A little over five years ago, Rolf Potts zipped up his backpack, turned in his key for the hotel room where he'd been holed up on Thailand's Kra Isthmus, and headed back to the United States. The Kansas native, whose new book Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer will be published this month by Travelers' Tales, was heading home after several years of traveling in and around Asia. He spent much of that time working on an award-winning column for Salon, publishing articles in magazines such as National Geographic Adventure and Condé Nast Traveler, and becoming a rising star in the world of travel writing, an increasingly popular genre supported by a growing number of titles on the newsstand.

But not long after he came back to the United States, Potts started to notice that other travel writers working in the genre would turn around and disparage it, a few rejecting the title of "travel writer" outright. In serious literary circles, it seemed, being a travel writer was like admitting you played Dungeons and Dragons or loved REO Speedwagon. At writers conferences, it was called a "trivial genre."

"It was a long infancy for me," says Potts. "I didn't realize that there's sometimes a stigma attached to travel writing. I started traveling around Asia in 1998 and I didn't go home for any substantial amount of time until 2003. I was just this guy sitting in cheap hotels writing stories."

Distanced from American culture, Potts hadn't heard of the "Me and husband Ken" school of travel writing, a derogatory description coined by Tom Swick, author of Unquiet Days at Home in Poland (Ticknor & Fields, 1991); he hadn't paid attention to the kind of writing that Slate writer Jack Schafer later called "standard travel section crap that could have been composed by the local chamber of commerce."

Potts was just trying to write good literary narratives about his travels. He'd been out in the world and struggled to make sense of his experiences, and now he was writing about how the world was changing and how it was changing us. He wasn't the first to try his hand at it.

"I think that tradition goes a long way back," says Jim Benning, editor of WorldHum, the literary travel-writing Web site where Potts is a contributing editor. "People like Hemingway had a huge influence on young writers, with the idea that you go out and have an experience of the world to get your material."

Potts's first big story in this vein didn't have the romantic swagger of classic hard-bitten Hemingway, however. In "Storming The Beach," an essay published in Salon in 1999, Potts chronicled his attempt to infiltrate the set of the movie The Beach, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Richard, the protagonist of Alex Garland's brilliant 1997 novel of the same name. The only problem was that the movie was being filmed on Phi Phi Leh, an island off the coast of Thailand where, owing to DiCaprio's outrageous celebrity after the mega-success of Titanic, security on the set had reached "paramilitary proportions."

The story, far from being an account of a simple-minded stunt, was actually a fantastic narrative mixed with meditations on the "shadowlike ironies of travel culture," Walker Percy's "traveler's angst," and "the greater struggle for individuality in the information age." It was, in other words, a compelling blend of storytelling and reflection, a profound look at where Potts found himself, both in place and time. Not exactly the typical sweet-spot guide to luxury getaways that so many travel magazines plug on their covers.

Potts grew up in a sleepy neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas. His mother taught second grade, and his father taught both high school and college biology. Along with his older sister, he and his parents were hardly world travelers: Potts still remembers the first time he saw the Rocky Mountains—just a state away, in Colorado—at age six. And once, when he was fifteen, the family tagged along with his dad to a conference in Los Angeles where, for the first time, he saw the Pacific Ocean. That was the extent of young Rolf Potts's travelogue.

In 1989, he went off to school at Friends University in Wichita, then transferred to George Fox University, a private Quaker college near Portland, Oregon, where he earned a degree in writing and literature. After finishing his studies in 1993, Potts moved to Seattle, where he worked as a landscaper. When he had saved enough money, he and a friend headed south in an old VW bus for an eight-month road odyssey that he imagined would result in an epic tale worthy of the great American road books he'd come to love: Steinbeck's Travels With Charley in Search of America, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, and, of course, Kerouac's On the Road.

Together, the would-be Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty spent most of 1994 driving around the country. In Houston, Texas, they rode shotgun with police through the city's Fifth Ward. In Brentwood, California, they weathered an earthquake. In Arizona, they hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon on Super Bowl Sunday. In Massachusetts, they stayed at a monastery. And in Miami, Potts saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

When they finally ran out of money, Potts headed back to Kansas, got a part-time job, and spent most of 1995 off the road, at his desk, in a studio apartment trying to put together a book recounting his first road trip. It was called "Pilgrims in a Sliding World," after a line from a Robert Creeley poem.

After nearly a year of work, Potts started sending chapters out to agents and publishers. A few asked for more pages, but nothing after that. Finally, he showed the manuscript to his high school English teacher and mentor, the late John Fredin. "He reminded me that there was value in frustration," says Potts. "He told me that writing the manuscript was a good exercise, that it probably wouldn't work as a book, yet it was something I'd be glad I did."

Although the advice was tough to hear, Potts took it and moved on. "I would've had to go back to the beginning of the book and start over, so it just made more sense to let it go and continue with my life, instead of sitting in a room in Kansas throughout my mid-twenties trying to make it work."

Potts had written himself into a corner, and it became painfully clear just how much work had gone into the books he'd loved. According to Don George, whose editing career has included stints at Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Lonely Planet Publications, a commonly held misconception about travel narratives is that writing them is easy. "A really well-written piece of travel writing seems effortless. It seems like a person probably sat down and dashed it off in a half hour," he says. "But in fact, it's just months of rewriting and restructuring and trying different things."

It's a problem faced by writers of any genre, of course, but travel writers have a special burden of forming a coherent story—with a beginning, middle, and end—out of the unformed mass of events that make up the act of traveling. "Let us be straight about this," wrote Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea: Being a Narrative of a Journey Through Uzbekistan, Including Descriptions of Life Therein, Culminating With an Arrival at the Aral Sea, the World's Worst Man-Made Ecological Catastrophe, in One Volume (Pantheon Books, 2003), in an essay on the subject. "There is no such thing in the brute, unfeeling world as a story. Stories do not exist until some vessel of consciousness comes along and decides where it begins and ends, what to stress, and what to neglect."

Potts had come to realize that, with "Pilgrims in a Sliding World," there was no story, no narrative he could find his way into. Rather than force it, he did what came naturally to him: He packed his bags. In late 1996, he boarded a plane for Korea to follow some college friends who were headed to teach English to kids in Busan, a gritty, industrial city on the southeast coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Potts worked in Busan for two years as an English teacher. But he didn't really want to be an English teacher; he wanted to write. He filed some dispatches for the Wichita Eagle, he wrote for some English-language newspapers in Korea, and he started saving his money and looking for other outlets back home. But in 1997, not many magazines had a Web presence. Few U.S. editors used e-mail, and most rejections were mailed the old-fashioned way. Potts was living too far away for any of that, but there was one publication that was open to a new process, so Potts sorted through the ruins of his failed book project, found a nice vignette about Las Vegas, and sent it to Salon.

"I really liked his writing," says George, who was Potts's editor there. "It had a freshness to it. He was good at bringing characters to life. And he got into really interesting and funny situations. He had a nice sense of humor, but also it had a philosophical underpinning that I liked a lot, a larger worldview behind the misadventures."

George ran the story, which begins, "I understand this now: Things don't happen in Las Vegas. Things are happened in Las Vegas. All actions in the town are so meticulously predicted and orchestrated that spontaneity itself exists only as the ghost of compulsion." He ran a few of Potts's other stories too. Then Potts pitched a column titled Vagabonding, which provided the title for what would be his first book, a collection of practical essays on the ins and outs of long-term travel published by Villard in 2003. Soon, his byline was running alongside some of the biggest writers of the day.

"When your column runs underneath Garrison Keillor and Anne Lamott," Potts says now, "suddenly nobody can tell that a few months ago you were teaching twelve-year-olds in a faraway country."

Potts left Busan and filed dispatches from Laos, where he got cholera ("Retch-22: Laos in the Time of Cholera"); Turkey, where he got drugged and robbed ("Turkish Knockout"); Lebanon, where he met the craziest tour guide in the world ("My Beirut Hostage Crisis"); and of course Thailand, where he stormed The Beach.

In one scene in "Storming The Beach," Potts describes chatting over whiskey with an American couple named Todd and Ann about the difference between travelers and tourists. It's a never-ending debate between both kinds of people, most of whom consider themselves the former rather than the latter.

On the surface, it's a simple distinction. Tourists leave home to escape the world, while travelers leave home to experience the world. Tourists, Ann added wittily, are merely doing the hokey pokey: putting their right foot in and taking their right foot out; calling themselves world travelers while experiencing very little.

Potts considers the distinction to be blurry at best and meaningless at worst. And while that may be true, the terms do illustrate an important aspect of travel writing: Very few of us, it turns out, really know what we're talking about when we talk about travel writing.

"Narrowly defined, travel books are nonfiction accounts of journeys undertaken by the writer," says David Espey, author of Writing the Journey: Essays, Stories, and Poems on Travel (Longman, 2004) and a visiting professor at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. "The journey is also one of the main metaphors for the course of human existence. Yet the public tends to lump travel books with guidebooks. As Bruce Chatwin said about himself, ‘I want to be put next to Chaucer on the bookshelves, but I end up next to Czechoslovakia on $5 a Day."

Chatwin, who died in 1989, was alluding to one of the main tensions within the genre of travel writing: narrative versus service. At the heart of this division are questions of intent: Is the purpose of a piece of writing to help the reader plan a vacation? Or is it to probe the human condition? Is it a service to the reader, or is it a form of art? Can it be both?

"It's tough," says George. "Even when I was at the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a tension between a really well-written story about a really awful trip, and a pretty well-written story about a trip that a lot of readers would like to take. You're trying to balance your interest as a person who loves good writing with what the reader wants in terms of useful information."