Vagobond is a site dedicated to the spirit of adventurous travel and the love of life that comes from it. The French call it joie de vivre, in Italy it is amore de la vita and in any country you can see it when you find people enjoying what they are doing. Not all vagabonds are traveling on a tiny budget and not all vagabonds are going huge distances. It’s a matter of world view.
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As you no doubt know, a Vagabond (spelled with an ‘A’ – sometimes scarlet:)) is a person without an obvious source of income who wanders from place to place. Since the 1920′s the term has been used to describe a type of travel that doesn’t break your budget and that generally brings one into contact with local people, cultures, and landscapes. (Check out what’s new with Vagobond for 2012 here!)
Harry Franck, a pioneer in cultural travel without giant budgets such as those provided by organizations like the National Geographic Society wrote numerous books about his travels on every continent. (To learn more about Harry, you can visit here. )
In the 1960′s American Ed Byrne set out to explore not only the USA but also Europe and North Africa with a very low budget and a desire to get to know the people. His books and down to earth writing style inspired people like my parents generation and those who followed after them to spend more time than money. Ed is the original slow traveler. (To learn more about Ed, go here.)
During the 1990′s and 2000′s people like myself, Rolf Potts and many others were inspired by Harry, Ed and those greats who came before us to hit the road and learn to travel in a different way than most people were doing. Not just the backpacker trail which had consisted mostly of hippies and dope seekers in cheap places like Thailand and Eastern Europe, but to really see the world and get to know the people in it.
By no means was the idea original even when you go back as far as Ibn Batuta or Herodutus (-more about them and other extraordinary vagabonds here) but it was different than just about everyone else was living. Rolf’s now classic manual for living the road life “Vagabonding” hit the shelves in December of 2002 and in May of 2003, my own “Rough Living: Tips and Tales of a Vagobond” was published.
Since then, travel has changed immeasurably. The internet has become a fundamental part of travel and rather than sending postcards and letters things have become very different. In the 1990′s I started to use group emails to update friends and family, then in 2000 I moved from Yahoo Groups to Blogging. Today nearly anyone embarking on a vagabond adventure starts a blog and postcards, letters, and even group emails are things of the past. In 2012, we suddenly realized that we were no longer a blog. We’d become something else, an online travel magazine.
Vagobond began as a way to share my travels and adventures with friends and family and before long, it had become a place where I was sharing travel tips and stories with strangers too. It was just a matter of time before I began to meet other vagabonds and share their stories too and today, Vagobond has become a place where you can find unique world travel stories, discover amazing vagabond trips, regular travel tips, and fun features like ‘Extraordinary Vagabonds‘ or even plan your trip around the world.
This is where our paths hopefully intersect. Although, Vagobond started as purely my adventures, it is my hope that you will not only discover but share your discoveries with me and the other writers here at Vagobond. I encourage you to not merely view stories here but to interact with them, escape the box store mentality, learn from what is shared here, pass it on to others, and contribute your own thoughts as your read about adventures that are here to inspire.
As always, this is a site that is focused on exploration, discovery and sharing the things that make travel wonderful…or in some cases awful. I hope you will share the journey with all of us here.
About Vago Damitio
Our Editor in Chief
