E-mail a friendRick Steves
airdate June 19, 2009
One of the world's most famous travel writers, Rick Steves has spent 100 days every year since '73 exploring Europe. He's researched and written 24 travel guidebooks and is host, writer and producer of the public television series Rick Steves' Europe. He's also a Tribune Media Services syndicated columnist and a regular on USA Today's op-ed page. Steves began his career teaching travel classes at his alma mater, the University of Washington in Seattle, and working as a tour leader in the summer.
Travel guidebook author talks about learning from people who have different ways of seeing the world. (2:18)
Full interview. (12:00)
Rick Steves
Tavis: Rick Steves is a best-selling travel writer who's written more than 30 books on travel in his wonderful career. He's also well-known to PBS viewers as the host of the popular series, Rick Steves' Europe. His latest book is called "Travel as a Political Act." Rick, nice to have you on the program.
Rick Steves: Nice to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: Please explain this title to me.
Steves: (Laughter) "Travel as a Political Act."
Tavis: As a political act.
Steves: Well, travel is also, of course, a recreational act and just a lot of fun, but it's a lost opportunity when people don't realize that, in their travels, they do have the opportunity to broaden their perspectives. You know, it's kind of a shame for the standard American traveler if it's all about, you know, see if you can eat five meals a day and still snorkel when you get into port. There's more to it than that.
Tavis: Yeah (laughter).
Steves: I've spent 30 years teaching people how to travel through my guide books and shows and so on. I've noticed sort of an evolution in my teaching passion. For the first decade in the 80s, it was cheap travel, bunch of tricks. You know, Europe Through the Back Door. That was my book. The 90s, I found myself teaching art appreciation and history and culture. I wrote a book called Europe 101: History and Art for Travelers and I was talking about appreciating the cuisine and all that.
Since 9/11, it's really occurred to me that it's important also when we Americans travel to broaden our perspective and I find myself just really passionate about sharing with people the value of traveling in a way that broadens our perspective and lets us get comfortable with the fact that we find a lot of truths to be self-evident and God-given, but other people find different truths to be self-evident and God-given and we're not gonna change them.
You know, I grew up thinking the world was a pyramid with us on top and everybody else trying to get there and that we had the American dream and everybody else, if they knew what was good for them, would have the American dream also.
Then I learned that people don't have the American dream. They got the Bulgarian dream or the Sri Lankan dream or the Moroccan dream or the Norwegian dream, and those are just as good as the American dream. So that's a radical new understanding when we travel. And then we go to a faraway land and we realize, hey, we don't need to be threatened by people who are different than us.
Now since 9/11, I think it's in our own interest to realize that we're just four percent of this planet. We're a beautiful four percent of this planet. We're a God-blessed four percent of this planet, but so is the other 96%, you know. If somebody says, "God bless America," I think, well, what about everybody else?
Tavis: You know, when I saw this book - I mean, you're going right where I knew you would go. When I first saw this book, the first thing I thought was how I have felt - to your brilliant point now - how I have personally felt since 9/11 traveling around the world.
Because of my demands here on the TV show and the radio show on public radio, I don't get a chance to travel a lot throughout the year, but every summer I take a month off from this program and I get out of the country as fast as I can and cover as much ground as I can in that 30 days and get back to work here. So you'll be seeing a lot of reruns in the month of July. Just warning you. I'm out in July and I'll be all over the world during that month of July, as much as I can cover.
To my point, though, I have noticed myself since 9/11 how difficult it has been as an American to feel that sort of push-back. You know, things are a bit different now that Obama's president, but certainly for those eight years under George Bush, because of how we're perceived around the world, I don't know about you; I want to get your take on it, but I can feel that push-back when I stepped off the plane and went to restaurants. I could feel that.
Steves: Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been in Madrid when there's a million people out in the streets with anti-American placards demonstrating against one of our wars. They're not demonstrating against me or you. They're demonstrating against a foreign policy they disagree with. That's a very fundamental thing.
They like Americans. They really like American ideals, but they might disagree with our foreign policy. I think a lot of us get sidetracked on that, as if we freed them from the Nazis and therefore they should agree with us now.
Tavis: On everything.
Steves: On everything, and that just doesn't make much sense because they're good people. But I don't think a lot of Americans realize when they travel that smart people have different ideas. I mean, I really was amazed when it occurred to me that smart, well-educated people with nowhere near the freedom or opportunity or affluence that I have would not trade passports.
That's a beautiful thing to realize and I celebrate that now when I travel. It's part of my work because, for 25 years, I was literally taking groups around Europe as a tour guide. I had this opportunity now to take them into a place where people measured things differently.
You know, my beat is Europe. That's where my guide books are and so on. To me, that's the wading pool of world exploration. So we go there first and we get comfortable with that and then we're not threatened by the French anymore and this sort of thing. Then we put our toes into Morocco and, oh, there's a secular Muslim country.
You go to a stadium in Morocco or you go to a stadium in Turkey as a tour guide. In Turkey a lot of times, I don't have a list of famous sites. It's a cultural scavenger hunt. 300 high school kids in the stadium thrusting their fists up in the air screaming, "We are a secular nation, we are a secular nation." I go in there and I ask my guide, "What's going on? Don't they like God?"
She says, "No, we love God here, but in Turkey we're very concerned about the fragile and precious separation of mosque and state giving the rise and pride of Islamic fundamentalism across the border in Iran." Now as a tourist, I never thought about the separation of mosque and state like we would be concerned about the separation of church and state here.
And as a tourist, I never thought what it would be like to be a country that really wanted to be secular like we want to be secular in our country that had a theocracy just over the border and, all of a sudden, more women are walking around covered up, you know, and more people are agitating for the government to become a theocracy and it becomes a struggle. We have that opportunity in our travels as Americans to not be dumbed down. I believe the system wants to dumb us down because they'll make more money off us in travel.
Tourism is arguably the biggest industry in the planet, the biggest employer and so on. Nobody in the industry likes to have people traveling as a political act because you don't spend a lot of money. They want you to be all excited about duty-free shopping and frequent flyer miles and all that kind of thing and I want to get excited about finding people who can shake up my self-assuredness and help me be not only a more thankful American, but a better citizen of the planet.
Tavis: You mentioned that Europe is your beat and indeed it is. Let me ask a silly question. Why does Europe endure - of all the places around the world, I mean, beyond the obvious. There's so many obvious answers to this question obviously. But why does Europe endure as this place that we all want to run around in summer?
Steves: Well, I can only speak for myself. I mean, where am I inclined to go? I'm not that interested in China or South America, for some reason. Personally, I'm interested in finding my roots. Now they're not my physical roots like the movie Roots - well, I don't know. My cultural roots.
Why am I the way I am? It's because my grandparents came over from Norway and it was a Christian-European sort of society that came out of the enlightenment and all this kind of thing. So I just go back there because I'm endlessly curious about what shaped me. Where are my cultural roots?
There's good reasons to go to any place around the world. I'm just concerned about doing a good job in what I cover, so I need to dedicate all the time I can get away from home to doing my work in Europe. But I think we find Europe to be like brothers and sisters. We're first-world rich nations and we're confronted by similar challenges. That's what a lot of Americans lose the opportunity to see.
How do these smart people deal with the same challenges we're dealing with? We're dealing with immigrant labor problems; so are they. We're dealing with racism; so are they. We're dealing with homophobia; so are they. We're dealing with a miserable losing drug war and they're dealing with a drug war that's just as frustrating to them, but they're making progress at it because they have decided to use harm reduction as a motivator instead of incarceration. Fundamental differences there.
And my European friends are always disappointed in me as an American and how many people we lock up. They always remind me, "You guys lock up eight times as many people per capita as we do." They say, "Here in Europe, we know that a society has to make a choice. Tolerate alternative lifestyles or build more prisons." Now that's a real great beginning of a conversation right there.
But as a tour guide, I'm really passionate. We take 300 or 400 groups around Europe every year and I encourage my guides to do this. Foster an atmosphere with these Americans who have two weeks of vacation in Europe not to just talk about dumbed down stupid fun-in-the-sun stuff. That's okay, but take this opportunity to really challenge each other to be broadened by our travel experience.
I've had that opportunity because I've taken what's called educational tours to trouble spots. I went down to El Salvador and Nicaragua back in the santanista days when I could have been hanging out in Yucatan. It really lit a fire in my gut for what's it like to be south of our border, you know.
Tavis: This book, again, is "Travel as a Political Act." The second thing I thought when I saw the cover of the book was just a notion of, you know, travel, period. Forget travel as a political act. I just want to say to Americans, travel. It troubles me that most of us don't have passports. It troubles me that most of us never get beyond the borders of this country.
So I don't understand how we ever lessen that arrogance - that's my word, not yours - but I don't know how we ever lessen the arrogance that we have if we don't ever move - the reason why I get out of here every summer is so I can look back at the country and, to your point, appreciate it for the things it's good at and be a more honest critique of it when I get back in it. But most of us, we don't even have passports.
Steves: (Laughter) And a lot of politicians don't get a passport until they have high aspirations.
Tavis: Exactly.
Steves: And it'll look good if I have done a little traveling, you know. But I'm so thankful that - well, since 9/12, it's occurred to me that travel writers, travel teachers, tour guides and travelers can be the medieval jesters of our century.
In the middle ages, the jester was part of the court. The king paid him, fed him, but he could go out there and goof around with the people. He came back into the court and he could tell the king the truth and the king didn't kill him because the king needed to hear the truth. We travelers need to go out there, learn about the world and come home and tell the king the truth.
A year ago, I went to Iran with my public television TV crew. Scary thing. I was nervous. I almost left our camera in Athens the day before we flew to Tehran thinking they were gonna be throwing rocks at us. It was the most valuable experience I've ever had as a traveler and the warmest welcome I've received from the streets anywhere when they knew I was an American. What a mindblower.
All I wanted to do, Tavis, was bog down in how do they treat their Baha'is and what about nuclear power or whatever. I just wanted to humanize them. What motivates 70 million people? And the same thing motivates them that motivates most of us who are so adamantly scared of them, fear and love. They're afraid of forces that are gonna change their culture and they love their children.
Tavis: It's amazing what happens when you can tap into the humanity in people. Amazing (laughter).
Steves: Well, that's my inspiration, you know, because it's a lost opportunity for travelers. I've been so fortunate to have so many opportunities in my travels because I've chosen to go to Managua instead of Mazatlan.
A week ago, I was in Dubrovnik and it was a human traffic jam of people getting off the cruise ship. I couldn't film because it was just nothing but a mob scene. You couldn't walk down the street. These people were so excited that they could eat five meals a day and still snorkel when they got into port. I thought, "Okay, this is acute time in Dubrovnik. I'm going two hours inland to Bosnia."
I could talk all day about Bosnia. I mean, it's so inspirational because, 15 years ago, they were killing each other. You know the story about Bosnia. Today those children are getting together and the people are learning. We're not gonna change each other, but we're gonna live together.
Tavis: I want to let Rick Steves get out of here because I'm sure there's a plane, a boat, a ferry (laughter), something waiting to take him someplace else in the world and I don't want him to miss his next appointment. The name of the new book from Rick Steves, "Travel as a Political Act." Rick, nice to have you on the program and safe travels wherever the next stop is.
Steves: Thank you, Tavis. Okay.
Back to June 19, 2009