkok. Figuring this might be an interesting deviation from the standard tourist-circuit activities, I went to the American embassy and received a letter of introduction to an unlucky drug trafficker named Carla.

Brief acts of presumed kindness carry a whiff of narcissism: As I took a series of buses through the snarl of Bangkok traffic to the edge of the city, I imagined Carla to be a weary, desperate woman who would thank mefor the small gift of magazines and the encouragement to keep persevering behind bars. In reality, Carla was a tough, pretty Puerto Rican woman who arrived in the visitor’s room fifteen minutes late smelling like shampoo, and regarded me with ambivalent cordiality. After speaking for a while about her own situation (her fateful decision to make a quick buckdelivering Thai heroin to New Jersey for an acquaintance; her plans upon her release in nine more months), she began to steer the conversation toward me.

“Why did you come to Thailand?” she asked.

“My primary goal is to follow the route of Marco Polo through the Orient.”

“Oh yeah?” Carla said. “Where are you going after Bangkok?”

“North,” I said. “Probably to Chiang Mai for a while.”

“Chiang Mai?” Carla raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “Marco Polo didn’t go there.”

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this simple observation was to change the way I traveled, far beyond Asia.

2. Are you looking forward to the upcoming book tour? Do you have dates and locales picked out yet?

I’m definitely looking forward to the book tour, as I always enjoy meeting readers and talking to audiences. I’m in the middle of my Kansas leg at the moment, and when that’s finished I’ll continue on to Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, New York, Camden, Portland, Bellingham, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This will take me right up to Thanksgiving.

You can check out the details on the events page at my website.

3. Asking a seasoned traveler which are his favorite places in the world is a bit like asking a mother which is her favorite child. But can you take a shot at sharing some of your favorite countries or cities?

You’re right — it’s always a tough assessment. Since the early days of my international vagabonding I’ve been a big fan of Laos, Burma and Mongolia — though I haven’t been back to any of those countries since 2003. I go to Paris every summer to teach a creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy, and I’ve really come to love that beautiful city, despite my weak French language skills. Last year I went to Havana and really came to love Cuba. And there are some other places I want to go back and get to know better — Argentina, Ethiopia, India, Australia. The list could go on.

Of course the place I’m really getting to know better these days is Kansas, where I’ve had a little farmhouse on 30 acres since 2005. I’m actually not there very many days a year, but when I am home I learn a lot about slowing down and getting to know one place.

4. Several of the stories in your new book originally appeared on the internet. What do you see as the benefits and drawbacks of writing for an internet audience?

A big benefit in my experience has been narrative flexibility. At places like Salon and World Hum and Slate I’m really able to take stories in my own personal direction, without the space or photo considerations that might come with writing for a glossy travel magazine. These stories also have more reach, since they’re available worldwide and can be accessed as easily now as the day they came out.

As for drawbacks — well, I’ve been writing for online venues for so long that I really can’t think of any, off the top of my head. I’m used to the format, and it works for me

5. Rumor has it you’re working on a new show for the Travel Channel. Can you give us any details about it?

You bet. The working title of the show is “American Pilgrim,” and it takes a look at the travel conditions of the Mayflower Pilgrims. I’m the host, and basically I travel around the United States meeting with the descendants of those first Pilgrims and talking about the challenges they faced. If all goes according to plan, the one-hour show should debut on the Travel Channel on Thanksgiving Day around prime time. I fly to England at the end of this month for a couple days to record voiceover narration.

Of course, people who are familiar with my writing might wonder why I’m doing a show about American cultural history when I’ve established myself as an independent and international travel guy. I wondered the same thing at first, but I guess they wanted a younger host to inject some energy into what might be seen as middle-aged subject matter. It was a good way to get some experience in front of the camera, and I actually had a really great time shooting it. I can’t imagine I’ll turn my career over to television anytime soon — I will always be a writer first and foremost — but I look forward to doing occasional TV documentary work in the future.

Talking travel with Paul Theroux (Part 2)

by Jeffrey White on

In Part 1 of Gadling’s conversation with novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, the author of the recent Ghost Train to the Eastern Star talked about growing older and the importance of the return journey.

In Part 2, America’s most famous travel writer takes on India, China, Russia and Georgia, considers his past work and gives his own assessment on the impact of his seminal travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar.
Your earlier travel books, like Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonia Express, were continuous trips, taken from point A to point B, and I think the narratives reflect that. But your Pillars of Hercules trip was taken in two parts. Dark Star Safari had some elements of a second trip to Africa in there. Ghost Train is not a continuous trip. Does that change the way you travel, not going continuously? Does it make it hard seeing a trip as a whole journey?

I think of it as a whole journey. But try to stay away from home for more than three months. It’s really hard. First, bills start piling up. Things go wrong. You’re needed. You can’t be out of touch for more than three months. That’s about the limit. After three months you have a lot of people screaming.

Earlier in my life I did. I’ve been away for as much as four or five months at a time. To be alone, to be away from a family or away from the responsibilities of life, the bills and whatever — it was very difficult.

With Ghost Train, I broke it up. When I got to Vietnam, I went to China and from China to Tokyo. Tokyo is quite near Honolulu, believe it or not. So I flew home to Honolulu. I actually had a colonoscopy appointment and did all those things. A little time past and I returned to Japan and resumed the trip. That actually seemed to work out quite well. I hadn’t gone very far, I was still sort of on my trip [in Hawaii], and then I went and finished the trip. I could have done it the way I did before, but I actually spent more time on this trip. With the Railway Bazaar I was gone about 3 1/2 months. This was more like six months of travel.

India was major section in The Great Railway Bazaar, and it’s a major section in Ghost Train. You were confronted with ostensibly a much different India this time around, but I got the sense that you feel the truth of India has remained relatively unchanged.

I think so. My sense is that in India, the rituals, the pieties, the religion, the beliefs of the people, which are deeply held in most cases, are the things that make India itself, and at the same time prevents it from becoming something else.

In China, it’s different. I can only talk about India by comparing it to China because China has been transformed. China has been able to modernize but at the expense of losing its soul and many of its traditions. But there is something in Indian life that is perpetually backward looking, and as modern as a place that they are trying to make India, it has this link with the past. It’s as though China has severed its link to the past.

Take foot binding. If foot binding had been an Indian tradition instead of Chinese, they’d still be binding feet in India. But binding has been abandoned in China. A lot of traditional things that are good, bad and indifferent are still practiced in India, some more widely than others. But they’ve abandoned those things in China. I think this is why India is such a fascinating place to visit. When you are looking at India, a lot of it is still the old India. A lot of old China is disappearing.

A lot of people who go to India miss that, it seems. They talk about India in terms of either quick healing devotion or IT. You juxtaposed that during your visit to Bangalore: one minute you’re in an ashram and another you’re in a massive call center. That seems to be the two kind of ways people see India.
That’s true. But it depends on who you’re talking to. If you were talking to an Indian peasant he wouldn’t be that upbeat about the “Indian Miracle.” But there are plenty of millionaires and billionaires in India who would say you can outsource here and they will just talk about the miracle, because they represent the miracle side of it.

I think India is a very multilayered society. As I think I mention in the book, an Indian can talk about hedge funds and the stock market and still consult soothsayers about things like the prospects for his son or daughter in marriage! In a lot of cases, you can’t get married in India if certain stars are not aligned. You wonder how that squares with hedge funds. It’s bizarre to an outsider like myself. It’s comic and weird and worth writing about.

Bangalore, of course, is the capital of Thomas Friedman’s flat earth theory.

Well, he maintains that the world is flat and I maintain that the world is round. Of course maybe you can fly from New York to Bangalore — though I don’t think you can — so you can say, yeah we can go and outsource something. But not many miles from Bangalore you are in traditional India, which has no contact to Bangalore. There are villages without electricity or villages that have serious food and water shortages.

Friedman is all about globalization. You’ve been traveling for more than 45 years. What’s your take on globalization?

Once upon a time someone said it was the end of history — was that Francis Fukuyama? Something like the Soviet Union has ended so now we live on one big happy planet. It’s obvious that that’s not the case. Georgia has proved that Russia is an empire, or at least with imperial ambitions. Putin is like a czar! Nothing really has changed.

Friedman’s point is that the world has changed, the world has been transformed. I don’t buy it. If you’ve seen people melt down, and I have in a lot of places — take Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was once a highly educated, viable place with great infrastructure: roads, schools, hospitals, everything. They made things for themselves. Now it’s really one of the poorest countries on Earth. Everything has gone wrong there.

There are too many people losing out. There are too many people who are not flat Earthers. They live in valleys. They live on mountainsides. They live in remote places. They are not a part of this. I agree that there are places that are connected to New York and London. Yes, there are avenues of development. But that doesn’t mean everybody is profiting. If that was the case there would be no point in traveling. You’d just say, “what’s the point?” It’s easy to get from here to there.

During your trip for Riding the Iron Rooster, you saw a lot of things that foreshadowed events to come in China. In Ghost Train you spend time in Georgia, and refer to its breakaway provinces. Did you see or hear anything that suggested the events of last month?

I didn’t see any Russian incursions or anything, but you know the thing is that Russia is constantly on the mind of Georgians. I was there two years ago and the Russians weren’t doing anything except leaning on the Georgians a little bit. They had cut off power at one point. Whenever you talked to a Georgian, they talked about Russia in terms of their own independence, or their own smallness. You know, it’s like how the average American never thinks about Canada. But if you go to Canada, Canadians talk about the U.S. all the time, because we’re overshadowing them. And Georgia feels very overshadowed by Russia. I mentioned Abkahzia. I went through Gori. I
didn’t mention South Ossetia, but people talked about it.

My point is that if you go to a place and have a completely open mind, which I do, and you listen to people and you write down what they say, you don’t always have to understand what they’re saying, but if you accurately report their fears, their anxieties and hopes and so forth, later on when something bad happens you can say, Oh yeah, that’s related to something I wrote down.

When I was in China, I was writing a lot about oppression. Government oppression, and even about demonstrations, in the winter of ’86 and ’87. When my book came out it got very bad review. It was the usual things that people say about me, that I’m sour, I’m grumpy. But I was writing about the way the government was behaving, and that was before Tiananmen Square. I felt vindicated by that.

I want to get you on a point you make early in Ghost Train. You take travel writers to task for their habit of making quick generalizations. But travelers are moving. You don’t stay in places long — how do you try to avoid being flip and breezy about a place?

It’s very hard. But my mission is to be truthful about my experience. I’m not writing a geography book. I’m writing about my trip. It can’t be taken as anything but a journey I’ve taken, and a report on my experiences. Part of that is making generalizations, inevitably, the way you might on a weekend in Washington, D.C. That’s kind of a normal thing for a traveler to do. I try to avoid snap judgments, but if people keep repeating things to me, then it seems fair to make a generalization.

A lot of people credit The Great Railway Bazaar with reinventing the travel writing genre. Do you think it did?

I don’t really know. I only know that it was a phase in what I was doing. It was very important to me to write that book. The trip was a real test of mental strength, and then the book too, for reasons I’ve said, the crisis in my marriage. It was an important thing for me. But I moved on from it, and I think I wrote better travel books after it.

I think it’s nice that people allude to it. I’m glad that it’s had the influence that it’s had. But I’ve moved on. I don’t reread my earlier work. I can say that I didn’t even reread the Railway Bazaar for this book. I started to reread it but then I thought that I spent so much time working on that book that I know it, I know every word of that book. So I don’t go back, even to my novels. I haven’t reread Blinding Light, or The Mosquito Coast. I don’t know whether other writers do. I don’t. It just gets you nowhere. I want to do something new.

I’ve read that you’re planning on traveling in the Northern Hemisphere for your next book.

For my next travel book I’m going to go to places I’ve never been before. So it’s going to be the opposite of Ghost Train. But I’m working on a novel at the moment, set in India. So my next published book will be this one. It’s about a crime in Calcutta.

What about a serious journey through America? It’s been a long time since William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways.

You know, he had a very good idea. You need a mode of travel. You need a way of meeting people, and he had that. It’s very difficult. He figured it out. Travels with Charlie kind of figured it out. A writer I admire a lot is Barbara Ehrenreich. Nickle and Dimed. It’s travel, the economy. I liked that. I liked the idea of going and getting a job in a fast food place, and then moving to another place and working at another fast food place. I would have liked to write that book. But I’m too old for that.

Read Part 1 of Gadling’s conversation with Paul Theroux.

Talking travel with Paul Theroux

by Jeffrey White on

In 1973, Paul Theroux took a trip that changed both his life and the course of modern travel writing. The Great Railway Bazaar, an account of nearly four months of train travel from London to Japan and back, has been essential reading ever since. Now comes Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux’s highly anticipated follow-up, in which he retraces the route he took 35 years ago. From Eastern Europe and Turkey through Central Asia, India, Japan and back via the Trans-Siberian, Theroux weighs what has changed in the years he’s been away, and concludes that the most profound transformation has been in himself.

Ghost Train is Theroux’s 13th travel book, to go with his 27 works of fiction.

In the first of a two-part conversation with Gadling, Theroux talks about getting older and the importance of the return journey.

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, the subject of aging is a theme, this idea that older travelers are almost ghost like, and you often note the time that’s passed since you took the trip described in The Great Railway Bazaar. Aging also figures in some of your recent books — I’m thinking about Stranger at Palazzo d’Oro, Dark Star Safari. Is this your major subject now — getting older?

I only have myself to deal with, you know. Everything is going through the filter of my experience. Aging is an interesting subject. Not age as senility or incompetence or anything like that, but really age as a point of view, as a vantage point, because after a certain period of time you see the repetition of the world, you hear the same things over and over again and you realize, “I’ve heard that before.” The young really don’t have a sense of repetition. People who are young think that the world is going upward, that everything is going straight north, getting better and better. But I think with age there is a sense that the world works in cycles.

In Ghost Train, the idea of aging is important, because I’m returning to an earlier scene in my life and sizing it up. Also, in Dark Star Safari I went back and revisited a place that I had been. I was in my early 20s when I first lived in Central Africa and later, you know, in my late 50s I went back.

You’re very interested in the idea of the return journey in Ghost Train, and the fact that not many travelers make it. Not many travelers go back to a place they’ve been. Travel writers — or writers who travel — seldom do. Why do you think that is?

The main thing, the simplest thing, is that travel is a lot of trouble. Sometimes I get a bad review and I think: This person has never really been anywhere. Anyone who travels realizes that it takes a lot of time, a lot of physical effort, a very big commitment, a lot of money. Maybe not a lot of money, but money, because it’s a year off, it’s a year you’re not doing anything else. A year or more. It could be two years. Two years without any income, your life is in suspension. The commitment to a long trip is a huge one, and I think that’s one of the reasons.

And travelers move on.

Yes. Most people move on. They want to do other things. They feel they have have written a book on it and have closed the book. They don’t want to revisit a place because it opens up a whole new area of experience.

Another reason is this question of age. You know most writers when they get into their mid to late 60s begin to think of writing their memoirs. They are home, they’re playing golf, they are kind of winding up their affairs. If you take practically any writer my age…let’s say Mark Twain. When he was my age he was writing his autobiography. Evelyn Waugh was writing his autobiography, A Little Learning. Henry James was, Notes of a Son and Brother. Rudyard Kipling wrote Something of Myself.

All these people I have mentioned were engaged in a memoir, an autobiography or a backward glance, with no thought of revisiting an earlier scene. Kipling didn’t want to go back to India. Waugh didn’t want to go back to any of the places he went, Africa or elsewhere. Graham Greene still did some traveling, but he wrote two memoirs when he was in his late 60s. I’m 67. Maybe that’s what I should be doing, but I’m not doing it.

It seems that you’ve had the idea of the return journey even before your Africa trip in Dark Star Safari. You told V.S. Naipaul once that the most interesting thing a traveler can do is go back to a place and see it again.

That’s true. I have had this in my mind. I suppose the first country I went back to after a long period of time was China. I had made visits back to Africa and saw that it wasn’t doing that well. I went to China in 1980 and then back again in 1986 and 1987 and I saw that it was changing. I remember asking a diplomat in Shanghai, “What’s going to happen next in China?” He said he didn’t know.

Is that because he was there, with no vantage point?

This was in 1987 when we were talking. And there were a lot of cranes and buildings being built in Shanghai, but it was still very much old Shanghai, even though the economy was changing, and he said, “We had no idea that this was going to happen after the Cultural Revolution.” He didn’t know Shanghai was going to become much busier and have a lot of manufacturing and America would start outsourcing things there and things were loosening up. In other words, he said, “I have no idea what’s going to happen next because I wasn’t expecting this.” You know, Shanghai is a boom town now. It doesn’t even resemble, 20 years later, in the slightest the Shanghai of that earlier period, so I saw that and I guess I was thinking about China when I was talking to Naipaul at the time.

Or I was thinking of the kind of thing everybody thinks about, which is going back home. You go back to the place where you were born, back to a school, back to a house you used to live in, and it’s always changed. For a writer that’s a gift. It’s something else to write about. The ways that people change, the ways that people age, are always full of fascination. I think that’s what I was driving at then.

But you can’t make a career out of it.

Yes, I imagine that you can’t constantly go back on your earlier work.

No, because that’s memory lane. But still, I was glad I took this trip, because I learned a lot. You learn a lot about the world by going back, which is another way of saying that by growing older you learn a lot. There are a lot of lessons. You don’t even know them when you are young. You think the world is constituted different, designed for steady improvement, and that’s not the case.

Tomorrow: Theroux takes on India, China and Russia, considers the impact of The Great Railway Bazaar and tells us where he’s traveling to next. Click here to read part 2.

Talking travel with author of “The Snake Charmer”

by Jerry Guo on

I’m here with Jamie James, a former critic at The New Yorker turned author. His latest book, “The Snake Charmer”, centers around a renegade herpetologist who ultimately dies in the jungles of Burma after getting bitten by a krait, one of the world’s deadliest snakes. Jamie traveled to Burma to research the book.

He also writes frequently about travel and culture for The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. He currently lives in Bali.

The NYT review of Snake Charmer declared the book’s protagonist, herpetologist Joe Slowinski, a “Class A jerk.” From all the research you’ve accumulated, what’s your take on the guy?

The Times review presented a very shallow analysis, concentrating on one sliver of a complex character — 5% of the book yanked out of context. It’s true that Joe was ruthless in his pursuit of knowledge, and rubbed some people the wrong way; but few scientists bother with “please” and “thank you.”

Joe was also widely loved and respected by his colleagues. One fascinating reflection of Joe’s personality, which I never could find a place for in the book, is that no fewer than SEVEN people told me that he was their best friend. That seems truly remarkable to me — how many people have that kind of impact on the people around them? And from his colleagues he commanded widespread respect for his brilliant mind and original thinking, more important qualities for a scientist than simple niceness. Joe Slowinski truly did not care what people thought of him, which is a key aspect of what makes him so fascinating.
You traveled to Burma in the process of writing the book. What was it like to travel in one of the world’s most closeted countries?

In some ways, travel in repressive totalitarian regimes is easier — as long as you’re willing to pay. That’s the upside of corruption: as long as you have American dollars and don’t show any interest in the Army, they’ll usually do whatever you ask.

Why did you decide to pursue this project (especially when his adventures have been covered before, in Outside Magazine, for example)?

Mark Moffett’s article in Outside was an excellent account of his personal recollections as a member of Joe’s final expedition, and a good starting place. However, no one had ever attempted to do a detailed, objective reconstruction of Joe’s final trek, and it proved to be the most interesting research I’ve ever undertaken. The first time I heard of Joe Slowinski was his obituary in the newspaper, which a friend clipped for me. It came out more than a month after he died — he received his fatal bite on Sept. 11, 2001, and the attack on America just ate up the news.

As soon as I read it, I thought, this would be a fantastic book — what a story! The sheer drama of it seemed so compelling. I had an instinct that a life that ended that way must have been interesting from childhood on — and that proved to be true. Joe Slowinski’s whole career was fascinating; his last expedition into remote northern Burma was the tragic finale of the drama.

Many readers will be jealous to hear that you live full-time in Bali. Sounds like the dream home. Any downsides or is it umbrella drinks on the beach all day long?

Living in Paradise has the advantages you suggest — one of the most gorgeous beaches in the world is a five-minute bike ride from my house, and the Balinese are among the most interesting and lovable people I’ve come across. It’s probably the best place in the world to have car trouble, people are so kind and eager to help.

The main disadvantage for me has been the lack of outside intellectual stimulus, but Bali is getting more connected all the time. When I came here 9 years ago, there were no decent bookstores, the world’s slowest dial-up internet service, a bottle of scotch cost $50, and so on — now we have gourmet food shops, book shops, reasonable DSL internet, and so on — but residents complain that every step “forward” makes the place a bit less special. The price of globalization.

Besides your work as a nonfiction author, you’re a prolific travel writer. How do you pick your stories?

I must answer you as a journalist. Every story I do is based more or less equally on two factors: I try to find places that I really want to go and a good market that might be likely to take an interest in it. They are two totally different worlds, the places I want to go and the places editors need to cover, and they’re both always shifting. I did a story about Shanghai for Condé Nast Traveler in 2001, concentrating on the futuristic architecture; and since then, especially during the build-up to the Olympics, there have been a zillion stories about China, Land of Tomorrow. Now I’m totally China’d out, but travel editors can’t seem to get enough. That’s not a knock to China; it’s just that my interest is much more in seeing places unlike any I’ve seen before.

Your favorite trip in Asia?

A hard question. Maybe it was my first trip to Laos, in 1994, when there was no tourism. Luang Prabang was a quiet little village with two crummy hotels, 500 ancient Buddhist temples, and thousands of monks, gentle young rice farmers coming to this holy city to meditate and beg alms. It was incredibly beautiful and moving. Now it’s another pretty place to get a massage and a manicure, a pizza and a beer. That kind of other-world experience is harder and harder to find — you have to go to the places you’ve never heard of. By the time a place has made it into the magazines, it’s already been mainstreamed.

You’ve been to some pretty grungy locales. What’s one place, if any, that you refuse to visit? (Sudan, North Korea, etc?)

I would love to go to North Korea — it’s practically at the top of my list. The Sudan…no thank you. The difference? As a foreign visitor, I know I would be secure in North Korea; but in Sudan they’re shooting real bullets and have hideous incurable diseases. When I was traveling in Cambodia in the days when the Khmer Rouge were still active, I always followed what I called the Driver Rule: if the driver was willing to go someplace in his own car, the probability was that we would get home safe — the driver always knows more than you do. If the driver refuses to go, then you don’t want to go there either.

What’s your travel style? Do you try to map out most of the details beforehand? Or just play it by ear? Any tools of the trade you can divulge?

I used to play it by ear, traveling without a map or a plan — until the night I had to sleep (or tried to) in my tiny toy Fiat, after I arrived in Florence and found out that there was a dentists’ convention going on, and the nearest hotel room was 50 miles away. I do like to plan at least two or three days ahead. The tools of the trade vary from place to place. One of the most essential (and most difficult) tools to pick up is learning what people mean when they give you a polite refusal. In Asia, “It’s impossible” may mean it’s really impossible…or it might mean “You’re not paying me enough.” Here in Indonesia, it took me years to realize that “thank you” means “no.”

Talking travel with author of Rough Guide’s Ultimate Adventures

by Jerry Guo on

Gregory Witt is author of Ultimate Adventures: A Rough Guide to Adventure Travel, which is out in bookstores today. This is a guy who has done pretty much everything when it comes to extreme adventures, so I’m definitely picking up my copy. He happens to be a skilled mountaineer guide, having led summit trips to Mt. Rainier, Matterhorn, and Peru’s Pisco. He’s also summited Colorado’s three highest peaks back-to-back in three days.

You’ve said that the “unattainable” destinations were weeded out. I love a challenge. What were some of the top ones?

I intentionally excluded some adventures like climbing Mt. Everest. It’s an exceptional challenge and adventure, to be sure. Instead, I explore uncommon adventures for the common man. These are adventures that most anyone, with proper training, preparation, and a healthy dose of tenacity can achieve. Some of the more physically and emotionally demanding adventures include climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan, hiking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail, or climbing Mt. McKinley.

You’re an experienced adventure guide. How does someone get that sort of job? What kind of training did you have to do?

Fortunately, I’ve never thought of it as a “job.” It’s just doing what I love to do-and isn’t it cool that someone actually pays me to do it! It requires a varied skill set, some of which can be learned, like wilderness emergency medicine, field geology, or wildlife identification. Other skills, like wilderness navigation, leadership, and managing the personal and group dynamics of clients in stressful or challenging situations is best learned on the spot and after years of experience in similar circumstances.
You’ve said that the “unattainable” destinations were weeded out. I love a challenge. What were some of the top ones?

I intentionally excluded some adventures like climbing Mt. Everest. It’s an exceptional challenge and adventure, to be sure. Instead, I explore uncommon adventures for the common man. These are adventures that most anyone, with proper training, preparation, and a healthy dose of tenacity can achieve. Some of the more physically and emotionally demanding adventures include climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan, hiking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail, or climbing Mt. McKinley.

You’re an experienced adventure guide. How does someone get that sort of job? What kind of training did you have to do?

Fortunately, I’ve never thought of it as a “job.” It’s just doing what I love to do-and isn’t it cool that someone actually pays me to do it! It requires a varied skill set, some of which can be learned, like wilderness emergency medicine, field geology, or wildlife identification. Other skills, like wilderness navigation, leadership, and managing the personal and group dynamics of clients in stressful or challenging situations is best learned on the spot and after years of experience in similar circumstances.

What percent of the trips in this book do you have under your belt? How’d you get the scoop on the places you’ve never visited yourself?

There’s no one on the planet who has done all of these adventures. I’ve done the great majority of them. But if there is any “hero” in Ultimate Adventures, it’s the guides, outfitters, instructors, and on-site tour operators who know these destinations and adventures inside and out. In every chapter I made thorough use of these local experts. For example, in my chapter on climbing Mount Rainier, one of my resources was George Dunn, a guide who has summited the peak a record 489 times. And even though I’ve climbed Rainer, no one in the world knows that mountain better than George. The contributions of people like him-over 300 of them-were invaluable. The result is an authoritative, hands-on guidebook, packed with insider information. But Ultimate Adventures isn’t about armchair exploration. It demands action-it’s a lifelist for doers.

How did you select what destinations and adventures made it into this book?

In my travels, the goal has always been to discover the greatest outdoor adventures the world has to offer. Adventure should put you face to face with the power of nature. It’s human flesh in harmony with earth, wind, and water. Adventure may cause you to squirm, sweat, shake, or do all three simultaneously. And at some point along the way you may ask yourself: “What on earth was I thinking?” Ultimate Adventures introduces readers to 170 life-shaping and unforgettable experiences.

Favorite five trips from the book?

I have a personal love affair with mountains and rivers. I also love wildlife, scenery, and great photo ops. So here goes:

1. Tracking mountain gorillas in Rwanda
2. Running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in a dory
3. Hiking in the Swiss Alps (and climbing the Matterhorn or Mt. Blanc as part of the trip)
4. Hiking New Zealand’s Milford Track
5. Rafting the Pacuare in Costa Rica (great river and wildlife viewing in one day)

Someone who loves the ocean might choose diving the Great Barrier Reef or surfing Oahu’s North Shore. If you’re looking for family adventures it may be wildlife viewing in Galapagos or rock climbing in Joshua Tree. Everyone will find something to tantalize their adventurous spirit. And don’t ask me this same question next week-you may get a totally different answer. My top picks depend on my mood at the time. Right now, after the blistering heat of summer, any cool climate adventure sounds appealing.

I’m about to climb Mt. Fuji in a couple weeks. What insider’s tips do you have for me?

Climbing Fuji-san makes you part of a thousand-year-old procession of humanity, which during climbing season can consist of up to 3000 people a day. The day-hike up this national icon is more a cultural experience than an mountaineering challenge, but it’s well worth the time. If you want to avoid the peak season crowds, but still climb in fair weather, try the first two weeks of July, before school vacations begin. One interesting fact: The summit of Mt. Fuji-in fact, all of the land above the 8th station (3000m)-is a part of a Shinto shrine, and as such, is the world’s most prominent privately owned natural feature.

What about New Zealand. It’s one of the greatest playgrounds for the outdoorsman. What’s the perfect itinerary for a 2-week trip?

No doubt, New Zealand is spectacular. For hikers, the Milford Track lays claim to being “the finest walk in the world,” and it may also be the wettest walk in the world, so bring raingear for this 4-day hike. And don’t overlook the Routeburn Track, a similarly spectacular 3-day tramp that straddles two national parks on the South Island. If mountaineering is in your blood, a guided climb of Aoroki/Mount Cook can take you to the summit of a legendary peak, where Edmund Hillary got his start. For world-class whitewater, put on your helmet and hit the Karamea River. Anytime a whitewater rafting trip requires a helicopter ride up a granite gorge to access the put in, you know you’re in for a great descent on a wild river, and these Class V rapids won’t disappoint.