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

Cliché Croatia

I’ve learned a lot from concerned feedback from Croatians and from Cameron Hewitt, the co-author of our Croatia & Slovenia and Eastern Europe guidebooks (and a driving force behind us getting that part of Europe up to speed with our coverage of the West). I’m fascinated by the Cold War and their struggles for freedom, and with the wars of the mid-1990s in the former Yugoslavia, but this is becoming old news. Here is an example of feedback to a recent article I wrote, and the response by Cameron (which I agree with a hundred percent):

Dear Mr. Steves,

It was painful to read your latest article on Dubrovnik and Croatia. I would have thought it was a reprint from 10 years ago. First of all the real story is that Dubrovnik has become a victim of its reputation. It is a laggard in post war tourism restructuring compared to other Croatian destinations. Much as energy wealth has kept Russia from reforming, Dubrovnik’s traditional reputation and hordes of Cruise Ship day trippers have lead to a town that is expensive, and offers second class amenities and value.

The real story of Croatian tourism and its successful rapid growth can be found in other areas, such as the Istrian peninsula, which offers high commercial standards of tourism, or the town of Zadar which is more than twice as old as Dubrovnik, and rapidly transformed itself to offer a far higher level of urban sophistication. National parks like Kornati, Plitvice, Krka, and Pakelnica, each offering unique splendor and are located less than two hours drive from each other. The town of Novalje on the island of Pag has become one of the top draws for the international party crowd with Ibixa-like 24 hour partying in one of the many mega clubs at the Zrce beach. The yacht charter industry is one of the largest and most competitive in the world, offering fantastic value, offering the most fantastic holiday experience. These are the real stories of the Croatian experience.

Milan Šangulin

Rick,

I actually agree with this reader. The point he’s making is that you should be cautious not to fixate on one (ugly) aspect of a destination — such as a war — when there’s so much more to the place. I think a similar case could be made about focusing too much on the communist chapter in former Soviet places, like Prague or Hungary or Poland.

Avoiding talk of old wars and communist times just to appease these critics is unreasonable. However, I would encourage you to think beyond these concepts. For example, I find Mostar at least as engaging for its mosques and Turkish houses and diving-off-the-Old Bridge traditions, as for its war damage and improvised cemeteries.

The more I travel in Croatia and Bosnia, the less I think about the war. The more I travel in Eastern Europe, the less I think about communism. There is so much richness of history and culture to learn about in these places, beyond those unfortunate blips on their history. It’s easy to still think of Eastern Europe as “behind the Iron Curtain,” or as the former Yugoslavia as war-torn—but that’s old news, man. As I say in the guidebooks and in my slideshows, people in Croatia think about the war only when a tourist brings it up. You’re doing readers (and the people who live in these places) a disservice to emphasize the negative/provocative factors too much. A solution might be to occasionally complement these weighty articles with a lighter, more tourist-friendly look at the same places (which you have certainly done before, in places like Dubrovnik). You could write a compelling article about Mostar, Dubrovnik, or the Serb parts of Herzegovina without ever mentioning the war.

Hope this helps.

Cameron

European Flesh and the American Prude

I find that Europeans are, compared to Americans, more comfortable with their bodies and with sex. (In fact, I imagine even bringing up this topic in my blog might offend some Americans.) Thinking through my recent travels, the examples are plentiful.

My Dutch friends had a copy of a graphic, government-produced magazine promoting safe sex on their coffee table. I was sitting on the toilet at an airport in Poland and the cleaning lady asked me to lift my legs so she could sweep. I’ve learned that I can measure the after-dark romantic appeal of scenic pull-outs along Italy’s Amalfi Coast drive by how many used condoms litter the asphalt. Soap ads on huge billboards overlooking major city intersections in Belgium come with lathered-up breasts. The logo of a German friend’s travel guidebook publishing company is a stick figure of a traveler on a tropical paradise islet leaning up against its only palm tree, hands behind his head, reading a book that’s supported by his erect penis. Children play naked in fountains in Norway. A busty porn star is elected to parliament in Italy. Coppertoned grandmothers in the south of France have no tan lines. The student tourist center in Copenhagen welcomes visitors with a bowl of free condoms at the info desk. Accountants in Munich fold their suits neatly on the grass as every inch of their body soaks up the sun while taking a lunch break in the park.

I’m not comfortable with all of it. In Barcelona during a construction industry convention, locals laughed that they had to actually bus in extra prostitutes from France for this gang. I find the crude sexual postcards sold on racks all over the Continent gross, the Benny Hill-style T&A that inundates TV throughout Mediterranean Europe boorish, and the topless models strewn across page two of so many British newspapers insulting to women. And I’ll never forget the time my wife and I had to physically remove the TV from our children’s hotel room in Austria after seeing a couple slamming away on the free channel 7 (and the hotelier looked at us like we were crazy).

Comparisons with America are striking. In our culture, a popular children’s TV host is routed into obscurity after being seen in an adult theater. A pop star dominates the news media for days after revealing a partially obscured breast for a fleeting moment during a football halftime show. During one particularly moralistic time, statues of classical goddesses gracing our nation’s Capitol were robed. And, because my travel show includes naked statues, it actually has to be shown only after 10 p.m. in some American towns.

I’m not saying we should all run around naked and have Playboys lying around in the doctor’s waiting room. But I have a hunch that children raised in America, where sex is “dirty,” are more likely to have problems with sex and their bodies than those in Europe. I suspect there is more violence associated with sex here than there. I have a hunch that the French, who have as many words for a kiss as Eskimos have for snow, enjoy making love more than we Americans do. I like a continent where sexual misconduct won’t doom a politician with anyone other than his family and friends, and where the human body is considered a divine work of art worth admiring openly.

An early edition of my art-for-travelers guidebook featured a camera-toting David— full frontal nudity, Michelangelo-style — on the cover. My publisher said sales reps complained that in more conservative parts of the USA, bookstores were uncomfortable stocking it. A fig leaf would help sales.

When it comes to great art, I don’t like fig leafs. But I proposed, just for fun, that we put a peel-able fig leaf on the cover so people could have the book cover the way they preferred. My publisher said that would be too expensive. I offered to pay half (10 cents per book times 10,000). He went for it, and I had the fun experience of writing “for fig leafs” on a $500 check. Perhaps that needless expense just adds to my wish that Americans were more European in their comfort level with nakedness.

Am I off-base? What’s behind all this, anyway?

Europeans Work Less.

This summer I hung out with a Greek friend who spent 20 years working in America. Only after he retired and returned to Greece did he realize that not once in all those years did he take a nap. Now that he’s back in Greece, if he’s sleepy in the afternoon, he takes a snooze. It’s got me thinking about how hard Americans work and how that compares with Europe.

United Europe has 400 million people with an annual economy of about 13 trillion dollars. To put that into relative terms, the United States has 300 million people producing about 13 trillion dollars annually. We’ve got the same size economy. They’ve got more people.

You’ll hear American proponents of our system put down the European system with claims that they don’t make as much money as we do. True — with more people generating only the same gross economy, they make less money per person. But Europeans make essentially the same per hour as we do.

I was raised believing there was one good work ethic: you work hard. While we call this the work ethic, it’s actually only awork ethic. Europeans have a different one. They choose to work roughly 25 percent fewer hours and willingly make 25 percent less money. While that may not be good for business — it is good for life. While choosing to work less is part of “family values” in Europe, here in business-friendly America working less is frowned upon…almost subversive.

I’ve got a friend in Seattle who’s evangelical about holidays. He runs a very small movement called Take Back Your Time (www.timeday.org). Its mission: to teach Americans that we’ve got the shortest vacations in the rich world, and it’s getting worse. His movement’s national holiday was just a couple weeks ago — October 24th. That’s because, by their estimates, if we were Europeans working as hard as people do here, October 24th would be the last day we’d have to go to work.

Things are changing, though. With the pressures of globalization, Europe is having to rethink some of its live-more-work-less ideals. I have a theory that in Ireland, sales of Guinness are threatened and the number of pubs are shrinking at the same rate that the number of cafés are increasing, because drinkers of stout are shifting to lagers and drinkers of lager are shifting to coffee. It’s a symptom of our faster-paced, more competitive world.

A Black President and Europe’s Ethnic Underdogs

As Europe looks at our country with a new respect and hopeful anticipation that the new president will be inclusive and not disappoint, I’ve been reworking some of my old notes and thinking about ethnic diversity in Europe.

As Europe united, I feared its ethnic diversity would be threatened. But I find just the opposite is happening. In Europe there are three loyalties: region, nation and Europe. Ask a person from Munich where he’s from and he’ll say, “I’m Bavarian,” or “I’m German,” or “I’m European,” depending on his generation and his outlook. These days city halls all over Europe fly three flags: regional, national, and Europe.

Throughout our lifetimes the headlines have been filled by regions challenging nations. Most of the terrorism — whether Basque, Irish, Catalan, or Corsican — has been separatist movements threatening national capitals.

Modern political borders are rarely clean when it comes to dividing ethnic groups. Brittany, the west of France, is not ethnically French. People there are Celtic, related to the Welsh and the Irish. Just a generation ago, Paris was so threatened by these Celts that if you were a parent in Brittany and you named your child a Celtic name, that child would lose its French citizenship. That would be laughable today.

When I first visited Barcelona, locals were not allowed to speak Catalan, wave the Catalan flag, or dance their beloved Sardana dance. Now, in public schools, children speak Catalan first, and every Sunday in front of the cathedral, locals gather to dance the Sardana — celebrating their Catalan ethnicity.

The small languages across Europe are actually thriving. More people are speaking Irish now than a generation ago. Just recently, Scotland convened a parliament in Edinburgh for the first time since 1707.

What’s going on? Brittany no longer threatens Paris. Barcelona no longer threatens Madrid. Edinburgh not longer threatens London. The national capitals are no longer threatened by their regions because the national capitals realize their power is waning. It’s Brussels. It’s Europe. And Europe is excited not about the political boundaries that divide people often without regard to their ethnicity, but about regions.

I’ve got a friend who is the Indiana Jones of archeology in Austria’s Tirol region. When he wants money to renovate a castle, he goes to Brussels. If he says, “I’m doing something for Austria,” he’ll go home empty-handed. He says he’s doing something for the Tirol (which ignores the modern national boundary and is an ethnic region that includes part of Italy and Austria). He gets money from Brussels because Brussels is promoting ethnic regions over modern political entities.

Europe promotes the smaller ethnic groups and they support each other as well. In Barcelona, a local told me, “Catalan is Spain’s Quebec. We don’t like people calling our corner of Iberia a ‘region’ of Spain…because that’s what Franco called it. We are not a region. We are a nation without a state.” The people of Catalunya live in solidarity with other “stateless nations.” For instance, they find Basque or Galician bars a little more appealing than the run-of-the-mill Spanish ones. Even ATM machines are in solidarity, offering the correct choice of languages. In Barcelona as in Basque Country, you’ll see Catalan and Euskara (the Basque language) with Spanish and Galego (the language of Galicia, in northwest Spain) — and only then German, French, and English.

The fact that these little underdog ethnic groups are all victims to a certain degree of the “tyranny of the majority” contributes to their solidarity. It even factors into the way they travel. On a recent trip to Northern Ireland I was impressed by how many travelers I met from Basque Country and Catalunya. Because the Basques and Catalans feel a kinship with the Catholics of Ireland’s Protestant North, they choose to vacation in Ulster. On the same trip, I saw Israeli flags flying from flag posts in Protestant communities all over Northern Ireland. Understandably, the Protestants planted by a bigger power (England) in Ulster are having a tough time with their indigenous neighbors. Right or wrong, good or bad, it doesn’t matter. They are settlers and they can empathize with Israeli settlers planted in land Palestinians claim and who are having a tough time with their indigenous neighbors.

As we celebrate our first Black president and the long and difficult road America’s ethnic underdogs have traveled, we can pay attention to the modern struggles of Europe’s fascinating ethnic stew, have an empathy for its underdogs, and root for those societies (perhaps inspired by the USA) to come together as we have.

Inflicting the fear of a little homelessness on a paying customer…

Back in the 1970s as a tour guide, I drove 50 or 60 people 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 over 10,000 who join us annually can be thankful.

As a 25-year-old hippie-backpacker-turned-tour-organizer, I had this misguided notion that soft and spoiled American travelers would benefit from a little hardship. In retrospect, I was pretty cruel. I’d run 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 so nervous at the prospect of being homeless for a night. 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 that night.

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 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 and 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 coming back for more. (Yesterday my tour sales director told me our sales for 2009 are holding, but only because more than half of those signing up are return travelers.)

For me, 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 Iraq wars 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.)