Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick
From time to time we share a random video clip to fuel your travel dreams. Join us today as we visit the underground world of Kaymaklı, Turkey, which provided an almost ready-made refuge for Turks during invasions and persecutions through the centuries.
You can watch my complete TV episode about Central Turkey for free on our website.
Back in the 1970s as a tour guide, I drove small groups in little minibuses around Europe with a passion for getting my travelers beyond their comfort zones. It’s fun to look back on the crudeness of my techniques. Today we have the same goals, but pursue them more maturely, gracefully, and effectively — for which the 20,000 travelers who join us annually on our bus tours are very grateful. Here’s the “redemption story” (in the spirit of Ben Carson) of how I overcame my basest guiding instincts:
As a 25-year-old hippie-backpacker-turned-tour-organizer, I harbored a misguided notion that soft and spoiled American travelers would benefit from a little hardship. (In retrospect, I was pretty cruel.)
I’d run our early tours with no hotel reservations and observe the irony of my tour members (who I cynically thought were unconcerned about homelessness issues in their own communities) being nervous at the prospect of spending a night without shelter. I had noticed that if, by mid-afternoon, I hadn’t arranged for a hotel, they couldn’t focus on my guided town walks. Believing they’d be more empathetic with people who never have a real bed, I thought it might be constructive to let my travelers feel the anxiety of the real possibility of no roof over their heads.
I remember booking a group into a horrible hotel above a sleazy bar, thinking that would put what I considered petty complaints about hotels in perspective. Seeing a woman from my tour group shivering with fear on top of her threadbare sheets at the threat of bugs, I felt triumphant.
Back when I was almost always younger than anyone on my tour, I made my groups sleep in Munich’s huge hippie circus tent. With simple mattresses on a vast wooden floor and 400 roommates, it was like a cross between Woodstock and a slumber party. One night I was stirred out of my sleep by a woman sitting up and sobbing. With the sound of backpackers rutting in the distance, she whispered, apologetically, “Rick, I’m not taking this so very well.” I gave her some valium — which was about all I had in my “first aid kit” — and she got through the night.
Of course, I eventually learned that this was the wrong approach: You can’t just force people into a rough situation and expect it to be constructive. Today, after learning from 30 years of feedback from our tour members and the experience of our team of guides, I am still driven to get people out of their comfort zones and into the real world with the help of our tours. But we do it in a way that keeps our travelers returning. (In fact, last year about half of the 20,000 those who signed up on our tours were alums, coming back for more.)
For me, taking a group of Americans through Europe is a rich opportunity to experience a little reality: Seeing towering stacks of wood in Belfast destined to be anti-Catholic bonfires and talking with locals about sectarian hatred helps make a trip to Ireland meaningful. Taking groups to Turkey during the Syria’s civil war has helped me share a Muslim perspective on that conflict. And visiting a concentration camp memorial is a required element of any trip we lead through Germany.
As a tour guide, I always made a point to follow up these harsh and perplexing experiences with a “reflections time” when I tried only to facilitate the discussion and let tour members share and sort out their feelings and observations. I’ve learned that, even with the comfortable refuge of a good hotel, you can choose to travel to complicated places and have a rich experience. (And when our tour members complain about something, I can’t help but think back on what we used to inflict on our paying customers.)
I love sunsets. They can be a vivid and romantic capper for a beautiful day on the road. Here are a few dramatic and memorable sunsets that come to mind:
1. On the Greek isle of Santorini, nursing a drink with a single flower in a vase on my table, as I sit on the lip of the crater high above the glittering Aegean Sea.
2. On the Nile, just across from Luxor, as the sun sets, the temperature drops, and villages come alive. As I’m poled along the shore in a classic felucca boat, children frolic, long-legged birds strike a pose, and I glide like a silent voyeur through the reeds.
3. On Denmark’s Aerø Island, warming myself by a beach fire while children splash in the shallow waters of the bay, and parents sit peacefully on the porches of tiny beach cabins.
The sun sets on Denmark’s Aerø Island. (Photo: Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli)
4. In Granada, Spain, joining the “Gypsies and hippies” at the St. Nicholas viewpoint as the setting sun makes the Alhambra glow red, evoking the tumult of its violent history.
5. On a ferry charging across the Greek sea, with dolphins — who seem to come out for the sunset — playfully loping ahead of the ship’s bow.
6. In England’s Cumbrian Lake District, sitting pensively on a stone at the Castlerigg Stone Circle just outside of Keswick, savoring a moment which inspires anyone to poetry…especially as sheep stir up the fragrance of the wild grass and the scent comes with a whiff of mystical druids, who once used these stones for their worship, dancing in the long shadows.
7. In Paris, sitting on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, surrounded by backpackers, buskers, and local lovers as Paris spreads out before me and slowly the sky grows dark and the City of Light is turned on.
8. On a Norwegian fjord, taking my dessert of ice cream and fresh berries out of my hotel’s dining room and sitting along at the end of the pier. The water is glassy and frightfully deep, black rock cliffs rocket into the sky above me, and the sun dips too early behind the peaks.
9. In Assisi, on the rampart of a ruined castle, with olive groves at my feet leading to a vast and lush Umbrian vista; imagining the age when each town was its own little state, and enjoying the same birdsong that inspired St. Francis.
10. And my favorite sunset: from my deck back home, on the Puget Sound just north of Seattle, as a golden path of sparkles leads across the bay to snowcapped Olympics. The sun settles behind the latest in a series of chosen peaks, and the ferries ply silently across as the water begins to glow like floating lanterns.
What is your favorite sunset far from home?
From time to time we share a random video clip to fuel your travel dreams. Join us today as we visit the lowest point on earth — the fabled Dead Sea — where locals rely on the water’s minerals to keep their skin young. En route to the Dead Sea, Medjool dates are ripe for tasting in Jericho.
Watch my complete TV episode about Palestine online for free at on our website.
It’s always exciting to be standing at the departure gate of a new year, and when it comes to touring in Europe, I’m eagerly packed and ready to go. In fact, I’ve got one of my best-ever years of travel in the works — and it includes a little tour guiding.
For 25 years I personally led lots of Rick Steves Europe Tours, but for the last decade or so I’ve ridden along as a tour member instead. My big news for 2016: I’ll actually be leading a couple of tours. While we’re keeping the specific dates a secret, one will be a My Way tour and the other will be one of our Best of Europe tours. And I can hardly wait!
