Oftentimes, we think that travel is something that we buy rather than give to ourselves. If we can figure out how to travel within that local economy, how to travel in a way similar to how people in the country were visiting travel, then I'm sure that's how you were able to get seven and a half months for $7,500.

It's not by the big flashy stuff that you see advertised in glossy magazines or even on Instagram feeds. It's the quieter, humbler, more interactive places where the people in West Africa or the people in Southeast Asia or wherever, South America, travel, and it pays off in time. That chicken bus probably goes slower and has less air conditioning than the nice tourist bus, but it puts you into a culture in a way that the tourist bus doesn't and it costs a lot less.

It goes a lot slower and it pays off in that time wealth that we're talking about. Yeah, I could talk about time wealth all day. It's really worth thinking about in the context of we have a limited wealth of time in life and we should really take advantage of it and not put off our best self to another time of life.

We should grab this time and let it enrich our lives. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm a diehard optimizer who loves doing all the research to get the best experience in life without an expensive price tag.

Today, I couldn't be more excited because I'm talking to someone who's had a huge impact on my travel life, Rolf Poth. If you're not familiar with him, you should be. He's an award-winning travel writer who's been published in almost every publication, but I came to know him from the book he wrote almost 20 years ago, Vagabonding, an Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, which became a classic of travel writing.

It has been an international bestseller. In fact, I stumbled upon the book in 2009, and it played a huge role in Amy and I taking a trip for eight months to backpack around the world. It was also part of the inspiration for my friend Tim Ferriss' book, The Four-Hour Workweek.

Needless to say, it's a must-read for travelers, and maybe even more importantly, people who don't necessarily travel but want to. Just this month, he followed it up with a new book called The Vagabond's Way, 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel. It is filled with stories of travel and journaling, quotes for each day of the leap year, important note, from centuries of philosophers, authors, poets, and travelers, all paired with reflections about the wonder and importance of travel.

I found it to be fabulous, especially for someone like me who struggles, find the time to sit down and read a few hundred pages at once. In this conversation, I want to talk about time wealth, why that's such a vital topic in life, how it transforms travels, and what anyone can take from the concept to travel in a richer way.

How we can adapt to the changes of travel technology and still have amazing adventures. Why he once traveled for six weeks without luggage, and what you can learn from that experiment. How leaving your phone behind or getting lost might create richer experiences. Why he thinks that as you get older, you can still have more richer and fulfilling travels and so much more.

Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Good to talk to you, Chris. I'm happy to talk about this. Yeah. I have a lot of questions. Big fan of yours. It's the book I've gifted more in my life than any other book, which someone always asks you, "What's your favorite book?" I was like, "I don't know, but 'Vagabonding' is the book I've purchased more to give to others." We can make this a conversation because I've tried to live a lot of the spirit of what you've written.

I will kick us off and ask, what do you think one of the biggest misconceptions the average person has about travel as you believe it is and you embody it? Well, that it's expensive, for one thing. I think that for generations, this is something I talk about in the new book, "The Vagabond's Ways," for generations, it's been seen as this indulgence.

It's been seen as this thing that wealthy people do to showcase their lives. When in fact, I think people of all backgrounds have always been able to travel if they've made it a priority. I think expense is a big one. Of course, hacking is something that you focus on.

We can talk about different hacks. You talked about time wealth. That was the huge hack for me from the beginning, realizing that time is more important than wealth in a certain sense, that creating time is really what you need to do to create a dream experience like travel. There are other things too.

There are fears. There's this notion that the world is more dangerous than it is, partly because it used to be that the old headline, man bites dog media environment. Well, now it's clickbait, that bad news clicks better than good news. Fear is another thing. Then I guess just difficult, but I think it's easier and easier these days, especially in the world where so much information is available, whereas sometimes there's too much information, but there's enough information doing at least to encourage us that there are people who are not that different from us traveling in a very rich and slow and long-term way.

It sounds like it's been something you've been thinking about for a long time because 2008, 2009, that's pretty early in the life cycle of my first book, Vagabonding. My wife and I, we had to do jobs and I got laid off and I was trying to find some freelance work.

She didn't love her job. We were like, "Let's take a trip." I didn't have work. She quit her job. We're like, "Let's take a trip before we find new jobs." We started putting pins up on a map of where in the world we wanted to go. We didn't really know that traveling for more than a vacation was a thing.

We'd never been told that. We'd never heard of the gap year. I read your book and I was like, "Oh my gosh, why a month? Why a week? Why not just go and see what happens?" We ended up buying, or I guess technically in our case, using points to get a one-way ticket to South Africa.

We had a rough idea of where we were going to go, but we certainly didn't have anything more than a couple of nights booked and we just went. It lasted about seven and a half months. It ended up costing about $7,500, which I think adjusted for inflation. Who knows what that is today?

But I think it's a whole lot less than most people spend on an eight-month trip if they take it. I think the slow travel, which I want to get into, is probably the thing that made that possible, not trying to rush from place to place. Then obviously, staying with locals helped also.

Yeah, that's awesome. It's funny. Seven and a half months is exactly how long my first vagabonding trip was. In 1994, it cost me $5,000, although this was back when gas was as low as 79 cents a gallon in the United States. Of course, this is before #vanlife. I was just living in a van.

I was just dirtbagging it. But that's really cool to hear. It's also cool to hear that you'll lost your job or you had a disruption in your life, and so you responded by doing something you dream about. I think sometimes people, they put off their dream life to some undefined time in the future.

Often, retirement in the United States is a huge one because really nobody is saying that you can travel more than a vacation. Until you're retired and you have more time for that, well, you can create time. You can look for time wealth. That's really cool that you responded to a disruption in your professional life by just sort of creating a little, what Tim Ferriss would call a mini retirement, but just an opportunity to embrace the world and live those travel dreams now because you can.

Even if you can't live them this second, you can start saving money and make them happen much sooner than American society tells you you can take that dream trip. I think that the cost to fly internationally and the cost of expensive lodging that you can confirm right away and you don't have to walk around a town to find is such a huge piece of the expense that if you say, "Okay, well, we're going to go and stay," and you're willing to stay and you're willing to find local accommodations, everything gets a lot cheaper.

Then my hack for your fear thing was that I always told people, they were like, "Oh, is this country safe? I've heard it's dangerous." I always pointed to this one. I don't know if it's still in there, but there was a lonely planet for New York City a long time ago, probably at least 15 years ago.

If you looked at it under the safety section, it said, "Well, if you're going to New York City, you should carry a money belt and you should make sure you put all of your money and your passport and your money belt and tuck it in your pants in the front." I remember money belts were like a travel thing for safety and I would show this to people.

I literally ripped the page out and I would show people and they'd be like, "Well, I've been to New York. You don't need a money belt. I don't carry a money belt in New York." I'm like, "Exactly." If they're telling you New York isn't safe and you know it is, do you really need to believe that everywhere else in the world isn't safe?

That was my mindset shift that I gave people was everyone's going to say everything's dangerous because it's clickbait. If you can get over that, the whole world can be a lot more opening to you. I think that there is, to be somewhat facetious about it, a money belt industrial complex.

There's a lot of things that people would sell you to assuage this fear when, in fact, you just put a couple of bucks in your sock or just put it in your pocket and odds are New York is full of New Yorkers who don't typically get pickpocketed. A lot of times, the pickpocket economy focuses on the most obvious touristic part of a place, that most parts of any city in the world are going to be places where pickpockets aren't going to hang out because there's not that many tourists to pick their pockets.

Sure, I'm sure that there's a few picked pockets a day in Times Square, for example, but New Yorkers don't go there. That area is interesting for a while, but then there's more interesting parts of the city after you're done. Yeah, no, I agree with you that I think sometimes just showing up and figuring things out can do you a lot.

I think sometimes we feel like we're hacking something like hotel expenses. You get online, you do some comparison shopping, you find an "bargain" and then you get to the city and you go straight to the hotel, not realizing there might be entire blocks of hotels where people in Thailand stay that cost a fraction of the big international hotels that you're shopping for online, for example.

Again, one hack might be simply the willingness to not plan too much in advance because, as I say in the new book, you get smarter every day of your trip. Whatever deals you found while you're sitting in your home office, and sometimes there's fantastic ones, and I'm not going to fault the cool deals that the travel industry has, but sometimes you're not going to know that this cool mom and pop beach hut in Indonesia that isn't online, but is in the lexicon of every traveler who's been through that part of Sumatra, that that is going to cost you $12 instead of the $50 that seemed like a bargain before.

I think that confidence and savvy that comes with just each day of being on the road of a long trip really is one of the best hacks out there. I got a call this week from a reporter at the Washington Post who asked my opinion on this TikTok video that she was writing a piece on.

It's like, "Oh, this is 2022 at its finest." There's a woman saying, "Before you book your flight, before you book your hotel, what you should really do is create a Google map and put a pin on every single thing you want to do and see and eat and drink.

That way, you know exactly where to book your hotel, and you can plan it all out in advance." A quote of mine that ended up in the article was that, "I really worry in today's day and age that we're creating a checklist before we even leave, and we've got a map, and we plot everything out." It's like, "What kind of experience are you going to have?" I'm not opposed to trying to flag some things you want to see, but I would encourage people to leave most of your time unplanned.

Have the list, maybe. Maybe you could write a list of what you want to do, but don't commit to, "I'm doing this this day," and set yourself in stone that that's the plan. I'm sure, as you've seen, most of the most memorable experiences I've had traveling are not the experience that I put on the list before I went.

It's a random person you met at a bar that I invited you to come have dinner with his family. And then the list goes on, a random place you just wandered down a street. Yeah, I don't take fault with that list, be it with pins on a Google map or just on a piece of paper you keep in your pocket, but I think you really have to inbake a willingness to throw it away if you find something more inspiring.

Because in a way, there's almost like a speed dating analogy here, that we're going to go on all these set dates with all of these people or places with certain categories that we've defined in advance when maybe you'll fall in love with the person you meet in the lobby.

What happens if you've overplanned everything and you don't leave yourself open to the spontaneous and literally or metaphorically falling in love, if not with a person in a place and staying longer than you had planned on staying? And I think that's a big problem that people have. I understand why you have a giant checklist of things you want to do in a place, but sometimes you're racing around so much trying to get to the checklist that you don't give yourself time to slow, to relax and look and just savor a place.

I think savoring is something we don't yet have an app for, right? That being able to just be happy that you're on the other side of the world, you're sitting on this beach and looking at the Indian Ocean and just being grateful for this moment and not worrying about what you're going to be doing tomorrow, that's a great gift of travel.

And I think allowing yourself to set the itinerary aside when you really respond to something on the road, that's a great non-planned plan to have, just the willingness to improvise as you become inspired and more knowledgeable. Yeah, I've heard you tell a story that I'm going to hope you repeat, which is about someone you were speaking with, I think, that was frustrated that they didn't get a chance to go do everything they wanted to see in Paris because they were stuck at a cafe and all they wanted to do was experience Paris and they felt shackled to the cafe.

Yeah, well, actually, that's more than one person. Initially, that was me. The first few times I went to Paris, I was just so frustrated that the restaurants are slow. America was very efficient. They can churn people through restaurants. They find your table, they bring your bill. In Paris, it was just so comparatively slow.

And then in time, I realized that that was just part of the pleasure of being there. And so I had students and friends who would come and visit me in Paris. I teach a writing class there every summer. And I realized that for all the people who are sitting worrying about their bucket list of things to do in Paris while they're waiting for their creme brulee to come, they're looking for an experience of Paris that is abstracted from the actual experience of Paris.

Parisians don't have a checklist of things. They actually enjoy the three-hour lunch. They enjoy being able to just savor each aspect of the meal and talk to the waiter not as just sort of another pawn in their game who's looking for a tip, but a guy who really knows the food and that's conversing with this person will help them have a better meal.

And the tables outside in French restaurants face out into the street so that you're sitting next to your companion side by side, sort of interacting with the street and observing it. And so I think if you don't allow yourself to just enjoy that three-hour lunch, even though it's way less efficient than an American lunch, you're not allowing yourself to enjoy Paris.

In America, and I'm guilty of this, sometimes we eat lunch standing up so we can get on with our day. But actually the experience of Paris is being able to savor a lunch in the way that French people do. And if you don't allow yourself that experience, you're sort of cheating yourself out of a core experience of being in a place like France.

I want to jump back. We skipped through a bunch of things. You talked about time well. So can we talk a little bit more about, you said it was this major unlock for you. How can people take that concept and improve their mindset and improve their travel? Well, I think it's a core shift in what you consider wealth is.

I think it's a matter of letting what wealth you have serve you instead of shifting your existence to serve a certain idea of wealth. I think oftentimes we go through all this trouble to reach certain goals, not realizing why we want them. And I think wealth is a big one, that there's certain metrics we use to judge wealth.

And one is money, one is possessions. But I think the truest expression of wealth is being able to use this limited amount of time you have in your finite life. We're all born equally rich in time when you think about it. And finding ways to let that time enrich your life in a way that makes your dreams come true.

I mean, I talk about travel all the time. So often I talk about time wealth in the context of travel. It could be about spending more time with your kids, for example. I meet travelers who go to the other side of the world and realize that very poor countries, comparatively poor countries like Uganda or Cambodia, being a father in those places is much more interactive with their kids.

They don't compartmentalize their fatherhood in those parts of the world like they do back home. So they learn almost by accident this idea of wealth as a manifestation of how you spend your time. And one interesting person I talked to is Kevin Kelly. I'm sure you're familiar with his work, a co-founder of Wired.

He talks about how young people are richer in time than money and older people are richer in money than time. And I think one reason why young people are stereotypically more given to long-term travel is that they're in that situation. They don't have more money than older people. They have less responsibilities.

They have more of a willingness to forego certain comforts to get more time out of what money they do have in their wallet. And so it really comes down to spending what money you do have in such a way that it makes your life more fulfilling. And I think oftentimes we think that travel is something that we buy rather than give to ourselves.

And if we can figure out how to travel within that local economy, how to travel in a way similar to how people in the country were visiting travel, then I'm sure that's how you were able to get seven and a half months for seven and a half thousand dollars.

It's not by the big flashy stuff that you see advertised in glossy magazines or even on Instagram feeds. It's the quieter, humbler, more interactive places where the people in West Africa or the people in Southeast Asia or wherever, South America, travel and it pays off in time. That chicken bus probably goes slower and has less air conditioning than the nice tourist bus, but it puts you into a culture in a way that the tourist bus doesn't and it costs a lot less.

It goes a lot slower and it pays off in that time wealth that we're talking about. Yeah, I could talk about time wealth all day. It's really worth thinking about in the context of we have a limited wealth of time in life and we should really take advantage of it and not put off our best self to another time of life.

We should grab this time and let it enrich our lives. One fun anecdote, which is my wife worked early at Lyft and the origin story of the company was before it was Lyft, it was a company called Zimride. And before it was Zimride, the name hadn't existed and one of the co-founders was in Africa riding one of those slow buses.

And that was the inspiration for starting Zimride, which became Lyft. So you say, the luxury bus might've been more fancy. But in this particular random case, taking that one bus ended up building a multi-billion dollar company. So there is one anecdote of even that cheaper, slower, maybe sweatier bus can pay off for some people.

I generally think travel is an opportunity to see people doing different things, different ways around the world. And that makes you a more creative person, makes you a more curious person and leads to all kinds of things. So funny that you use the one example that I happen to know ended up becoming a wild success.

But I think it's a fun story. I also think I had a conversation with my wife the other day, and we were talking about goals. And we haven't really gone through this process of what are our goals for our family, for our finances, for our health. But we thought, "We have two daughters now, maybe we should." And my wife had this financial goal.

I want a net worth financial goal. And I pushed back to her and this connects back to time wealth. But she said, "I would love to hit this milestone." And I said, "Okay, well, we could hit it. But would you be okay if that meant either one of us was working a lot more and not spending as much time together?" And she's like, "Well, no, I wouldn't want that." And I was like, "Well, would you be okay if we moved to a different part of the country that was cheaper, or we cut back on some of the things we do?" And she's like, "Well, no, I wouldn't want to sacrifice those things." And we had this conversation where in our minds, and this is purely part of the society we live in and the expectations we set on people, she had felt like we needed to grow our net worth.

And in a way, through this conversation about what we actually wanted to spend our time doing, we left being like, "Actually, maybe we need a smaller net. Maybe we need less." Bill Perkins wrote this book, Die With Zero. And the premise is like, "Why are we trying to amass all this money?

We should be trying to take the money we have and optimally use it to have the most fulfilling life." And in some cases, that might be actually not trying to grow and grow and grow your wealth, but maybe to find more creative ways to spend it or unlock time.

Yeah. No, I love this example. Actually, I love the shared taxi from Africa example too. But I think wealth is an abstraction. It's often future-oriented. And one thing, using children as a great example, because oftentimes we think of children in terms of them being potential adults, when in fact, the blessing of having them as children is having them right where they are, right?

And so, sure, it's good to create security and create good habits for your children. But part of the pleasure of being a parent is like having them being a newborn that is gripping their finger with their whole fist, right? And just being able to enjoy that moment regardless of what your net worth is in 20 years.

I think one danger of having arbitrary goals for net worth is that you become focused on those goals rather than that very transient experience that is parenthood, that each phase of your kid's life, it can be exhausting, of course. But it's so special. It's just so exciting. And then I think there's a different dynamic.

I remember sort of when I shifted from being this kid that was being raised by my parents to this traveler who was sort of hosting his parents and sort of being the expert and that they were the young, curious, naive people, even though they were my parents in a place like China or the Czech Republic.

And so, I think, yeah, nothing against having goals or thinking about net worth or creating safety nets or steering children in such a way that they will become productive adults. But just that blessing, I think often that cliche is, "Enjoy them while they're toddlers, that'll be gone. Enjoy them while they're infants.

Enjoy them while they're in grade school because you'll miss that." Well, you really do need to embrace that. And that sometimes if we're making decisions that are based on 20-year goals rather than just looking at our kids or looking at our life or looking at our travel, looking where we are, then we are relegating our lives to an abstract future instead of embracing the beauty of the moment.

You mentioned moving to another place. I'm based in Kansas, which is a much less fashionable place than the Bay Area where you're based. But one nice thing about that is that it just pays off. I'm not a parent, actually. I'm an uncle. I love being an uncle. But it just costs less to get through the day, to achieve certain goals in life.

And that pays off in free time. And so, I'm not saying that everybody needs to move to Kansas or to a cheap part of the world like Columbia. There's a lot of places where digital nomads go because they can save money. But there are different tools, hacks, if you will, to take what money you do have, to take what income and interests that you have and loves, be it from family or activities, and find a way to make them a more active part of your life.

I've talked about it on my own podcast that people will often, they love the mountains, but Oregon is hard to afford these days. So, they move to Tennessee, and they can hike three times a week in Tennessee for a quarter of the price of Oregon. So, I think that there's a lot of ways that if you can embrace the concept of time wealth and realize that there's different ways of freeing time up in your life, then you can really focus your life on those present moment goals that make life richer and more enjoyable and more fun and more rewarding and more likely to give back to things like family and community.

Is there a process or a framework that someone listening to this is thinking, "Gosh, I really wish I could figure out what that means for me"? Are there questions you would propose someone think about to kind of figure out what they want? I would say that there are some questions like, "What makes me happy in the course of a given day and in the course of a given week?

Where is my happy time?" And if I'm so stressed out, it's watching cat videos on social media, then maybe you should get a cat. I think sometimes we assuage our stresses through distractions rather than passions and loves. I think sometimes we don't know our passions, and I have nothing against college.

My father taught college, my sister teaches college, and I think it's a very noble vocation. But sometimes we go to college without even knowing what we like to do. And other cultures have gap years. In the UK and Australia, they have places, the gap year where you take a year off after secondary schooling, but before university where you travel or you work.

And that allows you to find out what you really love to do and where your passions are before you spend all this money going to university. And so weirdly enough, I think that travel and maybe traveling for seven and a half months or whatever is a great way to find out what you love.

I think there's what your parents think you should do, there's what your counselors think you should do. I think oftentimes young people, but even older people, it's the same way, that until you are off into the place completely away from the pressures and routines and constrictions of living at home, you can really find out where your heart lies.

That you might sit in a village for a day and watch people build a house and think, "Gosh, I want to build my own house," or study architecture or something like that. That's just a random example. One thing I talk about in the new book in the context of a couple monks from hundreds of years ago, the young monk talks to the older monk.

The older monk asks him a question about life and he says, "I don't know." And the older monk says, "Very good. Not knowing is most intimate." I think it's good to embrace not knowing yet, not just how to live our lives, but what our goals are of just sort of being the person who's traveling through the world without not a lot of plans yet, but having the faith to think, "Eventually, I'm going to really wander my way into something that makes my heart sing, that makes me fall in love with some aspect of life," and that's going to be focused on it.

That could be any number of things, including family. For years, I lived next door to my parents. My parents are now in assisted living. They're not far from me now. The whole lesson of living next door to one's parents, which is not a very common American thing, is very common in almost every other part of the world, in Southeast Asia and Africa, pooling your resources and getting land.

That paid off not just in the fact that I was able to save money, but I was able to spend some quality time with my parents at a really cool time in life. I think there's a lot of different strategies into creating either on purpose or by accident. This whole familial thing was an accident.

It was an idea about how to live as a family that I didn't get until I was overseas, but there's ways to allow yourself to grow into ways of being that you might not seem now. You just need to allow yourself to sit still for a while and stop distracting yourself and start embracing things in life.

It seems like spending a lot of time with family, you picked up quite easily because it's so common in the rest of the world. Are there other major things that have affected the way you live your life now that are themes that travel has brought you, aside from just traveling?

Right. Travel is so much a part of things. If we can see this, travel is more than a consumer act that are certain commonalities that we see again and again. Family is one of them. I've often said that when I was traveling through Southeast Asia, I was 27 years old, people would say, "Oh, are you married?

Do you have kids?" I said, "No, no, I don't." They're like, "Oh, I'm sorry." It was such a core value in this part of the world. I got the sense from them that their happiness was so tied into family, into marriage and children and relationships with family, that it seemed weird that I, this very rich and comparatively rich and mobile guy, would not have that as a core value.

I think food, another one, to be very simple, like in France, that's not the only place where meals are much slower and more communal than we have in our standing up, posting to Instagram while we're sipping our latte, first world society. I think it's really these basic building block things that travel has taught me to come home to.

Another great thing about France, but it's also something that you'll see in Africa or Asia, is eating food that was obviously grown within 20 miles of where you're eating it, of biting into a cherry in France and feeling cheated because you didn't realize cherries could taste that good. It's not some magical French thing, it's just that French place value on seasonal fruit, produce.

They're not flying in cherries from Chile in the middle of the winter. There's a certain time in late June, early July when it's cherry season and that's when you eat your cherries. Weirdly enough, obviously, travel has given me philosophical perspective with things like time wealth, but it's often these basic building block themes, love for family, concern about food that I bring home and try to bake into my travel life.

And then also just not rushing and multitasking things, being able to slow down and let a day happen instead of micromanaging and trying to rush through it to be somehow ahead of your competitive neighbor at the end of the day. I think that not to fetishize other cultures, because I'm a big fan of American culture, but I think sometimes we are doing too much, we're throwing too much at life and not sitting still.

It's just another great lesson I've had from travel is the ability to sit still and let a day happen in a way that really enriches it. And that can happen in a comparatively wealthy country like Norway, where I went for the first time this summer, or a comparatively poor country like Indonesia, where I went a few years ago.

It's really fun to intertwine one's home life with lessons learned from travel. And I'm sure you discovered a lot of things on your own journey and the journeys you've had since. Yeah, I mean, so many. I'd love to talk a little bit about how you have the kinds of experiences in a new place.

Obviously, we mentioned, look, if you land in Paris and you go straight to a hotel, and from your hotel to the Louvre, and then from there to a reservation, you're going to kind of miss it. But are there things that you try to do and how you structure your time in a place, how long you're there, what you do first that kind of allow you to immerse yourself in a new place?

Well, one of the catchphrases from Vagabonding that I refreshed in the new book, The Vagabond's Way is, "Walk until your day becomes interesting." And I think we often don't give ourselves credit for just showing up in a place and walking around without really knowing where we're going or having any goals or checklists and just sort of walking until you sort of get a sense for the pace of a place.

And instead of sightseeing, maybe smellseeing, follow the smells around a neighborhood and just find ways to slow down and realize that quotidian things are as amazing as sightseeing places. To use Paris as an example, they have a convenience store. It's an equivalent of 7-Eleven, it's called the Carrefour. There's also a Monoprix.

And just realizing that it's a little bit different than the American equivalent. Another thing I write about in the new book is getting a haircut in Egypt on Zamalek Island in Cairo, which took an hour and had 23 steps and cost $6, including tip. One, it was the best haircut of my life, but it was just a haircut.

It also gave me perspective on the meticulousness of Arab masculinity as pertains to appearance. And so, I had this wonderful experience just by willing myself to get a haircut in a foreign place. So, I have nothing against sightseeing. I have nothing against tourist districts. I think it's pretty normal to go to places you've dreamed about.

If you're in Egypt, sure, go to the pyramids. It'd be silly not to go to the pyramids, but get a haircut. Go to the local market, go to a sweet shop. A great thing about Egypt specifically is that they take their sweets very seriously. And just like way more than your average hostess ding dong, they have these handmade sweets that are amazing and dirt cheap and really fun to see.

And so, I'm sure I'm curious, what strategies... You had a seven and a half months around the world. Did you have any go-to strategies when you landed in a place after you were a little bit salty as a traveler? We tried to always, no matter what the purpose of the trip was, we try to always walk towards the food market or the market.

It doesn't have to be a food market. It could be, you know, in Turkey, there are more markets. In a lot of Arab cultures, it's just like everything's going on in the market. There's food stands, there's shopping. In some places, it's really more of a food market and you go early.

I think in Indonesia, the food market's closed by 10, 11 in the morning because everyone's there right in the morning to get food. And that's a place where I think definitely you could smell sea and all the senses are kind of a part of a food market. But it's also true in the fish market in Tokyo, it's like just people running around, bumping around, what's going on.

I feel like that is my favorite place to kind of get my bearings of a city. It's like, what are people eating? What are they drinking? Are they negotiating? Are they a yelling culture? Are they a friendly culture? You could see it all in this one place. And you could eat.

You could do it on your own. Recently, I kind of love just going on a tour somewhere with some local of a food market and getting a lay of like, what do we eat in this culture? How do people shop? How do people buy? I don't know how you feel about hiring tour guides versus just walking solo.

I think there's room for both for me. But that's where I start almost everything. I mean, we went on our honeymoon to the Seychelles, but we still went to the food market. The market, I think it was a fish market downtown because we were like, we just want to feel a place.

Even if the goal is to relax, we still want to feel the culture here. Yeah, I love that. And I think sometimes travelers will go to a market and they'll walk through the whole thing, but they'll only go to the jewelry stand or the brass figurine stand or whatever, the obviously souvenir thing.

But I love the idea of getting ingredients for a meal, even if this vegetable, you don't even know what it is yet. It helps to have a place with a kitchen, of course. But there's just so many times where tourists will spend like an hour in one of the most famous markets in the world and then they'll go to a restaurant.

It's like, no, no, buy food, just get a picnic, get those figs and that tea or whatever and have an adventure of it. And you mentioned a guide sometimes, like early in the travels, like in your first days in a place, I don't often get guides, but I'm not opposed to it because sometimes the guides can help you negotiate things and they can explain like, oh yeah, no, actually this isn't a fruit, it's a spice and we use it in this soup for this reason.

And it gives you a headstart. It's worth the monetary investment because it gives you a headstart on understanding how life works there. And I love market cultures. I also love market squares too, because oftentimes there's like a soccer game or people are playing foosball or basically it immediately insinuates yourself into the daily life of a place.

Because again, Parisians aren't usually standing in line for the mosque. Egyptians aren't usually taking a tour bus to the great pyramids, they're doing different things. And both Cairo and Paris, two of my favorite places in the world, really reward that walk through the market. And like in Paris, for example, different markets will be open on different days.

In Cairo, the best oranges I've ever had, I've gotten in a market in Cairo for pennies. Who would have guessed, but I was just wandering around and it's like, yeah, I'll get this orange that's half the size of my head, why not? And it was delicious. And I think those are the surprises that you can't really, there's no app for that.

There's no micromanaged way to wander into those awesome market moments where suddenly you're eating this fruit that you didn't realize existed. And now you're on your fifth one, because it's amazing and you're in Indonesia and it's a lot of fun. So yeah, I'm with you. That was jackfruit for me.

I had never heard of jackfruit my whole life. I tried it now. I love it. My daughter is two and she's obsessed with jackfruit. So I'm finding myself trying to find the Asian grocery store to go buy more jackfruit. And I didn't even know it was a thing. I just saw it and I was like, "What is this?" They're like, "It's kind of like a banana, maybe a pineapple, a little bit mixed." And it's my favorite.

Well, that's something you can take home too. You were talking before just like, what attitudes do I take home? Well, sometimes the simplest one is food. For my birthday last year, my wife took me to a Korean restaurant way out in probably an hour from here. Well, I was so excited because every time I eat Korean food, it reminds me of being back in Korea.

In a way, I can always take a little bit of my heart back to Korea when I'm eating kimchi and bulgogi. And so that's a big part of it. It's like suddenly these places are in conversation with each other. I'm curious, do you have any rituals that are sort of born of travel?

Do you have any things at home that were sort of baked in by your journeys in other places? Gosh, I'm trying to think through. I mean, I know when it comes to food, I'd say 50% of the foods that we cook are not traditional American food. We cook a lot of Korean food because we just love Korean food.

And so when we go to places, the gifts I try to bring people, I'm like, "Oh, let's bring some smoked paprika from Croatia." I can't remember what country, Budapest, Hungary. Hungary, I think has a lot. I could be totally wrong here, but I think it was Hungary has a lot of paprika.

So I brought home everyone paprika and I want to, I try to... The things we bring people are things to help them experience something kind of satiating, like a drink, an alcohol, a spirit, a spice. I don't know. That's one. I remember, I can't remember where I was that I experienced raclette and we bought a raclette grill.

My wife has since, it's been this sore subject in our house, which is like, "We never use this thing." And I'm like, "No, but one day we will." And she's like, "We've got to get rid of it. It hasn't been touched in two years. It's caked on with dust." But I think food is something that when we're in another country, it's like, "I only want to eat local." In India, it was like, "I will risk sickness to be able to eat the food on the street, drink the chai tea from the cups from a person." That's travel a lot for me is kind of understanding that.

And ideally, talking to people about it. I think the experiences that have happened once we've come home are always being able to connect the dots in strange ways. So a great example was we were in the park, just a five-minute walk from our house the other day, and all these people are dancing.

And I was like, "Why is everybody dancing?" This is not a park where there's normally dancing, but there's a bunch of kids and adults all dancing and eating. And I asked them, I said, "What's going on?" And they're like, "Oh, we're celebrating because it was the Lebanese festival last weekend, and all these kids danced in a parade.

And so now we're kind of celebrating here." And my daughter runs up to the middle of the group. A woman picks her up. And it's funny because I think many Americans would be terrified if a random person in a park starts picking up and dancing with your kid. But we're like, "Oh, I've been to Lebanon." And the culture is just so welcoming.

We ended up spending two hours there having meals, talking about our trip to Lebanon, and having a way to connect with people. And I think it turns out we live half a mile from a Lebanese church. And they're like, "Come on every second and fourth Sunday is when we have all the families there, and we do all these events and gatherings.

We don't care if you practice whatever religion, just come. We love meeting people who understand and are excited to learn more about our culture." And so I think one cool thing to take away, and depending where in the country you are, it could be harder or easier, but you don't have to go halfway around the world to have a really immersive cultural experience that's far different from where you are.

And so I think we try to have those experiences when we're traveling, but we also try to have those experiences here and find the pockets of a city that are lots of Korean restaurants or lots of people doing XYZ and try to do that while we're here. Because for us, we can't always be traveling.

And with two small kids, it's hard. But it's not hard to necessarily go to a local Korean restaurant or meet a bunch of Lebanese people dancing in the park. That's awesome. And that's great that you had a kid that was just completely fearless and just ran in and sort of insinuated in that situation.

Kids are actually a great travel tool. I have a lot of old traveler friends who, they get married and they start to have kids and they're worried that it's going to cut into their travel experience. You know what I can, because kids need a certain structure and discipline on the road.

But I've found that people around the world love kids and they don't really need a common language to pick up a kid and admire how cute it is. And so, kids can really be a window into a place. And when they get to a certain age, not only are they fearless, but they have no preconceptions about what is or isn't important.

I have a chapter in The Vagabond's Way about I went with my nephew to Père Lachaise Cemetery in France, and he was 14. And usually, you go there and it's like, "Oh, here's Jim Morrison's grave," or "Here's Oscar Wilde's grave," or "Here's Abelard and Eloise." Well, he was 14.

He didn't know who any of these people were. Jim Morrison died the year I was born. So, he barely knew who the doors were. But he just was curious about everything. He's like, "Well, why are there all these flowers on this grave? His name is Frank Alamo." It's like, "Well, I don't know." And he's like, "You don't know who Frank Alamo is?" It's like, "I've been here for 10 times, but I don't know." So, we looked it up and Frank Alamo is like this sort of Elvis-style pop star who just died in France.

And there's this other grave in the cemetery that had all these hammers and weasels carved into this giant grave. And it was this Russian princess whose fortune was made on iron and fur, hence the hammers and the weasels. And it's just sort of this strange mystery that basically all he brought to this place was his imagination because he was a 14-year-old kid.

And suddenly, I was learning things in a cemetery that I had been to several times. And so, I think kids can be a great travel tool because not only are they just excited that people are dancing, but also they humanize you to other people. It's one thing to be a couple of outsiders in a group, but outsiders with kids who are excited about things, then suddenly, you're one of them in a certain way.

A family is a very recognizable unit around the world. And it's a great window into places. I know you don't have children, but you've got your nephew. I'm sure you've had more travel conversations than probably anyone listening. Are there tips that you've picked up from others that you'd give to people with kids trying to think, "Gosh, travel can be stressful with children.

It seems like too much. How to make it easier? How to make it feel more approachable?" Well, again, structure is something that they need more than your average dirtbag traveler. They need a sense for how each day works. But maybe also take them into environments that do capture their imagination, maybe environments where there are other kids.

We default to museums and cathedrals way of travel, which is fine and interesting, but it's more abstracted. It's more tied into things like history or religion or wherever. We're sometimes just a random park. Now, I feel like if somebody is in the Bay Area, they should go to this park where you found that dance.

Basically, any park where people are having fun is a window into a place. And kids, at the end of the day, love to run around. And there's so many places, preferably away from heavy traffic, where kids can run around and suddenly, you're hanging out and your kids are opening doors into a place that you wouldn't have noticed before because kids don't need to have a common language to run around and have fun.

And sometimes they'll talk to each other and have perfect conversations without realizing they don't really speak the same language at a certain age. And so, I think just sort of that openness and realizing that it's a lot simpler than you think. I think we can sometimes micromanage parenthood in the United States.

We have our special backpack full of the sippy cup and then the iPad and all these things that we feel like we need to keep a kid occupied, when in fact, a green space where they can run around with other kids is great. Actually, that market, I'm sure kids would be really excited visually and centrally by a market just because it's like, to use a metaphor that would make sense when I was a kid, it's like something from Star Wars.

It's like the cantina scene from Star Wars where the music is different and the food is different. And in this kid-like way, it's like you're on another planet. And so, I think allowing your kids to engage their imaginations in a way that we as parents and elders sometimes have ceased to do is a great way to make them great travel allies and to sort of follow their example of being kid-like in a place that we don't understand but we can be engaged by.

I want to talk a little bit about slow travel, but I think that is also a big thing. I haven't done this yet. Our kids are two and four months, but we thought about travel. It's like, what if instead of trying to take a week trip to Italy, we take a month trip, we find some Airbnb, we could rent our place out here while we're gone so that the cost of the trip is a little cheaper.

Or maybe, I haven't thought about this way, we find a family and stay with them or something and get to know people. But when you're there and you create a routine, you can create the routine there. There's not as much pressure of, "Oh, well, we have to do all this stuff because we're only here for four days." It's like, "Well, today, we're going to go to the park.

Maybe we're going to sit at a cafe. We'll come home, you can take a nap." We don't have to get it all done. I think I'm really excited to do a little bit more of that style travel, which we did on our big trip, because we didn't have the money.

We were just like, "We're going to stay in the city for a week because we can't afford to keep moving." But I think that could be something valuable to do with kids instead of the traditional late 20s trip where you're just like, "Go, go, go through everything." I think that's great.

Experience more by doing less. In fact, you live in a very popular part of the United States. There's actually home exchanges. You can find somebody in Italy who wants to live in the Bay Area for a while. There are online sites where you can do home exchanges. I live in Kansas.

Have you heard of people that have had success? I want to do a little bit of research here, but it's like, what are the odds that there's a person in Italy who wants to come to the Bay Area the same week I want to go to Italy? Have you heard good success stories from people doing this?

Absolutely. Some of the students in my Paris class from the Bay Area have done home swaps. They basically find a place to stay during my class in Paris while the French family is enjoying a California vacation of their own. There's no silver bullet. It's not a perfect thing, but it's very doable, especially if you live in a part of the United States where people from other countries would like to live in themselves.

And then the great thing about being with a family in a place is that doing chores, washing dishes, you're basically routine, you're suddenly doing it in a more Italian way. And I guarantee when you walk down the same street for the third day in a row with your super cute kids, the guy that owns the pastry shop is going to come out with a little snack for your kids.

Basically, you become a part of the habit of that neighborhood. I think sometimes tourists, even backpackers are ghosts. They're there for a couple of days and they're gone. And so, you can't really develop relationships. Whereas in for a month, it can be really special if there's this American family that's suddenly in the village and they don't speak the language that well.

And they're sort of cute when they order the food because they get the words wrong and they order a dessert food item for dinner or whatever. But then suddenly, you have this new enlivened empathy simply because you have joined, instead of being part of a touristic routine in a place, you've joined the daily routine of the people who live there.

And then suddenly, you and your family or you and your partner or you as a person alone are experiencing a place in a very rich way that is not taking five countries off your list, but it's taking one community for example, a month. And you're really going deep in a way that you're probably more likely to think about it in your old age, that one month in the beautiful Italian village, than if you'd been racing to five different countries in that one month during the same time.

So, I'm a big fan of slow travel. It's funny because you talked earlier about getting your hair cut. And I think back to our trip around the world and some of the most memorable moments. And mine too was getting my hair cut in Nairobi by someone who was terrified because they're like, "I've never cut a white person's hair in my whole life." And I was like, "Look, I promise you, you can't mess this up.

I don't care." And we had this amazing... It wasn't quite as long as your experience. But it was so much fun. And we had a great conversation. And I remember that infinitely more than probably... I can't even tell you the restaurant that maybe someone recommended I go to or was the highest rated and we went to.

I don't know what it was. I don't remember a dinner out in Nairobi, but I do remember that haircut. And so, I think that's interesting. You mentioned checking items off a list. I'm curious how you feel about people creating bucket lists or kind of... Is that something that you're like anti-bucket list?

Do you like it? How do you feel about the concept? Well, I have a whole mini chapter about bucket lists. I'm not anti-bucket list, but you really have to understand that the bucket list is what gets you out the door. Because so many items on the bucket list, the pyramids being a great example, well, there's a lot of tourist buses there.

There's a lot of Egyptians there who are part of the tourist industry and they want you to pay $100 to sit on a camel, which is fine. But I think five hours spent in a neighborhood market in Cairo is going to be more rewardingly Egyptian than you would have five hours waiting in line and going around and getting your pictures for Instagram at the pyramids.

I'm not going to say don't go to the pyramids, but I'm just going to say that the things that you find by accident on the way to the various items on your bucket list are probably going to be the things that make you happiest. You're talking, not to make this all about haircuts, but I was driving in New Orleans with my friend Dan once and he just said, "I'm sick of my hair.

I need a haircut." So, we just pulled off the road. We just happened to be in Canton, Mississippi. We pulled into a place, it was a black neighborhood and we go into a barbershop and the guy's like, "I've never cut white hair, but I got this." This is the United States.

We sort of made the day of everybody in this black barbershop. It was sort of this collective effort, like let's cut Dan's hair. He doesn't have the naturally kinky black hair that the people in this neighborhood have, but let's figure this out because in Canton, Mississippi, white people never come into this barbershop.

It was this funny thing. It wasn't the best haircut that my friend Dan ever got, but we sort of made their day because in a town where there's still elements of segregation and white people just don't swagger into the barbershop in the black part of town. Suddenly, we had this experience that whatever lack of proficiency that in the haircut was, it was super memorable and super fun where suddenly we were just sort of casually hanging out in a black barbershop in Canton, Mississippi because we needed a haircut and it was as memorable as anything we found on the way to New Orleans.

We had a blast in New Orleans. I'm not going to knock that, but part of what was fun were the things that happened away from Bourbon Street or the other things that you're supposed to see in New Orleans or on the way to New Orleans itself, stopping in this town that we didn't really know much about before we randomly walked into a barbershop to get a haircut.

I think being willing, even as you seek out items on your bucket list, to surprise yourself and to foolishly wander into a barbershop that isn't necessarily used to cutting your kind of hair, that can be super memorable. It was obviously memorable for you in Kenya and it was memorable for us in Mississippi.

I think this juxtaposes something really fascinating, which is I think, "Oh, I had this experience. I had to go halfway around the world to get my hair cut by someone who'd never cut a white person's hair, and here you do it straight in the United States." I think so much of travel, and I'm guilty of this myself, it's like in order to have these crazy experiences or unique experiences or different experiences, you have to go halfway around the world.

Can you help me get over that? This was one example, but how do you feel about the fact that I feel like there's all this pressure to have to travel, you need to hop on a plane and cross an ocean? Yeah, well, a couple of things came to mind.

One is that whole concept of walk until your day becomes interesting. Just going for walks, counterintuitive walks in your own neighborhood or in one neighborhood over, and just even walking to work or driving to work in a way that you're not used to doing, just finding different patterns in your home environment on foot can be really interesting.

One thing I talk about in The Vagabond's Way is how about during the pandemic, my wife and I were itchy to travel, but we really couldn't. We couldn't go see your cousins in Norway, so we decided to walk to a town in Kansas called Little Sweden. It was 22 miles from our front door to Little Sweden.

It took us seven hours. Our feet hurt really bad, but it was so fun to see this little landscape of the Kansas countryside on foot through a method that we had never seen before, so that was really fun. Even simpler than walking 22 miles to Little Sweden is these food experiences.

I think one fun thing about the barbershop experience in Mississippi is that we had broken an unwritten rule, which is white people don't get their hair cut in black neighborhoods. Well, oftentimes, we go to places that are "dangerous" in our own hometown, but even places where poorer people live, they have to eat lunch.

What's it like to go to a cafeteria counter in a neighborhood we don't usually go to? I think sometimes we realize that there's a wealth of cultural options in our own town, just because we're in the habit of our own social class or our own bubble of familiarity in our home, and that sometimes a neighborhood that's seen as a barrio neighborhood probably has the best Mexican and Latin American food in your own community.

It might just be a storefront that's next to a television repair shop, but odds are that food is really great. The price of doing it is just being willing to go to that part of town where maybe not as many people speak English as they do in your own neighborhood, and going to a place where people who might have a generation ahead of them still living in Mexico, and suddenly you're eating food in a context.

Actually, speaking of Mexico specifically, my sister who teaches college in the little Sweden town here in Kansas, she realized that most of the Mexican people who worked at local restaurants and stuff didn't just come from Mexico, but they came from Zacatecas. They came from a place called Fresnillo. She realized that there were buses that go from central Kansas to Zacatecas.

For 10 or 20 bucks, you can go to Mexico on the same buses that migrant workers go to see their family. Just by pushing the envelope, not just going to the Mexican restaurant, by saying, "Where exactly in Mexico are you? How often do you see your family?" Really, there's a shuttle service that goes to Wichita that takes you to a bigger bus that goes to Dallas.

It takes you to an even bigger bus that takes you to the border. Then you take Mexican buses home. She actually was able to create an adventure to Mexico with her family that cost nothing. They were able to, instead of hanging out with tourists going to Mexico to Cancun, nothing against Cancun, but basically they took a bus full of people who work in the service economy of central Kansas, and they were able to get to see a part of Mexico that they never would have otherwise seen because they were willing to see a part of Kansas that they had never otherwise seen.

I think food in immigrant communities is a huge window. Even if you don't end up on a minibus to Mexico, being willing to just unfold the layers in immigrant communities in your own hometown is a great way to experience travel while you're still home. There are a few things we haven't touched on that I'd love to talk about briefly.

I know you took this trip about, I don't know, a decade ago, where you just literally had no bags. First off, that's wild. We did no checked bags, which I think is doable. TBD on how doable it is to small kids. What did you learn from going on a trip with no bags, and what does that change now?

What do you not take on trips now? One thing I learned almost immediately that this big central core conflict in telling a story about traveling the world with no luggage became pretty easy pretty fast. I was traveling with a sponsor. I had a vest full of things where I could put things in my pockets.

I got used to that system very early, and people would often say, "Well, gosh, I wouldn't want to sit next to you on an airplane. You must smell bad." It's like, "No, I actually showered every day, and I washed my clothes every day." Basically, at the end of the day, I would take off the clothes I was wearing, shower with them, dry them up for the next day, and I would just rotate two sets of clothes.

I was actually very clean. Once I got used to it, it was pretty simple to do. Early on, my sponsors are saying, "Should we contact the Guinness Book of World Records? I don't think this has ever been done." It's like, "Have you heard of refugees? Have you heard of merchants that have been traveling the world forever?" The idea that you have to travel the world with a bunch of giant bags is pretty new in a certain sense.

Yeah, I guess the first lesson I learned is that once I got into my meticulous cleanliness routines, I didn't really miss my bags that much. Now, this has not made me a full-time, no-baggage traveler, but what it did make me realize is that it's not that hard to take a small day pack or like 30-liter or less backpack with you that you can put in the overhead bin, because at the end of the day, really, what I was most relieved not to have were the giant bags that I had to check under the plane or drag around over the cobblestones or to grunt through the tropical country with sweat dripping down my brow.

I realized that my kit, whether it be in pockets or in a relatively small bag, you don't really need that much to have a great time when you travel. In a sense, our best travel memories aren't about the crap that we put in our backpack. It's about this awesome thing that we found in the village square.

It's about these people we met, or it's this experience we had, or at the very least, it's about something that we got and we put in our backpack and brought home from the other side of the world to commemorate this memory of a great experience we had before. It was such an instructive trip.

To this day, I haven't really done anything that compares to going literally with no baggage for six weeks around the world. It was a blast to do, but it's really leavened me. Three years ago, I traveled around the world for three months with one 30-liter bag, and it was easy.

In fact, I still felt like sometimes I was overpacked. At the end of the day, it just didn't take that much for me to have a great time and have everything I needed. One final thought about that, it's even easier these days with so much on your smartphone to help guide your trip from GPS maps to language translators.

There's fewer things that you do have to pack in your bags. Of course, this brings up the can of worms of your phone can actually distract from your travel experience too. But no, there's really no longer any reason to take a bunch of stuff around the world. Just discipline yourself into taking the bare minimum and letting the world provide the rest, including experiences.

Are there any items that you're like, "This one particular brand of shoes or sweater is the thing that I always bring now." Is there anything for you that's your go-to travel item? I think besides my Kindle, and I don't want to sing the praises of Kindle too much because I'm a big fan of independent bookstores, and my new book is out in hardcover.

It's my fifth book, but it's the first time I have a book in hardcover. But the Kindle allows me to take my library with me. I love it. There's certain clothing items. I'm a fan of merino wool, for example. I'm a fan of my 30-liter pack. I'm a fan of Blundstone boots.

They're not a sponsor. Actually, my merino wool and my pack are sponsors because Vagabonding is such an old book. People have actually started travel product companies and said, "Look, Vagabonding inspired this." So it's like, "Oh, y'all wear it. This is pretty good." Blundstone boots out of Australia is not one of those companies.

I think they've been making them since the 19th century. I love Blundstones. They don't have laces. You can slip them on and slip them off. They're very sturdy. They look as good in a nightclub as they do on a mountain trail. So I'm a big fan of that, but it's not that many things.

My Kindle, my boots, a few toiletries, my merino wool, and I'm a pretty minimalist traveler, and I'm happy traveling that way. Well, you brought up the phone, so I feel like it'd be a good place to go. I thought about the first international trip I took that I remember.

I took some as a young kid, but the first one that I was on my own without my parents. I went to Taiwan when I was the first freshman or sophomore in college because I'd gone to boarding school. My roommate in high school was in Taiwan. I was like, "I want to go visit him." I was like, "Gosh, we didn't have iPhones." So I was thinking about this trip and all the things we did.

I was like, "Well, I guess we just relied on locals and instincts and it didn't matter." Now I think about trips and the way technology has changed, both for the better and the worse, the experience of being somewhere. I know you've challenged people to leave their phones behind at different parts of trips.

How do you think technology has changed things, and how can we still have the kinds of experiences that we all want to have and not get distracted? Well, I remember that first wave of technology that really allowed us to travel in a different way. In fact, my example is my first vagabond trip was 1994.

I was living in a van, and I would call my parents once a week with my calling card. This is before I used email. Five years later, I was living in Asia, and it felt like a luxury to be able to email my family. I was in closer touch with my family from Mongolia than I was from Oklahoma, right?

Just five years earlier. Around that same time, that was 1999, I remember there were some articles, I think in the San Francisco Chronicle, about how virtual reality will allow you to travel the world without leaving your home, right? Well, now that we have the smartphone, now that we have this little black mirror in our pockets, we can be traveling the world without really leaving home in the habit sense.

We're still sending text messages to our friends. We're still looking at our social media feeds. We're still reading. Instead of picking up the local newspaper, we're reading an online newspaper or an online social media feed that we still do back home. In a sense, smartphones have made travel easier.

They've made it harder to get lost and harder to get bored, but they've also sort of trapped us into those same insipid habits that we have back home. I've literally met travelers who, even on the other side of the world, the last thing they do before they fall asleep is look at their phone.

The first thing they look at when they wake up is look at their phone. It's like, "Guys, you paid all this money to go to the other side of the world. Do you really need to put a phone between yourself and what you're experiencing?" That's why I'm a big fan of encouraging people to use their five senses, to not just look and listen, but to smell and taste and feel their way around the world.

Really, you don't have to travel without a phone at all, but maybe leave it in the room for a day. My wife and I did this in Paris and Norway this summer. We found all the cool places we wanted to see on our computers and phone when we were still in our lodging, but we would mark it on a paper map and use that paper map to explore the city.

That allowed us to not fall back on our phone every time we thought we were lost, not to fall back on our phone every time we wanted to send that cool picture of the cool dog to our mom back home. Basically, it just forced us to be unconnected for a while.

We could have those experiences. Sometimes, there's this little pencil for a restaurant that we wanted to see in the 20th arrondissement, but suddenly we found a place in the 11th arrondissement that was cooler and completely caught us by surprise. This cool fromagerie was next door, and we got some cheese for the next day.

I think allowing yourself to have experiences by chance, to use the information that is available through our phone, but not to drown ourself in all these options so that we're always questioning the moment we're in. I think, again, going back to the idea of living so much of our lives in the future, even as we plan and try to be responsible individuals, we cheat ourselves so much out of what is in the present.

It's actually an old phrase now, FOMO, fear of missing out. Sometimes, if we have our phone, we could be having this amazing experience in an amazing city, but our phone is telling us that, "Oh, maybe there's a better market that's five minutes this way," or, "Maybe there's a better restaurant that's 10 minutes this way." Actually, no, it's amazing you found this place by accident.

Embrace that while you have it. Give yourself permission to trust your instincts, to trust your nose and your palate as much as that smartphone app, because those are the things that you're going to remember, that you're really allowing yourself to travel as a pilgrim instead of as a consumer, and to wander yourself into a deeper understanding of what that travel experience can be.

A couple of things I want to hit before we wrap. I found that one of the greatest ways that I lighten the cost of my travels is to play the travel hacking points and miles game. I know you're not as deep in that world as me, but I'm curious if there are any cost-saving travel hacks that you like that we can share with people listening.

My old one was just fly into a place and then take it from there, that regardless of the multi-itinerary you could do, there might be a train that crosses an international border, there might be buses, there might be shared taxis that could inspire the next Lyft or Uber in some part of the world that you didn't even know existed, but suddenly it's a really cool way to travel and the people are just delighted that this awkward, sweaty American is in this shared taxi in Laos or Senegal or some other part of the world.

So I'm a big fan of overland travel and flying into a place and winging it from there. Oftentimes too, you go into the neighborhood in Bangkok or the neighborhood in Nairobi where local people find their plane tickets, and oftentimes those onward flights are cheaper than if they had been done internationally through a middleman.

What I've done as I've gotten older, I'm not the best flight travel hacker in the world. I can probably learn from you and other people who've done that quite well with credit cards and miles and things like that. In part, I got so insinuated in the overland travel into the point-to-point sort of bucket shop travel, bucket shops are places where in immigrant communities or in local communities where you buy discounted tickets, but I've often found that more recently I've taken a lot of trips through flight aggregators like Airtrex, airtrex.com, that allows you to plan multi-stop itineraries under one umbrella that you can fly around.

I think they do itineraries up to 25 stops, but I usually do it usually four to eight stops. I've done it around the world, but this summer, for example, I went from Denver to London to Paris to Norway to Faroe Islands, back to London and Denver. Just under one umbrella, I was able to have them put together the best flights possible.

There's two ways you can do it with Airtrex. One is that they have an online widget that you can go in and one fun thing is you can waste half a day just doing a sample trip that you don't actually plan on taking, but just seeing how much would it cost for me to fly from New York to Brazil to West Africa to Italy and take a train to Moscow and then take another train to the Pacific and then fly to Bangkok.

You can waste a day just doing trips that are absurd and just to see if it works. They also have a number that you can call and talk to a person. I usually use them in tandem and the person will help you put together this trip and they might give you some advice like saying, "Well, actually the cheapest way to fly from Los Angeles to Australia is through Singapore and maybe you can just stay for a week in Singapore on this cheap trip and get another experience out of that trip." What I do with Airtrex is usually I'll tinker around with their online widget and then when I think I know where to go, I'll call the representative.

It's like a travel coach and they help you design that flight. I'm not saying it's always the best way to hack flights, but my gosh, if you have an extended multi-stopper around the world flight, it's a great way to go because it saves money and then you basically have everything is under one bucket and you basically have an advisor that can give you that great advice saying that, "Yeah, you'll save $200 going through Bangkok and actually Bangkok's pretty cool.

Why don't you stay there two weeks and save another $100?" It's not technically a hack, but it's a great service, Airtrex.com. Cool. And then the last other question I always like to ask everyone, is there a city in the world you know well enough to leave anyone listening who might be heading there with a few unusual or fun recommendations for whether it's a meal, a drink or some unusual activity or experience?

Wow, let me think. Immediately it came to my Paris. I'm not even that much of an expert on Paris. I've been there many, many, many summers in a row to teach English. And so, my French isn't even that good. I'm there teaching classes in English. And the Parisian, this is sort of cheating on the answer, but it's a good answer.

It's an old French technique of the flaneur. Do you know what a flaneur is? A flaneur is, this is Baudelaire sort of invented the idea in the 19th century. It's a person who walks through the city, not in search of things, but just in search of experiences. They don't see the city as this utilitarian route between point A and point B.

It's a person that realizes that wandering from point A to point B is full of experiences that you don't know about yet. And so, you can use it as, it's technically a male verb, but you can be a flaneuse or you can be a female flaneur. But it's a noun, but it can also be a verb.

I'm going to flaneur my way through this experience. It's very baked into the Parisian way of seeing the world. You can practice it in any city in the world. And you probably don't want to go through a dangerous neighborhood drunk at night, but being a flaneur who just sort of wanders through a city, not quite knowing where you're going to go, but knowing that something awesome is going to happen.

Again, based on something you smell, something you see, or somebody you bump into, that is a great strategy for seeing a place. And I'll have an aside story. I talk about it in the Vagabond's way that I used Trip Advisor to find Trip Advisor's best rated rendang restaurant in the Indonesian city of Bukit Tinggi.

I went there and it was fine. But what I realized, I'd gone through a market, again, going back to markets, through of people who lived in Bukit Tinggi, eating dinner, and they weren't going to this place. They didn't use Trip Advisor. They lived in Bukit Tinggi. They're eating in the market.

And so, I realized that I had used this, instead of just flaneuring my way through the market and seeing what was delicious, I'd use Trip Advisor to go to a place that was outside of the market. So, that has only reinforced the idea that wandering through a place, just sort of being hyper aware, not to your phone, but to the environment in the manner of a flaneur who's just seeking experience and is seeking surprise, that's probably better than any single recommendation I could give you in Paris.

And if I do, my wife is the foodie. She could give you restaurant recommendations, but she's out of town today. So, be a flaneur. That's okay. I'll take it. That's a fair answer. And the book, the book's out. You can get it where books are sold. I picked up a copy at a local bookstore.

So, thank you for writing it. It was fantastic. Where could people stay on top of everything you're doing, all your writing, and everything you're up to? I'm an old school website guy. I've had it for almost 25 years, RolfPotts.com. It connects to all my socials, which I use from time to time, but really, it's a good starting point for all the books I've written, for all my podcasts, my Deviate with Rolf Potts podcast, with articles I've written back into my dirtbag days in the 1990s.

For all things Rolf Potts, it's a good place to start. Awesome. Well, Rolf, thank you so much for being here. Yeah. It's good talking to you, Chris, and it's fun to hear your stories. Good luck with your next adventure with your kids.