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 and no place to stay in the city he was about to land in. He's also stood on a Paris balcony with a good bottle of wine and the jazz drifting up from the street below and known he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Both of those things are liminal travel.

This 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 it also covers the larger territory: why the between-state is spiritually valuable, what you actually find when you strip away your roles and possessions, and how to use uncertainty as a teacher rather than an enemy.

It includes chapters on:

• Hitting the road when the conditions will never be perfect
• The philosophy of liminal spirituality — what every religion agrees on, even when they're fighting about it
• Baoism: a portable framework for meaning that travels anywhere you do
• Specific recommendations from Alaska to Tahiti to Morocco to the Netherlands
• How to suffer well and what it teaches you

This is not a comfort read. It will not tell you the best hotels or the safest routes. It will tell you how to be genuinely between — and why that's worth more than knowing exactly where you're going.

Originally published 2011. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Baoism and corrected text throughout.