Gadling Take FIVE: Week of October 4 – October 11

by Jamie Rhein on

Browsing through Gadling’s offerings this week are posts about places from the people who have had first hand experience.

Jerry’s trip to Pyongyang brought him an unexpected “history lesson on [his] own [Chinese] cultural heritage.” His posts are an opportunity to ride along and see North Korea through his eyes. You’ll also glean the impressions of his traveling companions.

For another trip into the unknown regions of New York City, Jeremy, who lives there, takes us on a journey through the naval history of Brooklyn. I had no idea there were these abandoned mansions until Jeremy wrote about them.

A drive along the Oregon coast is a trip Meg recommends. She waxes poetic about the view from McKenzie Pass located in the Willamette National Forest. As she says about the pass, “It’s one of the most stunning places in the world.”

Although Kent hasn’t had the chance to explore Haiti because his trips there are only airport stops, his photos point out the latest devastation from recent flooding. As he puts it, the people in Haiti “can’t seem to get a break.”

When it comes to a shopping mall, if you’re a travel writer doing book signings, our guest blogger Rolf Potts knows that it can be one heck of a lonely place to be.

You, Rolf Potts, are a Contemptible Jackass, Part I: Stoner movie redemption

by Rolf Potts on

Around the time Marco Polo Didn’t Go There was set to debut in bookstores, I began to wonder what kind of negative comments it might attract. I wondered this not because Marco Polo is a bad book (to the contrary, I’m as proud of it as anything I’ve written), but because some degree of knee-jerk negativity is inevitable in the instant-reaction atmosphere of the Internet Age.

I learned this when I debuted Vagabonding five years ago. For the most part, of course, reader reaction to my first book has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. But every once in a while I’ll get an email or a blog comment that basically claims I’m a contemptible jackass because of some theme or observation in the book. One rather perplexing criticism that recurs from time to time is that Vagabonding is “preachy.”

At first this observation baffled me, since I urge flexible open-mindedness from the opening Preface chapter (“Add what is specifically your own…The creating individual is more than any style or system”), and the only things I preach against are postponing your travels, micromanaging your itinerary, or traveling too fast to truly experience your cultural surroundings.

After a bit of follow-up, I’ve discovered that most of these critics were upset by my “anti-marijuana” stance. The thing is, I never come out and tell people to not smoke it on the road; all I say is to (a) not get caught traveling with it in places where it could land you in jail, and (b) don’t get into the habit of using it all the time, because it will separate you from the more mind-blowing experience of unfiltered reality. That’s as anti-drug as I get in Vagabonding — and in fact (while I’ve never much been into smoking it myself) I’m all for marijuana legalization in the United States.
Moreover, I’m of the belief that stoner movies are one of America’s greatest contributions to world culture. In fact, from my personal DVD collection, here are four stoner movies that I make an effort to watch at least once a year:

4. Dude, Where’s My Car? Admittedly, one reason I love this movie so much is that I first saw it on the big screen in Bombay’s Colaba neighborhood, and it proved to be the pop-cultural equivalent of time-travel amid a very intense sojourn in India. But even better, this is a stoner movie that (unlike, say, Smiley Face) doesn’t try too hard to be a stoner movie: It’s just a delightfully pointless and juvenile comedy that features occasional marijuana use, an idiotic sci-fi sub-plot, and a million quotable lines. And then? No more and then!

3. Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle This movie has already been praised for its effectiveness in capturing an ebullient, almost patriotic vision of the American Dream without having any white guys in starring roles (unless you count the genius cameo by Neil Patrick Harris). This munchie-driven comedy might even qualify as an iconic American road movie, since Harold and Kumar’s epic burger quest shows how any destination is made that much sweeter by the challenges of the journey itself. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

2. Dazed and Confused Richard Linklater’s pot-laced tribute to 1976 might be hilarious and quotable, but it’s also startlingly well observed. Indeed, this is no madcap stoner fantasy — it is (to me, at least) a wonderfully evocative look at mid-American teenage life in the pre-cell-phone age. A nice reminder that, at the end of the day, you just gotta keep livin’ man — L-I-V-I-N.

1. The Big Lebowski The first time I watched this movie I laughed myself silly — and nearly 20 viewings later it keeps getting funnier. To try and explain why I love this movie so much is beside the point: Either you know what I mean because you love it too, or you’re one of those people who just couldn’t embrace its stoner-Zen absurdity (and if so, then, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.). The Dude abides! Fire up the Ford Torino and take me to LebowskiFest.

So there you have it: My admonitions in Vagabonding don’t mean I’m against marijuana; I’m just saying you should save plenty of psychic space for unmediated reality as you travel. As for Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, it remains to be seen which aspect of the book attracts the most grumpy emails. I’m guessing it’ll either be the “Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age” blurb on the cover (which might attract the ire of Beat movement fundamentalists), or use of the word “postmodern” in the subtitle (which could attract the fundamentalist ire of pasty academic guys in black turtlenecks). We’ll see!

Tour stop #3: The loneliness of a shopping mall book signing

by Rolf Potts on

Waldenbooks, Salina Central Mall

Having completed my first and only shopping-mall-based Marco Polo Didn’t Go There book-signing, I now know what it feels like to be a public social oddity — to have people furrow their brows at you in bafflement at the sight of you, or avoid eye-contact altogether as they walk by. At times, as I sat in front of the Waldenbooks outlet in the Salina Central Mall with a stack of my books, I felt less like an author than one of those guys who gets hired to dress up in a chipmunk costume and hand out promotional flyers for a car wash.

In retrospect, I realize it was unrealistic to think that an all-purpose indoor shopping mall in a mid-sized, mid-American city would be a good place to tout my book. After all, your average person heads out to the mall on a Saturday to shop for shoes or catch a movie, not to impulse-buy a travel-themed book by some guy they’ve never met before. However, since the mall Waldenbooks is the only place in Salina where one can buy new books — and since I’m now based out of a small farmhouse about 8 miles southeast of Salina — I figured it would be good form to make an appearance there.

After having participated in more structured book events on college campuses or in indie bookstores (for both my new book and for Vagabonding), I don’t think I was quite prepared for an appearance that basically involved sitting at a table with a stack of my books and greeting passersby. In theory this might seem innocuous enough — that is, until you realize that the only other people doing this in the mall are pushing gym memberships or cell phone plans. Thus, your average Saturday shopper has gotten used to avoiding eye contact with anyone who sits at a table and greets them in a friendly voice.

For someone who is not used to being in such situations, this can be a humbling experience.
Of course, it’s good to be humbled from time to time. As a full-time travel writer, I have the luxury of doing what I love for a living. Not everyone does. Moreover, not everyone cares all that much about world travel, and it was easy to see this at the Salina Mall. Sitting at my little table, I had a stack of cards touting a $500 flight-voucher drawing (thanks to a Bootsnall promotion that ties into my book tour) — but this didn’t get nearly as much attention as the drawing for the Mahindra ML 105 tractor that was parked 15 feet in front of me. Even the folks who filtered in and out of the Waldenbooks were more interested in Halloween kids’ books or the new Christopher Paolini than the book of the guy (me) sitting right there in front of them.

Ultimately, I sold three copies of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There over the course of two hours: One to a Kansas Wesleyan University student who’d heard me speak on campus the previous week; one to the co-owners of Pronto Print, where I occasionally go to make photocopies; and one to a woman who goes to Assaria Swedish Lutheran Church with my parents. About halfway through my stint some of my family showed up, and I spent the last hour of my author appearance reading Halloween books with my nephew Luke and chatting up the various random shoppers who had the temerity to make eye contact with me.

In a way, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon in Salina. Whereas I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat back and watched families and teens and retired folks interact in the small-town plazas of Europe or South America, I can’t recall ever having done such a thing in my own adopted hometown. Thus, for two hours I got to observe something I might otherwise have missed — the understated Saturday rhythms of an indoor shopping mall in the middle of the country.

And in a way, that was itself a close-to-home travel lesson, even if I didn’t sell many books.

Trashed any hotel rooms lately? Blender interviews Rolf Potts (kind of)

by Rolf Potts on

My virtual book tour for Marco Polo Didn’t Go There ended just last week, and — while it was a lot of work — it ended up being quite the success. Over course of ten days, I visited online venues like Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week and National Geographic Traveler‘s Intelligent Travel to answer questions and share stories and photos. CNN.com ended up linking my interview with Budget Travel’s “This Just In” from its front page, and both the New York Times‘ Ideas Blog and Arts & Letters Daily linked my Q&A at World Hum (which, while not an official part of my virtual tour, did coincide with the event).

During the course of this online tour, I answered all manner of questions about travel and travel writing, including advice for aspiring writers, my most shocking moments as a traveler, and the cross-cultural ramifications of wiping your ass. This was all great, and I loved tackling those kinds of queries.

What I wish sometimes, however, is that someone would ask me the kind of questions they ask rock stars in Blender Magazine.

Ever read Blender? It’s great stuff — a hilarious blend of music advice, brief celebrity interviews, and obsessively categorized music nostalgia and trivia. I mean, sure, I subscribe to The New Yorker, The Economist, Poets & Writers, and a whole pile of travel magazines — but when I return home from a journey to dig into my stack of magazines, I often find myself going for Blender first. It’s just good fun.

Since nobody ever asked my any Blender-style rock star questions during my virtual tour, I think I’ll ask those questions of myself right now. Here goes!

Blender: So, Rolf, when was the last time you trashed a hotel room?

Rolf: Actually, most travel writers don’t need to trash their hotel rooms, even when they’re feeling like rock stars. This is because writers like me start out as budget travelers, and for the most part budget hotel rooms are already trashed.

I mean, how can you hurl a TV set out the window when your room never had a TV set to begin with, and the windows have rusted shut? Why smash a chair against the wall when that chair falls apart when you simply sit in it? Why do ecstasy when you’re already on Imodium and mefloquine? Why abuse the service staff when you have so many cockroaches to contend with?

Even when I end up staying in nice hotels, my experience has taught me that I could never trash a hotel room to the same glorious degree you see when checking in at your average developing-country budget-dive.

Blender: Ever gotten drunk in the home of a celebrity?

Rolf: I have, in the purely technical sense. I’ll admit I don’t visit many celebrity homes, but my cousin once house-sat one of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s homes in San Francisco’s South Bay, and I occasionally went over to visit her and drink beers. I’m sure at some point in there I drank enough to technically be considered drunk — though I’ll admit it wasn’t one of those Dave Navarro Playboy Mansion moments where I, say, tapped a vein and sprayed my name on the wall with my own blood.

I think the most extreme thing I did while boozed up at Woz’s house was go into the garage and play his South Park pinball machine (which is pretty much the same thing I did when I was sober). Plus I passed out in a beanbag once, while watching Dogtown and Z-Boys on Tivo. Can Dave Navarro claim that? In Woz’s house? I think not.

Blender: You’re in the middle of a book tour now: Tell us, what are the groupies like?

Rolf: I don’t think I have groupies — at least, not in the traditional sense of hot young vixens that you take back to your hotel room and bang next to piles of cocaine and urns full of room-service Hennessy. I mean, for starters I usually don’t stay in hotels on my book tour; I usually stay in the homes of old friends, and my old friends tend to have wives and infant children who might intimidate any groupies that follow me home.

But on a more basic level, I don’t think book tours lend themselves to groupies. For starters, travel writers are too self-contained to travel with an entourage, and an entourage is essential for groupie-procurement. Plus my first book was a rather earnest-minded treatise about time-wealth and long-term travel, and it had a great reader response that has defied demographic stereotype. Thus, while it’s technically possible that some of my fans are sultry young sex bombs who only want to party, most of them tend to be gung-ho travel addicts who are stoked to tell me about their next journey to India or Mozambique or Paraguay.

So while a rock star might disappear after a performance to skinny dip in the hotel pool with a gaggle of aspiring supermodels, I usually end up drinking beers with, say, a 71-year-old woman who wants to bike across Central America, a 37-year-old married couple who want to take a year off and sail around the world, and a bunch of 21-year-old college students who are full of questions about living abroad. I think this is great — I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of human beings than a roomful of current and aspiring vagabonders from all walks of life.

Not that I’ve given up on the idea of groupies. I actually love the idea of groupies; it’s just a matter of timing and logistics. So if you’re a bodacious babe and want to be my groupie, just slip me a note with some rendezvous details after my reading and I’ll see what I can do. We might have to go to your place, though, since we wouldn’t want to disturb my friends’ slumbering infants.

Blender: What was your last brush with the law?

Rolf: Probably the time the Indian army caught me trying to smash up a blockhouse door along the Tibetan border and detained me overnight at an army base near a town called Pooh. The events that led to absurd encounter are too complicated to relate here, but fortunately I’ve detailed the whole story in my new book. Just read Chapter 5 for details.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There book tour: Salina and Wichita

by Rolf Potts on

After just two days on the road promoting Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer, I have learned one important lesson: Sex sells.

Or, at least, sex gets people’s attention in an otherwise staid bookstore environment. This is something I discovered by accident, when I arrived in Wichita for an event at Watermark Books and realized I’d left my laptop (and standard PowerPoint presentation) back on my farm, 90 miles away.

My forgetfulness, I think, was the result of my micromanaged book tour. Having written a book called Vagabonding, which is all about the pleasures of slow and deliberate travel, embarking on a strictly scheduled book tour is kind of a contradiction. This was the case when I toured to promote Vagabonding in 2003, and it is doubly the case on this book tour, which will visit twice as many cities as I did 5 years ago.

Pico Iyer, who is one of the most perceptive travel writers of the past two decades, once noted that going on a book tour is “a journey into the fracturing of self.” Travel writers might be naturally equipped to withstand the physical journey, but the psychic journey is another matter.

Iyer noted:

“You pantomime yourself in many moods at every turn, and try to sell what’s deep by being shallow; you are obliged, in some ways, to project a personality in order to advance what at some level comes from the impersonal. You move, at great speed, between radio stations, hotel
rooms and airports, and continuity (even inwardly) is what you lose. Whatever is private in you, spacious and inward-even if it is only a deeper level of the personality-is converted into something public, vocal and worldly.”

For the most part I don’t mind the “public and vocal” version of myself that emerges during book tours; in some ways, it’s a nice counterbalance to the elastic anonymity of vagabonding travel. The challenge comes in striking the right balance — of communicating something true about my own experiences while at the same time giving the audience something useful and instructive.

For my Vagabonding tour this was pretty simple, since that book has a direct application for everyone who reads it. My new book, however, is a collection stories rather than a volume of adviceor philosophy. In many ways it is a more entertaining read than Vagabonding — and for the book-tour audience to appreciate its appeal, this means I have to capture the right moments of humor and intrigue when I’m reading from its pages.

One obvious story for this task is Chapter 7, “Tantric Sex for Dilettantes,” which uses the second-person voice to capture an obsession I had with a certain woman while taking a Tantra class at an ashram in Rishikesh, India. Not only is this story strong on plot and structured like a joke, it also contains lots of great little details about, say, how to control your ejaculation using both physical and spiritual methods.

The only problem with this story is that I feared it’s sexual themes and occasional strong language might turn off library and bookstore audiences, which tend to be older and (so I presumed) more conservative than, say, your average bar reading audience. For this reason I gave “Tantric Sex” a miss at my library book-launch reading in my adopted hometown of Salina.
For the most part, that reading went well. About 20 people showed up, the library served wine and cheese, and there were enough audience questions to keep us going until closing time.

In Wichita, however, I got thrown off by the fact that I forgot my laptop (which contains a travel photo presentation to go with my talk), and I had to take a three-hour round-trip road trip back to my farm to fetch it. When I returned to Watermark Books just five minutes before my event
began, I was too flustered to care, so I opened up by reading “Tantric Sex for Dilettantes,” ejaculation references and all.

As it turned out, the 50 or so people in the Wichita crowd loved the Tantric essay — the older folks as much as anyone. My enthusiasm fed off of theirs, and it ended up being a great little event, even as we transitioned into the more practical matters of travel writing and opened things up for questions.

Thus my first lesson as my new book tour gets underway: For best effect, try a little titillation before you transition into straight information.

Two book events down, about 24 or so to go!