Liminal Travel: The Spaces In Between

Most travel books tell you where to go and what to do when you get there. This one tells you how to disappear into the spaces in between.

Liminal Travel is a guide for the traveler who doesn’t fit the usual categories — not a backpacker burning through a gap year, not a retiree ticking off a bucket list, not a yuppie eating their way through approved neighborhoods. It’s for the person who has left one place and isn’t sure where the next one is yet, and finds — to their surprise — that this is the best part.

CD Damitio has spent decades in that between-state: between countries, between identities, between certainties. He’s hitchhiked across Canada with four dollars. He’s sat in Frankfurt airport for 24 hours with diarrhea and no money. He’s also stood on a Paris balcony with a good bottle of wine knowing he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Both of those things are liminal travel.

The book covers the practical — how to find accommodation when you haven’t booked ahead, how to eat well on nothing, how to move without a plan — but also the larger territory: why the between-state is spiritually valuable, and how to use uncertainty as a teacher.

Originally published 2013. Updated edition includes a new chapter on Baoism.