Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

I’m off – Spain, Basque Country, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia – for 70 days. A piece of notebook paper in my pocket is my reassuring companion for the last days before departure. Jotting down things I need to do and things to pack as they come to me brings peace of mind as, with two months of work, there’s lots to organize and lots to forget.

Still, once at the airport and at the gate, things I overlooked pop into my world, reminding me that I always feel a little awkward at the start of my big annual trip. Reaching into my day bag, I found a paperback I didn’t intend to bring — when I landed at Heathrow, it landed in the recycle bin. I didn’t bring my normal $200 cash reserve. With just a few bucks in my wallet, I’m relying entirely on my two ATM cards with no ready cash safety net. I’m sure it’ll be okay…but I’ve never left home without a cash reserve. I neglected to tell my bank I’d be out of the country and to expect withdrawals from Europe. And I forgot to change my voicemail at work. I like it to be my gleeful voice explaining I’m gone for a long time. This time it’ll have to be another voice. Reading through my Spain guidebook, I came upon our excellent suggested reading and movie list. A few less Jon Stewarts or Officeepisodes and a little movie watching tailored to my upcoming travels would have given me better insight into Spain. It just didn’t occur to me until now. And I neglected to call my first hotel to reconfirm…and to remind them that I’ll be getting in at nearly midnight.

With three hours of downtime at the Madrid airport, I got my euros (used a freestanding ATM machine not clearly associated with a bank — which I try to avoid), and got my cell phone geared up with a European SIM card (I brought two phones — my basic American phone wouldn’t take the card, but my old Nokia works great; €15 and I’m in business with about 20 minutes of call time and piles of text messages).

After a €28 taxi ride from the airport, I’m set in my Granada hotel — midnight, streets polished by strolling Spaniards. I feel like a groggy bear coming out of hibernation. But I think within a day or so, I’ll be settled into the rhythm of research and pounding the pavement to the melody of Spain.

Last month someone who works for the company that makes our bags signed up to support a group fighting to protect salmon from some development. They started printing my name on their fliers, and I asked them to stop putting my name on their material. They concluded I was “anti-salmon,” and now schools of salmon-lovers are upset with me.

I filmed the force-feeding of the geese on a farm in France’s Dordogne region, where I interviewed the farmer about the treatment of their geese and their love of this delicacy. Yesterday my staff told me there’s an orchestrated campaign from PETA to get me to stop talking about that delicious slice of French cuisine and get active against the mistreatment of geese. (Anthony Bourdain did a wonderful video clip about his appreciation of foie gras on YouTube.) I don’t care if they are monogamous…they’re just fancy chickens to me, and we humans rule the food chain. I told the people who answer our phones not to be intimidated, and that I wouldn’t be cowed by PETA over geese.

Then I got this email from Daniel R:

“Rick Steves’ comment about finding used French postcards along the Amalfi Coast was inappropriate. He owes his NPR listeners an apology.”

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If “French postcards” means what I think it means, Daniel is complaining about me sharing on my radio show how I stumbled on lots of used condoms on the Amalfi Coast, and could actually measure the intensity of each scenic turnout along Italy’s most romantic stretch of coastline by the number of condoms that littered the asphalt. I wasn’t promoting the practice…just relating what I saw. It’s simply romantic couples appreciating nature, making love, and practicing safe sex. Their worst offense: littering (and perhaps offending people who aren’t able to enjoy the view quite so much). At least I didn’t put this photo in the book.

Is a travel writer supposed to be a provocateur? Should I not talk about bullfights, force-fed geese, and condoms? Should I condemn those who do things that offend us…or share their passion? I suppose we are all politically correct in different — thankfully unpredictable — ways. Life would be boring if we had one-size-fits-all correctness. As a travel writer, I’m just beachcombing after the cultural storm caused by my world meeting another. My work is to stroll the beach and take home curious observations to enjoy, ogle, and fiddle with. Then I share them with my readers.

On Wednesday, I fly to Granada in southern Spain, kicking off two months of travel. I’ll hope to have some fresh treasures to share.

I’ve been thinking about trust among tour guides, mortgage brokers, and doctors. I don’t like not trusting people I hire to be my experts — whether on tour, in a bank, or in the hospital.

I’m in a crisis of trust with banking and medicine. I like my investment guy…but I don’t trust him. I don’t understand that business, and I don’t really believe he can do his work without being corrupted by the conflicts of interest he deals with when he advises me where to stow my money. It’s the same with brokers who knowingly sold thousands of Americans mortgages they didn’t understand and could never pay. This makes me sad.

I just gave a fundraiser talk for my HMO (GroupHealth in Seattle). One of my big fears is that my doctor will get me on some prescription medicine for the rest of my life in part because it is profitable to him (or the medical industry in general) for me to take that drug. I learned that my HMO has an ethic higher than that, and that the doctors there willingly make less money in order not to sell their souls by pushing pharmaceuticals on innocents like me. I told my HMO friend that I don’t want “choice”…I just want accessible, efficient, and affordable medicine motivated by my body’s needs, not a doctor’s bottom line.

(Coincidentally, I put my HMO to work fixing a hernia. I had surgery two days ago and was really impressed by the organization and the whole process. Writing this blog entry is the only work I’ve done all day.)

While tourism is small potatoes compared to banking and medicine, its corrupting influences can be instructive. I started my tour company 30 years ago out of a similar frustration with the existing system. Naive tourists were shuttled through Europe by slick tour guides who kept them in the dark and took them shopping for kickbacks. In Amsterdam, they skipped the Van Gogh Museum (which cost the tour company $10 a head and offered no kickbacks) for the diamond-polishing place (free and offering 20 percent kickbacks on diamonds purchased). Because of this violation of trust, a generation of Americans has seen diamonds in Amsterdam…but no Van Goghs.

Ages ago in my work as a tour organizer, I realized that the norm in the industry was to recommend trip cancellation and interruption insurance (both to avoid any liability if something went wrong, and to get a 30 percent commission from the insurance company). I figured the insurance companies were making a third, the travel agent was making a third, and the tourists were paying triple the actual value of the insurance — which they often shouldn’t have purchased in the first place. To recommend this (and get that 30 percent commission) might have been really profitable, but it seemed dishonest to me. Instead, I figured the overall cost of insuring all the travelers on my tour program would be something I could more efficiently include in the tour. By “self-insuring,” I could provide that coverage while adding only about 30 percent of the cost of the normal insurance coverage to the cost of our tours.

This is related to what my HMO is attempting to accomplish — and perhaps what our nation needs to do with medicine in general. (All statistics agree that Europeans — who have defragged their health costs smartly — spend one third what we do for health care.) I make money by offering a good tour, not by pushing a highly commissionable product. I like to think doctors want to do the same (but, as Flip Wilson explained, “The system makes them do it”).

Considering the challenges confronting our government and society today, I keep coming back to this trust issue. I think of all the clever young students lured into professions in medicine and finance and banking because there’s lots of money to be made, and I lament the loss of trust. Our money says “in God we trust”…but what about the rest of us?

I recently took an interview with Kevin Berger from Salon.com on my way home from a speaking gig in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was exhausted at the airport and thought it would be just a quick interview. I called him, and he just got me talking and talking (which I do with abandon when I’m tired). Kevin must have had a tape recorder going, because he caught everything I rattled off. He was fun to talk to and just egged me on. I remember stepping onto the plane as I hung up, thinking, “Wow, I talked that man’s ear off.” I didn’t really take the interview too seriously. But now, considering the readership Salon.com has, I’m glad I mustered the energy to have this conversation with him. Sometimes when I’m unguarded, my thoughts come out better. I like the feeling and flow of this piece. (Nice work, Kevin.) The article was posted this morning, and it has held the #1 “Most Read” spot on their homepage all day…and has sparked a lot of conversation in the blogosphere. In case you’re interested, you can read the article.