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Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

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

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Nomads and Cuff Links

I was on the terrace of a fancy Dubrovnik hotel in jeans and a T-shirt. A big shot was at the next table with his hair just right, a coat and tie, and fancy cuff links. I thought, wouldn’t it make more sense if the poor and powerless were the ones who had to dress up like that?

In Dubrovnik, the cruise ship crowds were so intense that we literally could not do our filming in the middle of the day. The city was inundated…a human traffic jam. I got a bit down. Then, as is so often the case, things cleared out and the town regained its charm. Those who stay after the tenders have stopped ferrying people back and forth enjoy a town the thousands who blitzed it from their ship have no appreciation of. It’s sad to think that the vast majority of Dubrovnik’s visitors see a hellishly crowded city and probably leave with the wrong impression. Even if they think they liked Dubrovnik, they didn’t really get to meet it.

There’s a buzz about how humble little Montenegro is emerging as “the new Mediterranean hotspot.” The tourist board there put my film crew in an “emerging hotspot” designer hotel on the Bay of Kotor. It was so elite and reclusive that I expected to see Idi Amin poolside. (Actually, I think he’s dead…but I thought it would be cool if they had a blow-up version of him just parked next to the pool on a lounge chair with a cocktail.)

The hotel, open just a month, was a comedy of horrible design. We felt like we were the first guests. My bathroom was far bigger than many entire hotel rooms — but the toilet was jammed in the corner. I had to tuck up my knees to fit between it and the sink cabinet. The room was dominated by a big Jacuzzi tub for two. I am certain there wasn’t enough hot water available to fill it. I doubt it will ever be used, except for something to look at as you’re crunched up on the toilet. My bed was vast, but without a side table light or even access to a light switch. A huge rain storm hit with fury enough to keep the automatic glass doors opening and closing on their own. Nothing drained — a torrent ran down the stairs outside the front door, and everything was dripping. With the rain, a horrible smell drove us out of our rooms. Just as we sat down to our breakfast, the storm knocked out the electricity. Looking past the candelabra on our table, the overwhelmed receptionist explained with a shrug, “When it rains, there is no electricity.” The man who runs the place just looked at us and said, “Cows.” (I think he meant “chaos.”)

Looking in the mirror the other day, I noticed how white my teeth looked. It reminded me that when I asked my dentist the best way to get my teeth whitened, he said, “Get a tan.” It’s so great to be getting sunshine and exercise on the road.

We drove by a Gypsy camp switchbacking from the Mediterranean coast up into the interior of Montenegro. Our guide explained the local Gypsies don’t want to go to school and don’t want to work. I commented that they don’t want their children to be taught lifestyles that threaten their nomadic ways. The camp was absolutely filthy. Our guide said, “That’s their aesthetic.” I couldn’t really imagine a society with an aesthetic to be sloppy…as if moms bark at her kids, “You can’t go out to play until you mess up your room.”

All over our world, nomadic cultures like the Roma (or Gypsy) culture are struggling — I think because they’re at odds with societies that require fences, conventional ownership, and non-nomadic ways. I wonder how many nomadic cultures (American Indians, Eskimos, Kurds, Gypsies) will be here in the next generation.

Cresting the mountain into the Montenegrin heartland, we came to a village that looked like it had no economy. Then a man took us into a big, blocky, white building that looked like a giant monopoly house. He opened the door and we stepped inside, under tons of golden ham peacefully aging. It was a smokehouse — jammed with five layers of hanging hamhocks. Our Montenegrin friend stoked up his fire, filled the place with smoke, and we filmed. More industry than you realize hides out in sleepy villages.

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Photos Help Tell the Story

Wrapping up a great trip, a few photos add to the story. Note also a number of photos added to entries over the last two months.

Travelers enjoying tapas and their guidebook. When blitzing tapas bars in Madrid’s best neighborhoods, it’s fun to find happy travelers putting their guidebook to good use.
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An amazing painting in Cortona.
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Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I open the shutters and greet a new day in Volterra. In a week I meet the TV crew…
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Dottore Vincenzo Riolo in Pisa taught me volumes about his town and is one of many excellent new local guides I met and will recommend in my guidebooks.
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Why call it tourist season if we can’t shoot them? A scary welcome in Florence’s Oltrarno district.
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Station of the Cross, padded for protection, along the route of a bike race in Slovenia.
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Happy road trippers with favorite guidebooks in Slovenia.
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Cheap and delicious picnic, relaxing in my Zagreb hotel room.
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Cameron Hewitt (co-author of our Croatia & Slovenia guidebook) reads about himself, me, and our American film crew in a Zagreb newspaper. I guess an American film crew in Zagreb is newsworthy.
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Croatian B&B hosts—clicking with new friends in Korcula.
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Day #70…Trip over, one last beer to enjoy a Dubrovnik vista and celebrate a smooth and productive trip before flying home.
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Are Brains and Brawn a Zero-Sum Game?

I love traveling in former Yugoslavia. Many enjoy it for its Dalmatian Coast resorts, its seafood, or its great prices. For me, it’s like turning a history and politics text book inside out, shaking its contents all over the earth, and then playing in it.

While the region is still smarting from the bloody wars of the 1990s, things are changing fast. Much of the war damage scenes I saw two years ago in Mostar (Bosnia) and wrote into our script have been fixed up. Updating my script, I replaced the sad images (and words) with hopeful ones — men in hard hats on scaffolds rebuilding blackened shells of buildings.

Like the Habsburgs and Ottomans, Yugoslavia was the fault line of cultures between east and west. Bosnia was the same fault line within Yugoslavia, and the unfortunate city of Mostar was the fault line within Bosnia. It was an epicenter of ethnic tension. That’s why city parks (which were out of the line of sight of snipers) are now jammed with shiny marble tombstones, mostly dated 1993. Primarily Muslim graves, they have images of the person buried there…a reminder that while the Muslims here came to blows with Christians, they are European Muslims and don’t have the strict limits (regarding alcohol, modest dress, showing images in art, and so on) imposed on many Muslims farther east.

While each evening the tourists clamor to eat down by the river with delightful views of the city’s beloved, pointed, single-arch bridge, I took my business to the Boulevard — the former front line that only now is getting some tentative businesses opening up.

 

As Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina rebuilds, this big new church comes with a minaret-shaped spire that seems designed to reach higher than the neighboring minarets.
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Enjoying a plate of stuffed peppers and a Sarajevsko beer — I thought of Sarajevo, considering the Bosnian capital in the news in 1914, 1993, and today. I talked with a young man who served me. He just opened his bar here on the Muslim side. Immediately across the street stands the new Catholic church, with a minaret-shaped spire that rockets up at least double the height of any minaret in town. (He and I compared stress-related cold sores…mine from finishing up three TV shows covering most of ex-Yugoslavia in 20 days…his from opening up a bar on the former front line.) He said that while bullets are no longer flying, he worries about vandalism from young, hate-filled men across the road. There’s understandably a lot of “Your father killed my father” and vice versa sentiment. He’s been open two months, and so far…no problem.

Eating my meal, I was surrounded by poignant sights and sounds. First a warbly call to prayer echoed across town. Then the church bells tolled determinedly across the street. It was like Turkey and Germany were taking turns knocking on my ears. All the while, a little boy with training wheels on his pint-sized bike pedaled vigorously around and around the newly laid sidewalk by a still-bomb-damaged line of buildings and grass too young to walk on. He went faster and faster with each circle.

The day before, we crossed from the Serbian part of Bosnia into the Croat and Muslim part, filming visual indicators showing that we were crossing a centuries-old cultural divide that was gerrymandered into a border in the 1990s to finagle a fragile peace. Flags flapped proudly from wires strung over the road. Old Serbian kings were stenciled onto abandoned buildings. Ruined castles guarded ghosts of centuries-old threats on strategic mountain passes. On road signs, Cyrillic letters gave way to Latin ones.

Stopping to film one sign at the cusp where cities were indicated in both scripts, Cameron (co-author of our guidebook on this region and a critical part of our filming effort for his passion, knowledge, and contacts here) and I were sitting like Clark Kent’s puppies in our van while big, strong Simon and Karel were out with their fancy camera and tripod, framing up the shot. Suddenly a beat-up truck screeched around the corner and skidded to a halt next to Simon and Karel, raising enough dust to obscure the camera.

An enraged man powered out, slammed his door, and screamed at my crew, thumping his chest so hard he almost got air. As he was threatening our friends, Cameron and I were traumatized, watching from the car. Simon and Karel talked calmly with him while taking the camera and tripod down, then walked back to the car — not knowing if the mad Serb would actually get physical. Thankfully it didn’t come to blows.

We learned afterward that the media has been angering Bosnia’s Serbian community lately with its 60-Minutes-type coverage of sensitive issues, and apparently this brute just had it out for anyone with a big camera.

While we’ve met generally gentle and thoughtful people in all communities here, I can also see the potential for more of the sectarian tumult that made the 1990s so horrific. There’s a certain strata of society here in each ethnic community, and when you see them, you just have to think “for war…just add bullets and agitate.”

I’ll see a café filled with skinhead bodybuilders who make me think brains and brawn are a zero-sum game. Some are built like big tubes, with muscles that seem to squeeze their heads really small. They live in poverty, amidst broken concrete and angry graffiti with little but unemployment in their futures.

And then, you get out of the backcountry, and the energy and focus are much different. On Montenegro’s coast, people are still talking about the recent concerts featuring Madonna and the Rolling Stones. Both visited Montenegro (with local government sponsorship to help put that homely little country of 700,000 on the map) and sold out (30,000 tickets at $50 each — lots of gross for a small, poor country).

The Stones learned native words, referring to the country by its local name (Crna Gora), wishing all a dober dan (good day), and so on. They thrilled the euphoric crowd with a robust encore set. Madonna, on the other hand, didn’t relate to anything local, never talked to the people, and ignored their pleas for an encore. Friends who went to the concert recalled that she was in her helicopter, lifting up over the stadium on her way out of the country three minutes after singing the last verse of her last song.

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Tito Said ‘No’ to Stalin…and We Look Suspicious with No Beards

We’ve been filming new TV shows in Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia for nearly three weeks.

 

Tito may have been the father of his country, but he’s dead and the only image I saw of him in the 20 days I spent in the former Yugoslavia was on this T-shirt.
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Talking with locals about their memories of growing up in Yugoslavia (which broke apart in the 1990s), people have generally good memories of the times. Marshal Tito (its strong-arm dictator) is remembered in a single phrase: “He said ‘No’ to Stalin.” People remember the stability. And time and time again people said, “It was a good time…we could travel.”

Yugoslavians were free to travel when other Communist Europeans could not because they were happy to return. Locals here remember when their “Red Passport” was worth more on the black market than an American passport. That’s because Yugoslavia was on good terms with — and its citizens could travel in — both the First World and the Second (Communist) World.

People in these countries speak what used to be called Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian depending on your ethnicity). Today the languages are all still essentially the same but, as required by each new country’s constitution, they are called Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Croatian.

Europeans differ in how their national pride compares with their pragmatic need to connect with the rest of the world. You can read it in the letters they choose to indicate their country on car license plates and road signs. Croatia is proud: “Hr” for Hrvatska. Hellas is pragmatic: “Gr” for “Greece.” Germany is proud: “D” for Deutschland. Östereich is pragmatic: “A” for “Austria.” Magyarország needs to be pragmatic: “H” for “Hungary.” France doesn’t need to show its cards since Franceis French for “France.”

It’s interesting to see how the images lodged in my mind from past trips ripen in my head over the years — or simply change with the country. I write a script calling for a great view, painting, café, or experience — we go there and my cameraman wonders “what were you thinking?” Years ago in Croatia, there were lots of goats roasting on spits. People’s tastes have changed, the cost is up, and a goat slowly spinning over a grill is no longer an icon of the region. (Actually, in three weeks traveling here, we’ve seen less than 100 head of any kind of cattle, sheep, or goats.) It’s like my image of Greece with old guys drinking retsina wine. The Greeks are into better wine now, retsina is considered rotgut, and it has faded away from the tavern scene.

I’ve noticed every region of the Mediterranean is pushing its wine industry. Occasionally, regional pride blinds them to quality. Each region of the former Yugoslavia seems proud of the wine they produce — and none of it is any good compared to what I drank in Spain, France, and Italy. I find wine here on par with Greece. The difference: Here waiters actually admit it’s overpriced. We paid $40 to try a bottle of the best wine in Croatia. In Greece, I asked a wine merchant what local wine he’d buy for $30. He said, “With $30, I’d get three $10 bottles.”

We’ve had some great people moments, especially in remote Montenegro. Dropping in on a mountaintop, Serbian-Orthodox monastery, the monks (their long black beards matching their long black robes) told me, “You look suspicious with no beards.” In prepping them for my interview, I said part of our mission was to help Americans understand rather than fear people who were different. They joked, “We’ll have to prove to them they have reason to fear.”

Later, in the middle of a Montenegrin nowhere, we met an American family traveling with their 91-year-old mother. We shared stories of beautiful times we’ve enjoyed and lessons we’ve learned getting to know the people in this region.

Later, the grandma gave me the most encouraging compliment I’ve heard on this trip. I had to call my film crew over so she could repeat it. “Your TV show inspires me to keep going when I should be staying home.”

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Suicide Notes

For the last two months of travel it’s occurred to me that the tragedy of people committing suicide is universal — it happens in all cultures.

Here in Croatia, we were atop one of the tallest buildings in Zagreb for our TV work. It provided a great, high view of the city but we had to take apart our camera to slip the lens through the prison-like bars that caged in what was a top-floor, view café. My Croatian friend explained, “This spot is very tempting if you’re prone to kill yourself.” The ambience of what could have been the most exciting café in town was completely murdered to stop people from jumping.

In Ljubljana, what was once the tallest building in Slovenia — nicknamed simply “the Skyscraper” — had a trendy café on its top floor, but it’s been closed as too many were jumping to their deaths. Slovenes, so easy-going and friendly, are, statistically one of the more suicide-prone people in Europe.

Earlier, while I was in Spain, it seemed every town had a place known as a departure point for people committing suicide. An average of three people a year travel “from all over Andalusia” to jump off the famous bridge into Ronda’s gorge.

Standing at the Balcony of Europe, a gentle, Old World terrace overlooking the Mediterranean in Nerja, I asked my guide if it is a suicide point. She said, “No, but last year a city official investigated for corruption slit his wrists in his office, didn’t die, dribbled his blood all the way to the balcony, and jumped.”

In the Andalusian hilltown of Arcos, where they brag only they “can see the backs of the birds as they fly,” it’s traditional for suicidal men to jump from one side of the hilltown and women to jump from the other.

And the Swiss, people famous for being successful and content, have a relatively high suicide rate. The bridge in Lausanne was so commonly used as the springboard for those who wanted to end it all that on Christmas and New Year’s, when troubled people are inclined to become distraught, volunteers take turns manning the bridge with hot chocolate and cookies, ready to talk people out of killing themselves.

Is it just me, or does every major city have its spot notorious as a place for people to kill themselves?

When traveling, I strive to see beyond the tourist glitz and find the mundane grind and reality of life. Like the sweetness of being happy, the despair of being hopeless knows no borders.