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You Can’t Flush Tallinn

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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

Visiting a tiny land like Estonia, I’m impressed by the resilience of a small nation. How can just over a million Estonians survive the centuries wedged between Russia and Germany? With the agenda of tyrants to the East and West, I’d think Estonia would fare like a sheet of Kleenex in a flushing toilet.

And not every tiny land survives. There are countless sister cultures that are simply gone or nearly gone today. (For example, Livonia, in this same Baltic region, or the Sorbs of Germany.) But the pride and strength itself of nationalities like Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Kosovars, Icelanders, Estonians, and Basques as they maintain their traditions and language in the brutal (if not flushing) demographic currents of the 21st century is an inspiration.

With our new TV series, I find myself highlighting the Basques, Montenegrins, and Estonians. Come to think of it, even Norway (with about the population of Alabama) is a mighty mite, and we’re doing two shows on that country. Maybe, subconsciously, these days — when the media work to homogenize us all, globalization tries to convince us that selling our souls is the only option, and material values have become “too big to fail” — I’m in the mood to celebrate the cultural underdogs.

So here’s to the 1.25 million people who speak Estonian, the 700,000 people who speak Basque, the 150,000 people who speak Montenegrin, and the 5 million people who speak Norwegian. And here’s to traveling to a place where you can hear Estonians, Basques, Montenegrins, and Norwegians — in their own language — drink to your travels.

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Rue Cler: The Ultimate or Not?

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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is Paris’ best market street, Rue Cler.

As a guidebook researcher and travel writer, I’m inclined to look for the “ultimate” in each category: the ultimate medieval walled town in Germany (Rothenburg), the ultimate prehistoric stone fortress in Ireland (Dún Aenghus), the ultimate castle setting in Castile (Consuegra), the ultimate Riviera port town (Vernazza), the ultimate German enclave in Romania (Sighisoara), the ultimate medieval castle interior (Reifenstein castle, in northern Italy), the ultimate hike in England’s Lake District (Catbells above Keswick), the ultimate neighborhood pub in London (The Anglesea Arms, in South Kensington), the ultimate castle in North Wales (nope, I still can’t pick just one)…and the ultimate pedestrian market street in Paris (Rue Cler).

Travelers want “top tens”…favorites. Even our Smithsonian magazine project was driven by the appetite for readers and travelers to know The Best. We needed to offer not just “20 great destinations,” but Europe’s “top 20 destinations.” The new phenomenon in travel publishing is the demand for “top ten” books. I’ll play along, but who can really say “the best” or the “top ten”? (Perhaps that’s why I included England’s Blackpool in the Smithsonian “top 20” — just to playfully punk the whole notion.)

As consumers of information that shapes our travels, we need to see these lists for what they are: not the top, but a collection of favorites. In my work, once I declare a place “the best” or “the ultimate,” I know a rising tide of visitors will wash away some of its magic, and I need to be out there looking for a successor or another place in order to dilute the crowds. As far as Paris’ Rue Cler goes, you’d think there would be a bevy of pedestrian-only market streets with village charm offering alternative opportunities to feel the pulse of a Parisian neighborhood. Every time I get a suggestion, I track it down. And it doesn’t top my favorite. Rue Cler is tough to beat.

To me, Bamberg is really good, but it’s no Rothenburg. Santa Margherita Ligure is really good, but it’s no Vernazza. Burg Eltz is really good, but it’s no Reifenstein. The circular rock forts of the Ring of Kerry are really good, but they are no Dún Aenghus. And, in Paris, Rue Montorgueil is really good, but it’s no Rue Cler. Collect the bests. But as you sort through all the superlatives and all those “bests’ and “ultimates,” go ahead and disagree. Don’t let some fancy travel writer limit your freedom to find your own ultimates.

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Vernazza: Barnacles, Lorenzo, and a Scraggly Vagabond

To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is the Cinque Terre, on Italy’s Riviera.

When I first described and recommended Italy’s Cinque Terre in the late 1970s, there was almost no tourism here. The economy was sluggish…and so were the people. Sitting in doorways seemed to be a major pastime. Menus were humble and in one language. I remember local wine sold in bottles without labels — very cheap and not very good. (And back then, “very cheap and not very good” was just fine with me.) It was a world apart, where few spoke English and the American traveler was rare. Its remoteness was the foundation of its poverty.

Today its remoteness is a draw. The five (cinque) towns are affluent, and the region is a national park. Now it seems to be on the itinerary of almost every tourist in Italy. Fancy restaurants abound, as do boutique hotels. There’s a fascinating metabolism here — because of the prime location, tourism brings locals their livelihood as reliably as the tides bring nourishment to barnacles.

Many Cinque Terre seniors who can afford to live elsewhere, do. They see the rustic nature of the towns as more of a negative than a positive. In fact, a big trend in the Cinque Terre is elderly apartment-owners moving into the big city for a more comfortable place to live out their golden years. They hire Eastern Europeans to manage their apartments, renting to tourists who arrive with each train.

On my first visit to the Cinque Terre town of Vernazza, I couldn’t afford a good restaurant meal. But I met a gentle restaurateur named Lorenzo. I’ll never forget how he looked at me, a scruffy backpacker who rarely was served a hot meal. Knowingly, he said, “Sit. You must be hungry. I’ll feed you.” I sat. And he did. Caring strangers I met in my vagabond days of travel, like Lorenzo, left a lasting impression on me. I think I see people more positively than I otherwise would have, if I had never been in need and never ventured far from home. In fact, perhaps being in need far from home is something more risk-averse people should let happen once in a while.

Shortly after my visit, Lorenzo died — in the prime of his life — a victim of cancer. For twenty years, his daughter Monica has been my best friend in Vernazza. When I look into her piercing eyes, I see Lorenzo’s compassion and love. And I’m happy to bring my groups to Monica’s family restaurant — to eat on the same castle-view perch I did back when Lorenzo wore all the hats in his little restaurant and fed scraggly vagabonds.

Every year, we need to update our guidebook listings on the five Riviera ports that make up the Cinque Terre. Because locals are so eager to get into our guidebook (considering all the business it brings), the Cinque Terre assignment can be a challenge. Like, I imagine, a boxer finds going 12 rounds exhilarating, I find it exhilarating to fend off the wanabees and collect the gems of the Cinque Terre worth recommending.

The powerful appeal of these five unique villages gives an intensity to everything about tourism here. Locals need to make their money (they shut down in the winter), travelers need to have the time of their lives, and I need to get it right for the guidebook. With my hectic research schedule and the busy lives of local chefs, one of my favorite moments is around 11 p.m., when both the chefs and I have finished our work for the day. They sit at bars with small tables facing the sea, having a strong drink and a cigarette. I take a slow walk without an agenda, no camera or notepad…just being in the Mediterranean town of my dreams. All of us are savoring the place we work to share with travelers…a little chunk of Europe that we love, season after season, as much as anyone.

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Living with David

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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is actually a work of art: Michelangelo’s David, in Florence.

Some people are not impressed by beauty. They can still enjoy art. I love the thought that art is more than beauty. It’s the closest thing to a time-tunnel experience we can have in our travels. Really. It can take you back. But only if you know the context in which it was created. Who paid for it and why? What was going on at the time? Was the artist just earning a paycheck, or did he have something to say? Were he and his patron in synch or at odds?

Of course, when you look into the eyes of Michelangelo’s David, you’re looking into the eyes of Renaissance Man. Sizing up the giant of medieval darkness, man at the turn of the 16th century had decided he could triumph and step into the modern age. It’s humanism, and it’s also local pride. Michelangelo sculpted David in a time when city-states were proud. Florentines were a particularly proud bunch. While the people of Siena might take a statue they believed brought them a plague, break it into bits, and bury it all around the city of Florence, people in Florence would urinate into the river as if they were peeing on Pisa — a rival town just downstream. David was an apt mascot for proud and confident Florence. God blessed David, enabling him to slay the much stronger giant. And God blessed Florence, enabling it to rise above its crude city-state neighbors.

Other art also takes you traveling and takes you back. Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait, the first of its kind, is of a proud dandy — a cultural leader who deserved respect and good pay. He had just traveled to Italy, where painters were better respected than in his homeland Germany, and where they were given more esteem and more money.

Vincent van Gogh’s Potato Eaters takes you to a humble home of a farm family in 1885 in Belgium. Five salt-of-the-earth peasants with bony fingers share a lamp and a plate of potatoes. Van Gogh knew these people. Before being a painter, he tried to be a pastor. He lived, worked, and clearly empathized with poor miners and farmers. He cared about their lot in life, portraying them gnarled and ugly…but noble at the same time. And with this painting, his first masterpiece, he takes us there.

A helpful mindset when enjoying art in your travels is to imagine the reality of the artist and of the people for whom the art was created. If they had never seen a photograph, a movie, or never traveled. If they believed that God threw lightning bolts when he was angry. If they thought women were evil, Caesar was God, or pewter goblets represented the good life. Munch’s Scream doesn’t just scream. It screams for a reason.

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Sword-Fern Fantasies

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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is actually a collection of castles across Europe.

The list of favorite castles I collected and described for the Smithsonian ended up being mostly Europe’s glorious castles. These were the kind that were so foreboding, they made a petty kingdom’s debilitating defense budget a good investment in the long run, creating a defensive bastion so formidable that no one even attempted to take it.

But behind the touristic glorious castles are the forgotten inglorious castles — just evocative, stony husks with no plaster or paint, broken stairways, and open skies rather than rooftops. All across Europe, the fragrant lichen of history eats at the corpse of castles as they rot away unnoticed on hilltops. Climbing through waist-high weeds on rubble collapsed and corralled by surviving walls, you can break off a spiky frond and live a sword-fern fantasy.

While time strips away the plaster, it leaves enough to evoke the days of feudalism. Castles were built on the backs of peasant labor — forgotten people who had no option in life but to subsist under the rule of a corrupt and petty ruler and carry rocks when told to. Moss seems to prepare stones for the fall they’ve waited centuries for. A dark spiral staircase leads to a tentative lookout over what was a floor. Bat dung drifts high in the dark stretches of the staircase. Standing gingerly at the top of the stairs, you look out. Before you stretches no floor. Across the expanse is the most finished element of the castle: the still-tidy square holes into which hand-hewn floor beams were stuck. What became of the beams and all they supported?

Peering through arrow slits, you look away from your castle perch. Imagine the now-overgrown terrain, once shaved to create a no-man’s land, where no enemy could find cover as he approached.

Underground tunnels lead away from the shell of a castle. Crouching as I advance, I reach a place far from the castle, just a few feet under the shaved no-man’s land. Here is where explosives would be packed, ready to surprise advancing forces and blow them to smithereens if they dared approach this fortress.

Looking up from outside at the surviving wall, I see a pair of stones jutting out high above me, now supporting only the memory of an outhouse. I imagine updrafts that once blew onto noble butts. I imagine enemies that once eyed this toilet hole as the possible Achilles’ heel of an otherwise impenetrable castle.

Ruined castle appreciation isn’t for everyone. I guess it’s a guy thing…to peer, wonderstruck, over the shoulder of a guide who lowers a lamp on a rope into a dungeon that has only one way in or out — a mean-spirited hole in the ceiling. Stories of knights sleeping in wooden boxes filled with hay in dank ground-floor rooms evoke scenes of these men struggling night after night to find some warmth.

With the same boorish conversation and little else to amuse, I can imagine the appeal of alcohol in feudal times. There’s certainly evidence of drunkenness. Keyholes on mighty doors came with iron guides that funneled the key of an inebriated lord into place. All he had to do was locate his key, hold it in front of him, fall onto the door, and when the key landed in the hole, give it a turn.

The advent of the cannon forced castles to crouch rather than stand tall. And pre-cannon castles, standing tall atop hillocks, visited with the heavy breathing that comes with a steep hike, stoke the imagination of any traveler. And with imagination properly stoked, these humble and forgotten ruins too can rival Europe’s great and famous castles.