Interview with Vago Damitio

I met travel writer Vago Dami­tio online ear­lier this year when we were both entrants in an online novel writ­ing com­pe­ti­tion where he was show­cas­ing his bril­liant  Douchebags, Fags, and Hags.  The novel, which deals with the cross-country mis­ad­ven­tures of a man named Pigrone, has just been released as an ebook.  To mark the occa­sion I caught up with Vago Dami­tio, to talk about travel, spir­i­tu­al­ity, and writing.

Peo­ple always ask me this– actu­ally, they ask me ‘What’s your eth­nic back­ground? Is that Ital­ian?’ I like to tell them that it’s not an Ital­ian name, it’s actu­ally Fan­ci­ful. The funny part is when I see that look as they try to place where the coun­try of Fance is. In truth, it is fan­ci­ful. Unlike the pro­ta­gan­ist in my lat­est novel, Pigrone or Pig, I wasn’t lucky enough to be given the name by a hot Ital­ian woman look­ing for a one night stand — but, we do have some­thing in com­mon, Pigrone means lazy in Ital­ian and Vago means lazy in Span­ish.  My Span­ish friends often have a hard time intro­duc­ing me because mi amigo Vago actu­ally comes out sound­ing about like ‘my no-good, lazy friend’.  Still, I haven’t answered your ques­tion.  I wasn’t given the name Vago by my par­ents even though my mom, my wife and just about every­one calls me Vago. Instead, I was named Vago by a bar­tender who started call­ing me that after weeks of me ped­dling my first book “Rough Liv­ing: Tips and Tales of a Vagabond” in his bar. First it was, “Hey, it’s the Vagabond,” after a bit it just became “Hey, Vago” sort of like Norm from Cheers. Friends started call­ing me that and when I went trav­el­ing, it was always how I intro­duced myself.  Now, it’s my name. So you see, it is Fan­ci­ful, but I’m not from Fance.

This is a tough one. At one point, back when there weren’t a hun­dred thou­sand blogs that include the word vagabond and Rolf Potts and I were pretty much the only two writ­ers who thought it was fun to use such an obscure term to describe our­selves, it was pretty easy. The vagabond­ing lifestyle was all about long term travel and giv­ing up home, job, pos­ses­sions, and seden­tary life to do it.  Today, it’s a much broader cat­e­gory because you have techno-vagabonds who travel with the lat­est gad­gets and have full time, online careers. You have vagabond fam­i­lies who sail and drive while liv­ing in their vehi­cles, and you still have pen­ni­less, vacant eyed, long term vagabonds too. Essen­tially, I would say the vagabond lifestyle is about adjust­ing your­self to a life of long term or per­pet­ual travel.  For me, this means I have a home base in coun­try where I can afford one and I wan­der around as much as I can while try­ing to fig­ure out how to get my pay­checks from all my wandering.

Your book Lim­i­nal Travel: How to Travel on Almost Noth­ing also deals with wan­der­lust and the appeal of head­ing out and see­ing the globe.  What are some of your favorite places and why?

I haven’t even been close to every­where yet, but out of the places I’ve been, a few stand out.  I adore Turkey.  I mean, I love it. Every­thing about Turkey just clicks with me. It’s an image con­scious coun­try where peo­ple like to look good but they will give you the shirts off their back. It’s a place where you can ride in an air con­di­tioned bus, using onboard wifi, drink­ing tea and being handed lemon cologne by the bus atten­dant (every bus has one or two) and then you can look out the win­dow and see ancient Greek, Roman, and Ottoman ruins. I can go on and on about Turkey — I con­tinue to be a legal res­i­dent there even though I live mostly in Morocco.

I also love the Hawai­ian Islands and the Philip­pines. While it might sound funny, both places are sim­i­lar because they have aquatic cul­tures, heavy Asian influ­ences, beau­ti­ful water, and laid back peo­ple.  The Philip­pines is more afford­able but the sense of Aloha in Hawaii can’t really be matched any­where else. I’m kama’aina, I grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Hawai’i, I’ve worked in Taro patches and I’ve hiked and kayaked about as much as any­one I know of on most of the islands.

Finally, there’s Europe. It’s hard to break it down into tiny lit­tle bits but there are some gems. The French coun­try­side, Paris, the lakes region of Italy, Barcelona, Grenada — there’s some­thing to be said for the grand tour. I feel very for­tu­nate that I’ve been able to explore Europe over the course of years. From sail­ing in the Greek islands to hik­ing on the Isle of Skye — there’s no part of Europe that I haven’t found some won­der in.

And then of course there is Indone­sia, Malaysia, Thai­land, Sin­ga­pore, the Balkans, and I can go on. I’ve never been able to really make dis­tinc­tions because every coun­try has it’s charms and won­ders and mostly, these come from the won­der­ful human beings who live in them.

Oh, it’s a tricky ques­tion for me. I live in Morocco. My wife is Moroc­can, my daugh­ter is half Moroc­can. I have a lot of friends and fam­ily here. In fact though, they all entered my life after I came here.  I came here on a whim when I was explor­ing Spain, I got stuck in a flood when I was couch surf­ing, I fell for the girl and then, despite try­ing to leave again and again, I kept com­ing back for her. I finally mar­ried her and dragged her to live in Turkey, but when our daugh­ter came, it was impor­tant for my wife to be around fam­ily — so back we came. The truth is, I don’t like liv­ing here.  It’s a beau­ti­ful coun­try filled with won­der­ful peo­ple — it’s scenic, exotic, and fas­ci­nat­ing — but for me, it’s a bit like liv­ing in hell. As soon as I can get my wife’s immi­grant visa to the USA cleared, I’m going to drag my fam­ily away again and this time, hope­fully far enough that we won’t be able to eas­ily come back.

I believe in the Invented God. In fact, I am the lat­est prophet of the Invented God. I’m cur­rently writ­ing a book called The Invented God in which I am delv­ing into all of the major reli­gions to find truth. I believe that God is revealed to dif­fer­ent peo­ples and cul­tures in dif­fer­ent ways — I also believe that power hun­gry peo­ple soon sub­vert the truth with lies, so find­ing the true Invented God is a huge chal­lenge. This is my life’s work. It’s one rea­son I want to leave Morocco, this work could get me killed here. Seri­ously, I can never pub­lish while I live here. This is actu­ally the first time I’m dis­cussing it in print. It’s incred­i­bly dangerous.

I believe that my expe­ri­ences with salvia showed me the true nature of God.  Recently, I’ve been read­ing a lot about the God Par­ti­cle they’ve dis­cov­ered with the Hadron Col­lider in Switzer­land — the funny thing is, that idea was revealed to me years ago as I was seek­ing and using salvia.  Salvia is the most intense sub­stance I’ve encoun­tered. It’s not recre­ational, it’s only for the most stoic of seekers.

I would elim­i­nate com­pletely the idea of fiat cur­rency, cash, money, inter­est, and bank­ing. Erase them com­pletely. Human­ity existed for mil­len­nia with­out them and in fact, would be bet­ter off if they dis­ap­peared com­pletely. There would still be power, there would still be trade, but it would be very different.

I’ve been writ­ing since I was about six. I used to make lit­tle sta­pled books.  I was first pub­lished in a school paper when I was fif­teen. My first mag­a­zine arti­cle hap­pened when I was twenty-five, my first news­pa­per col­umn when I was twenty-six, and my first book when I was twenty-nine. I’m forty now.

I pre­fer to write fic­tion. I love the way that the char­ac­ters take over and take my out­lined plot in com­pletely dif­fer­ent direc­tions than I’d intended. If there is any­thing close to play­ing God, writ­ing a novel is it.  For me, giv­ing my char­ac­ters free-will to make their own deci­sions based on who they have become, what they have expe­ri­enced, who they are — that is beau­ti­ful. What I love is that shortly after I cre­ate them, they begin to sur­prise me by doing things I would never think of.

Still, writ­ing non-fiction is incred­i­bly reward­ing. I think what I really love about non-fiction is the research. It’s all about stand­ing on the backs of giants and putting pieces together. I would love to be a researcher and just be able to tell some­one else how to put the pieces together, how to ref­er­ence pre­vi­ous sources, and all that tedious stuff. Maybe some­day, one of my books will hit and I can hire an assis­tant or two.

I love Paul Ther­oux and V.S. Naipaul. I can see why they were friends and why they fell out. They are keen observers, detail obsessed, nar­cis­sists. Per­fect.  I’m also a huge fan of Neil Stephen­son — I love that he cre­ates these fan­tas­tic nov­els around actual details and his­tor­i­cal facts in such a way that the line between the real and the imag­i­nary is very blurred.  And then of course, there are all those clas­sic vagabonds — Jack Ker­ouac, Mark Twain, John Stein­beck, Ernest Hem­ing­way, Jack Lon­don, Robert Louis Steven­son, Her­man Melville, and many more.

This was one of those books that took me to places I never meant to go. I meant to write a snarky cri­tique of the expat com­mu­nity in Morocco but as soon as I cre­ated the char­ac­ter Pigrone, he refused to coop­er­ate with me. I kept try­ing to get him to go to the Sul­tanate of Baboob where I imag­ined the story would take place and I’d cre­ated a whole slew of sec­ondary char­ac­ters, but he refused to go! First he went to Spain, then to Italy, he decided to go wan­der­ing in Tunisia, and finally when he got to where I wanted him to be in the first place, the story was already over! It changed from a snarky expat expose to the jour­ney of a very aver­age guy on his way to find out who he really is. I became so frus­trated with Pig, that at times I thought of throw­ing out the whole project and start­ing over, but at the end of the day, peo­ple read it and love it. They love Pig and the expe­ri­ences he has. Some­one told me today that he was amazed at how much he learned from Pig! To be hon­est, I learned a lot from him too.

Well, of course it is.  I could have called it ‘An Unlikely Jour­ney to the Sul­tanate of Baboob’ but the truth is, Pig is con­stantly meet­ing these odd char­ac­ters — a Tunisian cross dresser is actu­ally the clos­est thing to a gay man he meets, fags actu­ally refers to cig­a­rettes, which I think is pretty funny.  I’ve had sev­eral gay friends read it and they all loved it and didn’t find it offen­sive — though I admit, there are some laughs involv­ing gay innuendos.

I’m not too pop­u­lar with ‘Travel Blog­gers’ these days. I’ve recently spear­headed cre­ation of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Pro­fes­sional Online Travel Jour­nal­ists (IAPOTJ.org) and I’ve called for peo­ple to stop using the terms travel blog and travel blog­ger.  Still, a lot of travel blog­gers still read my arti­cles so when I posted a story about my trip to the Sul­tanate of Baboob and how I was one of the first travel jour­nal­ists invited there — I expected that there would be an imme­di­ate cry of foul and peo­ple would point out that there is no such place.  Instead, after more than a thou­sand page views — the only reac­tion has been peo­ple shar­ing it and say­ing it sounds like an amaz­ing jour­ney. Lonely Planet actu­ally syn­di­cated the story which I find incred­i­bly funny.  48 hours later and you are the first one to call me on it. Nice work!

Vago Dami­tio runs and writes for the web­site vagobond.com. You can pick up ‘Douchebags, Fags, and Hags’, as well his other ebooks on Ama­zon.