Rolf Potts - Marco Polo Didnt Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer

"Rolf Potts is a leading voice of the up-and-coming generation of great travel writers. Embarking on a writing career as the Internet was becoming a mainstream medium, much of Potts's work first appeared online and crackles with immediacy, audacity and electricity. I recommend this book for anyone seeking to read-or writestylishly crafted tales about roaming an ever-changing and always fascinating world."

-Michael Shapiro, author of A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration and Guatemala: A Journey Through the Land of the Maya

"Rolf Potts is at the forefront of a new generation of literary travel writers that came of age with the Internet."

-Bookmarks Magazine

"He's been drugged and robbed in Istanbul, checked out brothels in Cambodia where prostitutes are identified by numbers, and shopped for donkeys in the Libyan Desert. Rolf Potts usually has an interesting answer to the mundane question, `So, what did you do today?"'

-San Francisco Examiner

"Anyone who enjoyed Rolf Potts's travel essays during the heyday of Salon.com already has an appreciation for his descriptive flair and storytelling ability. Unlike so many `I-went-here-and-this-happened' travel writers, his pieces are heavy on cultural nuance and light on self-aggrandizement."

-Globe and Mail (Canada)

"Rolf is one of the sharpest minds among the new generation of travel writers."

-Rick Steves

"Potts encourages us to think about travel in a way that has been almost lost."

-Tim Cahill

"Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age."

-USA Today

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Hawaii, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, South Pacific, Tuscany

Stories to Live By, The Spiritual Gifts of Travel, The Road Within, A Mile in Her Boots, Love & Romance, Food, How to Eat Around the World, The Adventure of Food, The Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage

100 Places Every Woman Should Go, The Best Women's Travel Writing, A Woman's Asia, A Woman's Europe, Her Fork in the Road, A Woman's Path, A Woman's Passion for Travel, A Woman's World, Women in the Wild, Gutsy Women, A Woman's World Again

Not So Funny When It Happened, The Gift of Rivers, How to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet, Danger!, The Penny Pincher's Passport to Luxury Travel, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, The Gift of Birds, Family Travel, A Dog's World, There's No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, The Gift of Travel, 365 Travel, The Thong Also Rises, Adventures in Wine, The World Is a Kitchen, Sand in My Bra, Hyenas Laughed at Me, Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?

A Sense of Place, The Best Travel Writing, Cruise Confidential, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, The Sword of Heaven, Storm, Take Me With You, Last Trout in Venice, The Way of the Wanderer, One Year Off, The Fire Never Dies, The Royal Road to Romance, The Rivers Ran East, Coast to Coast, Trader Horn

ROLF POTTS

For my family, who remind me how sweet home is (even if I'm rarely there)

Kublai asks Marco, "When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?"

"I speak and speak," Marco says, "but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."

-ITALO CALVINO, INVISIBLE CITIES (1972)

INTRODUCTION

xiii

Part One

ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES

Part Two

I'M A TOURIST, YOU'RE A TOURIST

Part Three

THE DUBIOUS THRILL OF PRESS TRIPS

Part Four

PEOPLE You DON'T FORGET

Part Five

TUTORIAL

"I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me, I said to Russia. Thus, my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification."

-Evelyn Waugh, Labels

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

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

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

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