Welcome to the seventh edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.
In our first edition of the new year, we’ve got a selection of stories, trends, and conversations to inspire your travel plans for 2025. There’s a podcast with Tim Ferris and Rolf Potts, who talk about everything from long-term travel tactics and “vagabonding,” to redefining one’s mindset around success and seeing a city with new eyes.
There’s a series of larger-than-life vignettes from the pulsating heart of Bangkok’s traveller hub, and an engaging collection of trends for 2025 that shed light on how – and why – travel is changing. We also voyage to Paris to hear an esoteric take on why many a traveller’s aspirations culminate in this city, and the Champs-Élysées.
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For your sense of possibility | Travel tactics, creating time wealth, and lateral thinking
If you’re hatching travel plans, author and perpetual traveller Rolf Potts’ ideas around “time wealth” and shifting our mindsets away from travel as a consumer experience are a compelling place to start. In fact, if renting out your home to live in another part of the world feels like a real possibility after listening to this wide-ranging conversation between Rolf Potts and Tim Ferris, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Potts is the author of Vagabonding, the 2002 book that’s often credited with shaping the digital nomad movement. His advice and insights are evergreen, to the extent that his 2022 sequel, The Vagabond’s Way, hones in on the philosophies of vagabonding and how to apply them to various phases of a trip, starting with “dreaming and planning the journey.” Ferriss is, among other things, author of the bestseller The Four Hour Work Week, which was partly inspired by some of the ideas in Pott’s “life-changing” book.
In this podcast, they delve into the most common fears that keep people from travelling, some of which Potts also faced when he took his first “vagabonding trip” 21 years ago.
“I was straggling back to Kansas after having this amazing eight-month trip around North America. And it was a trip that I thought would be my last. I thought I would get travel out of my system so I could become a responsible American workaholic, and then maybe return to travel when I was old. The fears I had going out were ‘Is this going to be expensive, is this going to be dangerous, am I going to come back and be compromised professionally’?”
One of my favourite parts is Potts waxing lyrical about being a flâneur, which he sums up with the mantra: “If in doubt, just walk until your day becomes interesting.” The concept, first explored at length by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, applies as much to wandering your own city as travelling, and is about “stay[ing] open to experience instead of your plans.” This, and the ‘beginner’s mind’ – “one of the most emotionally daunting and exciting parts of travel, where you just allow yourself to be a child again” – can help us to understand why travel sparks joy, and makes us feel whole again.
🔗 Listen to the original recording of the two-part podcast, or play Potts’ January 2024 “remix” of the conversation, which combines parts 1 & 2 and includes some fresh commentary. Find the pair’s next podcast here, which delved into The Vagabond’s Way and “sustain[ing] the mindset of a journey, even when one isn’t able to travel”. Links to all of Potts’ books are on his website.
For your je ne sais quoi | Avenue to paradise
If you dream of visiting Paris, you probably also dream about the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: the city’s quintessential avenue, linking two of its best-loved monuments, the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe.
In this refreshing and somewhat philosophical introduction to the avenue, Gary Kraut – who’s been welcoming visitors to Paris for three decades – unravels the famous thoroughfare’s name, literally and figuratively.
🔗 Listen here, or “be a flâneur for the day on a stroll up the full length of the world-famous avenue” on Gary’s highly-rated VoiceMap tour, The Champs-Elysées: From Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe.
For your sense of anticipation | Travel Trends 2025
The popular search aggregator Skyscanner has compiled Travel Trends 2025, which sheds light on the ways in which people think about travel and how this will influence US travellers’ plans in the year ahead.
The report’s seven key trends range from a rise in “health, resilience, and longevity tourism” – with 75% of American travelers surveyed saying they believe vacations “can help build resilience and strength so they’re better able to handle the stresses of everyday life” – to a trend towards travelling to sporting events to “feel part of a community”. It also lists destinations with the biggest increase in flight searches, the most surprising of which was Luang Prabang, the (once) sleepy Mekong River town in landlocked Laos where I retreated for a few months in 2011 to finish the final chapters of a book.
Happily, there seems to be a clear trend towards visiting less touristed parts of the world, with over a quarter of global respondents surveyed saying they hope to have a more positive impact on the communities they visit in future. But even more respondents (one third) said that knowing where to go is the biggest barrier to visiting under-touristed destinations. “By inspiring travellers to look at alternatives to the big-ticket capital cities and popular destinations, we can not only help them to support local communities, but also help to reduce over-tourism and encourage tourism dispersal,” the report points out.
🔗 Scan the engaging and easy-to-read report here, skip to the section about ways in which travel mirrors or responds to broader global trends, or head straight to the top ten ‘trending’ or ‘best value’ destinations around the world.
For your sense of nostalgia | The Place to Disappear
The way we travel has changed immensely since Susan Orlean wrote her iconic New Yorker piece about Bangkok’s Khao San Road 25 years ago this month. “Everything you need to stay afloat for months of travelling” was available in the bustling backpacker centre, wrote the author and columnist – and, in the nineties, that included well-thumbed guidebooks, American movie screenings, and dusty Internet cafés.
She described the infamous street at the heart of Southeast Asia’s travel network as “anchored in the world by the Internet, where there is no actual time and no actual location.” There was, of course, no way she could anticipate the extent to which smartphones would anchor us to the Internet wherever we go and, as a result, make this statement true of almost any destination. And so, Khao San Road – once an information sharing and storytelling hub for travellers plotting their onward journeys – must once again reinvent itself.
Orlean’s piece stirs up nostalgia for this relatively unplugged era of travel. But there’s also an uncanny timelessness to her description of the 400 metre-long street, as a “sort of non-place” that travellers pass through “so they could get to the place they really wanted to go.” That might be “a minibus trip to Phuket or Penang or Kota Baharu, or an overland journey by open-bed pickup truck to Phnom Penh or Saigon, or a trip via some rough conveyance to India or Indonesia or Nepal or Tibet or Myanmar or anywhere you can think of – or couldn’t think of, probably, until you saw it named on a travel-agency kiosk on Khao San Road and decided that was the place you needed to see.”
There’s also a series of vibrant vignettes of the people she encounters, including three Scottish friends who, one evening, find themselves sitting in a guesthouse bar beside an inebriated man who speaks fluent “Drunkard”.
“It was close to midnight, and the girls were sitting at a rattletrap table outside Lucky Beer, eating noodles and drinking Foster’s Lager and trying to figure out how to get to Laos. (…) It was as if the strangeness of where they were and what they were doing were absolutely ordinary: as if there were no large, smelly drunk sprawled in front of them, as if it were quite unexceptional to be three Scottish girls drinking Australian beer in Thailand on their way to Laos, and as if the world were the size of a peanut – something as compact as that, something that easy to pick up, shell, consume, as long as you were young and sturdy and brave. If you spend any time on Khao San Road, you will come to believe that this is true.”
🔗 Read The Place to Disappear, Orlean’s postcard from this nowhere (or everywhere) place here.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire
Have you stumbled upon something in the wide world of travel that lit you up? We’d love to hear from you! Simply reply to this email and look out for your nugget in future editions, where we’ll share a selection of readers’ tip-offs.