Around The World...Accidentally

What do you do when your moving truck gets stolen and you're left with $1,200 to your name? If you're Pamdiana Jones, you pack a backpack, buy a one-way ticket to South Africa, and end up spending the next three years traveling solo around the world. The best part? None of it was planned.

In this episode, I sit down with Pam — the self-styled Indiana Jones of travel writing, who chose her author pen name in exactly that spirit — about the accidental journey that took her from a ski town in Utah to Cape Town, across Southeast Asia, through Australia and New Zealand, and back again. The book she's written about it, When in Roam (as in, roaming around), is a fast-paced, hilarious, and genuinely action-packed memoir that puts the chaos of real travel on the page without softening a single edge.

We talk about the cover shot — Pam bungee jumping in New Zealand, backwards, in a photo that she describes as representing every "I shouldn't be alive" moment in the book. The story behind it is even better: she told her friend she wasn't going to jump, and he shoved her off the platform anyway.

We dig into the night in an African wildlife reserve — a 2am walk in the dark with a single pin flashlight, and a thousand eyes staring back at us from every direction. We talk about how Pam kept her total spend under $900 for three months in South Africa, the stopover in Malaysia that turned into four more months, and why she's glad she didn't know in advance that the trip would last three years. "If he's not going, I'm not going" is what she says she would have thought.

Pam also talks about what finally made her write the book after 20 years of being told to — a read of Eat Pray Love that she admired as writing, but decided was not the Indiana Jonesy book she actually wanted to read. She had sharks, skydiving, a stabbing on a train on page one, and a bungee jump she didn't consent to. That felt like material.

Guest Links Website: https://pamdianajones.com Shop & Books: https://pamdianajones.com/shop Email Pam: Pam@PamdianaJones.com

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