By the time Scene caught up with Rick Steves a couple of weeks ago in advance of his stop Wednesday night at the Parma-Snow Branch of Cuyahoga County Public Library to tout his new book, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, the event had already sold out and a waiting list had grown.
Whether or not Steves knew this fact, the legendary travel writer still graciously took 30 minutes to chat about the work, which is his original journal from the trip in 1978 complete with photos and other art, why he still believes in the power of travel to change the world, how to be the right kind of traveler, and the ways to grasp experience overseas.
Even if he did know the interview couldn’t sell any additional tickets, he probably still would have done it. After all, selling books isn’t all he’s about.
“You know, I’m a businessman,” he told Scene. “[Interviews are] good for my business. But I measure my profit not by how many dollars are in my bank account, but by how many people’s trips I’ve impacted in a good way.”
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity (and probably to insert some typos).
Scene: One thing I’ve thought about a lot with this book and for memories for the average traveler is how crystallized the memories are if you journal while you’re there, in the moment, instead of doing it when you return home.
Rick Steves: Oh, it’s critical. Hate is a strong word, but I hate to write vividly when I get back home. I’d rather have the raw material for vivid writing, taken down on the scene, and then fashion those scribbles into a good article when I get home. But I have to be there on the spot to capture the whole sense of it. You’re surrounded by bugs. You know, there’s the humid dust rising out the window from people who are dancing up and down, and you’re just right there, surrounded by it all. I love that, and that’s why, if you’re a writer — you know these little black mole skin books, that’s, that’s what I travel with. And I fill them up, and then I cross them off when it’s in the computer. And I know, great, I’ve got that stuff.
I just recently traveled with some friends and they’re big into journals and they got us into it a little bit. Everyone has phones now, so there are more pictures from trips, and vacation memories are far easier to come by with that volume. But what that lacks is context you might otherwise forget but are happy to remember – conversation topics, jokes, names, interactions. Without taking the time to make notes, those disappear. And in this case, something like this book doesn’t exist.
You know, a lesson from that, I think, is in this Hippie Trail book. And there’s a photograph in here that I like, which is just me sitting on a bench at a train station hunched over my journal. You’ve got 45 minutes til the train comes. You can jot down what’s going on all around you, and that’s, I think, the vividness of this book — there’s literally bugs squished onto the pages of that journal that are still there 40 or 50 years later.
Do you still journal as you travel, or has that taken a backseat to a reporter’s notebook?
[Pulls out a stack of notebooks.] I do this with every year’s research. This is what I did last year. And there’s four here, and each one is filled with writing that I cannot read 24 hours after I wrote it, but I can read it at the time, and you’re a writer, so you know, and then it’s crossed off if it’s in the computer. But I don’t do a journal just because I don’t have the bandwidth, and I’ve got to work on these books.
So, my journals: I did an empty book — like on the hippie trail — for every trip for the first seven years before I became serious about this stuff. And then when I was 25 years old, I wrote my first book, and that was the end of the serious journaling. But I wrote more, but it was a different kind of writing. It was researching for this.
Were you ever into reading about travel? Were you digging into Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad?
I’m a little embarrassed to say that I’m not very well read. I’ve written 60 books, but I haven’t read very many travel books. I’ve read some, but what I read is other people’s journals. People send me their journals, and these are just amateur writing that I just love. I like that. But no, if I had more bandwidth, I would. But there’s two kind of travelers. There’s the dream of what I wish I was as a traveler. And then there is the businessman, workaholic, mission-driven travel writer, running a company with 100 employees, producing TV shows, radio shows, and guidebooks and tours. And you know, I love to travel, and I like to think that I’m on the rooftop of that bus, but the reality is, I’ve got to get back to the hotel and write an article for the newspaper.
Everyone travels differently, and it’s helpful to get tips. In my personal case, it’s a combination of your books and a little research. I find fiction to be very helpful in getting an understanding of the culture that you’re walking into that doesn’t come across from a Wikipedia page.
Oh, that’s huge, and a lot of people can get that context through good fiction reading. Whereas I don’t read novels, I prepare by learning about the historic and artistic and cultural context of where I’m going. I mean, for instance, before I did this hippie trail book– I did this when I was 23 after graduating from the University of Washington, the year before, we had an opportunity at the university to design our own class and have a private professor, and I designed a class called Village India. It was a five-credit course. It was just me and a professor, and I had that self-created, self-designed study on village life in India, and when I think back on it, that was pretty interesting that, you know, when I was a student, I actually made a class, got five credits for it to prepare for this trip. So when I went to a village in India, I had a better context of what I was looking at. And to this day, in my travel teaching, I’m a big fan of reminding people, the more understanding you bring to your sightseeing, whether it’s drinking wine or enjoying a gothic cathedral or understanding Impressionism, the more context you bring to it, the more you’ll get out of it.
Why did you think anyone wanted to read your journals from so long ago and why were you excited about the idea?
The journals were not for anybody except for me. I wrote them for me, and I didn’t even write them knowing I would actually read them. I thought, maybe someday, you know, when I’m 64 I will read my old journals. But I wasn’t doing that. It was like netting butterflies. As little experiences went by, I wanted to net them and pin them up to the wall. And that was my, my ritual, or, I don’t know, my whatever. It just helped me to write stuff down. And when you write stuff down, you have to think about it in a way that designs the thought and tests it and runs it up the flagpole. So the journals were written for me. And I’ve got seven hard books– 200 pages, and they’re all filled with this very good script. I can’t write that way anymore. But every page of these books for six trips was written and taken home and saved. And the one that is worth really sharing was the epic trip, you know, on the hippie trail.
Now it’s historic. I mean, in the ’60s and ’70s, everybody was doing this. If you’re a backpacker, if you didn’t do the hippie trail, you dreamed of doing the hippie trail. You’d start at the pudding shop in Istanbul, where there’s a bulletin board, where everybody would team up and share thoughts and ideas. And then you do this trip, and you’d finish in Kathmandu. That’s where the rainbow ended for backpackers and I did it in 1978 not knowing that’s the last year it would be possible, because the next year the Shah fell, the Ayatollah came. Iran became a theocracy. You couldn’t really go there. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And life changed in a lot of ways, but I had this freakishly detailed account of it in 60,000 words, and I documented it with photographs, and not just pictures of here’s my friend having a beer. But I mean, as if I was storyboarding, you know, a play I was going to make. I mean, at the rest stop we skinned a goat, and I didn’t know that would someday be in a book to illustrate that. So I had the writing, I had the photographs. It was historic. Nobody does anymore. Two years later, I was no longer a piano teacher. I was a travel teacher, and since then, I’ve become well known as a prolific travel writer, focusing just on European travel. And I discovered this during the pandemic.
My publisher read through it, and they thought, you gotta do it. I was very concerned about vanity press. I don’t like to write a book, just because, hey, I wrote a book. Here you go. I didn’t want to do a vanity press thing, and I didn’t think I had the judgment to say whether this is vanity press or not. But my publisher assured me, no, this is good. I’ve also thought that a lot of people would say, Oh, I wish we could do that. And the takeaway from this book is, you can do it. You can have the hippie trail. You don’t need to go from Istanbul to Kathmandu in the wake of the Beatles. You can do it today. You can do it on a bicycle in the United States. You could go south of the border. You could do all sorts of things and get that pilgrimage dimension to your travels, knowing that you learn more about your home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance, knowing that or embracing the idea that 1400 years ago, Mohammed said, don’t tell me how educated you are — tell me how much you’ve traveled.
In that vein, the guidebooks you write are a starting point, right? Like you’ve said, they’re for Joe Six Pack. Here’s what you might enjoy and here’s what you should see and how to do it. Do you ever also feel like just telling people to wander? Like you don’t need to hit the new famous bookstore from Instagram or the Michelin restaurant. Just get your shoes on, take a walk, and see what you find out there?
There are examples in here about how that can be a good model, getting on a bus, leaving the city and intending to get off the bus where nobody has ever gotten off before, where no tourist has ever gotten off. The mark of a good time to get off the bus is when you try to get off the bus and everybody on the bus goes, oh, excuse me, you must be mistaken. Nobody gets off here. No, thank you. That’s where I’m getting off, and that’s I talked about. It’s a philosophy. You don’t do it literally, but you do it to a certain degree when you travel. And for me on the hippie trail, you know, if you’re in Jaipur, if you’re in Kathmandu, if you’re in Herat, if you’re in Tehran, you don’t need a guidebook. You just walk in a different direction every day, and every 50 yards, there’s another shop or something. Every 10 yards, there’s another shop, another moment, another little experience waiting to happen. And you know, that’s the freedom the hippie trail is about. I make a kind of a fun deal about this is where I first smoked marijuana. It’s not about marijuana. It’s about freedom. It’s about getting away from your norms. And, you know, having smoked a joint in Afghanistan is one example of that.
Are the interactions that you have with other people and residents of those countries part of it too? I know sometimes it’s hard for people, whether they perceive a language barrier or a cultural barrier or are just a little shy in general, but those connections certainly don’t happen unless you start talking to the people that you’re around, right?
Yeah, and that’s a fundamental travel skill that I’ve been talking about for 40 years with all my other books and so on. And again, this book on the hippie trail is kind of like the rough compost pile of travel opportunities that that this can grow out of. You know, the mark of a good traveler is, how many people do you talk to, and how do you do that? Well, you do it when serendipity presents itself, you say yes, without doing something stupid and getting yourself in any kind of danger. But I just love — anywhere I travel, if I’m in Ireland, I go to the west coast of Ireland. Stand in that bluff where Europe ends, and you gaze out on the Atlantic, and the old Irishman next to you, he goes, Ah, the next parish over is Boston. You know, that’s just a beautiful moment, and you wouldn’t have it if you’re in your hotel room watching TV or hanging out with another American tourist. You have that when you’re exposed, when you’re alone with the culture.
It’s a state of vulnerability that you have to embrace. You have to say yes.
Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s a vulnerability to be changed by your travels. When somebody tells me have a safe trip, I think what they might be saying is, don’t do anything that’s going to mess up your understanding of how the world should be.
I like how idealistic and optimistic you are about the ability of travel to fundamentally change people in that regard. I like to believe it too. Sometimes it’s hard to see in other people what keeps you believing in that though.
Take our political environment right now. If you had to travel before you voted, we would not have President Trump. Period. Because people would understand the beauty of being engaged in the rest of the world, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be so needy to have walls. I want to be safe, just like some frightened right winger, but I believe we are safer if we have bridges, and less safe if we barricade ourselves behind walls. Of course we have to monitor our border and all that, but philosophically, we got to be at the table when the world is dealing with complicated challenges, and now we’re just pulling out of everything. So the world’s got to deal with these challenges without American leadership, and that’s not good for anything.
You’ve done a bunch on the leadership front in regards to climate change to abate the travel you do and encourage with your tours.
Travel contributes to climate change. And some people know about our self-imposed carbo tax. I believe in mitigation. I don’t want to be flight shamed out of my travels, but I want to pay for my carbon and scientists know that you can create this much bad, but if you spend the money smartly and create that much good, it zeros out. It’s not heroic, it’s nothing to brag about. It’s just baseline ethical. So that’s what I do as a businessman, and that’s why we donate a million dollars a year to climate smart agriculture to help mitigate the carbon we create with our 30,000 people that take our tours every year.
You’ve also created family businesses and family wealth. I’m not talking about your company. I’m talking about hotels, restaurants that you’ve written about, people that you’ve come to know over the years and who have businesses that stretch back decades. And you’ve produced high interest in areas that didn’t have it before. There’s a puzzle of the Cinque Terre sitting on my kitchen table right now, and that’s a place that maybe six years ago, I would have chosen to go, and I probably would never go there now, just based on crowds. But those people are making money now and enjoying tourism, correct? How do you handle that? Do you tell people not to go there anymore? What’s your strategy when some place becomes too busy or doesn’t have the capacity for the scale of tourism that now exists?
Well, I’ve got six days of vacation in Europe this year, apart from the seven-day hike I’m going to take in the Dolomites. And three of those days are going to be spent in the Cinque Terre as a vacation. And I know that it’s really uncomfortably packed and miserably crowded when the cruise ships are in, and if you’re there when everybody else is there, good luck. But you can design your trip around that. And, you know, I always like to say there’s two IQs of European travelers — those who wait in lines and those who don’t wait in lines.
So the Cinque Terre used to be a very poor series of five little villages on the on the Riviera. Now they are five of the richest towns in Italy because of tourism. Most of the people who owned property there live in a big city nearby, and they have Slovenians running their Airbnb, you know, which is fine, and you have to decide in your travels, are going to go to the famous places? Are you going to go next door to places that are less famous and less crowded and maybe less charming? But crowds are a big issue in an affluent world, and my business is not to make things uncrowded, but to send my readers to good places. So I’m a little bit heartless that way. I mean, I love Salema. It’s the most beautiful fishing town in the south coast of Portugal. I love the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. It’s expensive and it’s crowded, but I still love it. The people are still Irish, they’re still friendly, and they make a lot of money selling tourists beer, but there’s great music there, and you can make a lot of friends there.
And the locals, they want good tourism. They don’t want bad tourism. That’s the thing, you know. So we’re good tourists when we’re curious, when we patronize small family run businesses. One thing that I’ve always been really big on, because I guess it’s my family heritage — my mom and dad ran a mom and pop piano store — I feel real good about connecting people to people. I connect my individual travelers with a thoughtful, respectful approach to those countries, I connect them with small mom and pop businesses, whether they’re tour guides, hotels, restaurants, whatever. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing, and it’s a very interesting responsibility and kind of burden to know that these are hardworking, struggling little companies, and a quarter of their business comes from my whim. If I could just say enough of that one, I’m going to drop that from the book and put this one in the book if I’m charmed by somebody else who ambushes me intentionally, accidentally. Oh, Rick Steves, come and see my shop, and if I like it and I write it up, well, that takes business away from another little shop, you know. So I got that struggle going on, and that’s my personal challenges.
As a travel writer, as much as I love to recommend a place that’s worthy of my recommendation, I do not like to recommend a place that’s conned its way into my awareness, you know. And that happens, and I got to be mindful of that.
Are you done being interviewed? I feel like in the last three years, there’s been, like, three profiles and many lengthy, lengthy interviews.
You know, I’m, I’m a businessman. It’s good for my business. But I measure my profit not by how many dollars are in my bank account, but by how many people’s trips I’ve impacted in a good way. I love the thought that today there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with their earbuds, and I’m in their ear as they’re following my tours around my favorite places in Europe. And I get to hire these local guides and pick their brains and then digest that information and design it in a way that’s right for my travelers, and then offer it in a free app where people can have my self-guided audio tours. And they’re getting to understand what Salzburg is all about, you know, they understand what, what Prague is all about. They understand the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and they can do it in a way designed for them, that’s free and that is smart, and that they can do it anytime, just like that.
So if I get an opportunity to share my passion for my work in the Washington Post or with you, or in the New York Times, I’ll keep doing it, as long as they keep finding it interesting. I’m having a fun time sharing it. And I do have a political mission of telling Americans to get out there and stop being so afraid and stop being so gooey and start thinking about love your neighbor in a global sense. I’m
talking about the hippie trail, but also why and how that matters today, and the importance of this kind of travel. It’s vitally important. I think people are generally, not universally, but generally changed by learning about other people. And that opportunity is all teed up. But if they don’t have any encouragement to be changed, they can have a trip that is just non-transformational. Or it can empower you to have a global perspective. You’re going to travel. What are you going to get out of it?
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This article appears in Feb 13-26, 2025.
