The Traveling Therapist Podcast · Kym Tolson

184. The Accidental World Traveler Turned Author with Pamdiana Jones

·32 min·1 clip

Stabbed on train, chased by elephants, scuba diving with bleeding hand and sharks. She started writing it on post-it notes at 3am during insomnia.

This episode of The Traveling Therapist Podcast features host Kim Tolson in conversation with author and adventurer Pamdiana Jones. Jones, who uses the pen name Pam Deanna Jones, is not a therapist but an accidental world traveler and international bestselling author. Her debut travel memoir, "When in Rome, R-O-A-M," chronicles her three-year solo journey that began in the mid-1990s. The journey started after a stolen moving truck left her with only $1,200, which she used to buy a $1,175 plane ticket to South Africa with an acquaintance named Jay. She traveled through South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, often surviving on just $2 bags of rice per week. Jones worked odd jobs like washing airplanes in Darwin and teaching snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef to fund her travels. Her book opens with intense moments, including a stabbing on a train and being chased by a herd of wild elephants. She also recounts a misadventure in a South African animal park where she and friends, while high, encountered thousands of animal eyes in the dark. A surprising insight is that her entire book was crafted from post-it notes she began writing when her twins were five years old. Jones reveals she learned to edit her own work meticulously, cutting thousands of filler words like "just" to strengthen her prose. She won a Solas Award for travel writing for a story about buying marijuana from a Zulu woman named "Big Mama," which she humorously notes is an award for "shopping." The cover of her book features the dramatic moment she was shoved off a bungee jumping platform after hesitating. Jones shares that a missed opportunity with singer Rod Stewart, whom she failed to recognize while waitressing, became a pivotal moment that inspired her lifelong mantra to always say "yes." She also published her grandfather's 1963 treasure-hunting novel, "The Secret of Oak Island," which she discovered featured her mother as a character. The tone of the episode is highly conversational, inspirational, and filled with humorous, self-deprecating storytelling. The style is anecdotal and driven by vivid, fast-paced personal narratives. Listeners who love adventurous travel stories, aspiring authors seeking practical writing advice, or anyone needing motivation to take a leap into the unknown would adore this episode. Therapists or burnout professionals dreaming of a creative side hustle may find Jones' late-in-life career pivot particularly inspiring. Listeners seeking a clinically focused therapy podcast or strictly business-oriented content for their practice might choose to skip this narrative-driven interview.

As heard by us

A travel-tinged conversation that settles into a candid lesson in patience, revision, and creative persistence.

The episode moves from travel memory into the slower, less tidy work of writing a book. What lands is the plainspoken honesty: the speaker talks about taking years to finish it, hiring an editor, catching serious mistakes, and learning to edit more carefully after that.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how a traveler’s instinct turns into a book, a messy edit pass, and two extra years spent learning to edit it yourself.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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