4 BIG TRAVEL LESSONS FROM RICK STEVES’S NEW BOOK

In 1978, Rick Steves had a good thing going at home in Edmonds, Washington — until he blew it up.

He was recently out of college and had already taken a few formative trips to Europe. He was a busy piano teacher with a hearty roster of students. He had a promising relationship with a girlfriend.

“We each had a grand piano,” Steves said. “We were going to move in together and make our grand pianos nest — and I let that dream go.”

He also let go of his students and turned his recital hall into a venue for teaching people how to travel.

The catalyst for his abrupt shift was the epic adventure documented in Steves’s latest book, “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer.” It was a trip popular with the counterculture at the time, and it had called to Steves for years. It also scared him. He planned and canceled it on multiple occasions. Finally, Steves and his travel buddy Gene Openshaw (who’d later become Steves’s longtime guidebook collaborator) embarked on eight weeks of dicey border crossings, marathon bus rides on treacherous roads and brushes with Nepalese leeches — ultimately emerging with a new outlook on life. Steves wanted to empower others to have transformative travel experiences, and he discovered he had the skill set to shepherd them.

Unlike his guidebooks or his collection of essays, “Travel as a Political Act,” “On the Hippie Trail” is a lightly edited printing of the 60,000-word journal he wrote on the road. It’s part time capsule, part love letter to travel (and Type II fun).

It’s also decidedly un-PC. Steves wanted to preserve the “candid, unvarnished snapshot” of his youthful odyssey, mentions of spotting topless women, his bowel tribulations and all.

To celebrate the book’s release this week, The Washington Post talked to the author and group-travel magnate about the powerful lessons learned on his adventure through Asia.

1. A good travel journal takes discipline

To document the Hippie Trail, Steves brought along a sturdy hardcover journal (he recalls now thinking that the other travelers who had spiral-bound notebooks to do the same looked like amateurs) and enough film to take nine photos a day. He didn’t have any publishing ambitions in mind; instead, Steves said he wrote for himself and for his family, and, when he got back home, he tossed the tome into storage. It wasn’t until the pandemic that he came across the journal again.

Steves was amazed by his younger self’s diligent note-taking.

“It was an anthropological dig into this 23-year-old, coming-of-age kid who ended up being a productive travel writer,” Steves said in a video call from his home office in Edmonds. “But I didn’t write my first travel book until two years after this.”

And this one shows Steves finding his footing as a travel writer and discovering the value of noting down impressions while they’re fresh.

“It occurs to me how, when you’re right up to date, journal writing can be more vivid … how you can do a better job,” he wrote while waiting to cross into Afghanistan.

He wrote about 1,000 words a day, recounting the modes of transportation he took (planes, trains, boats, horses, bicycles), the souvenirs he bought (including a mink pelt he named “Ringworm”), the Fantas he drank, the first time he tried marijuana, the political nuances of the places he was visiting.

2. Travel lows amplify life’s highs

Despite building a brand devoted to Europe, Steves says his favorite country is India, perhaps because it was the most challenging.

“India is a very personal thing,” he said. “Of course you’ve got the Taj Mahal and a few things that everybody wants to see, but really what India is all about is just walking and talking and dropping in and smelling and nibbling. … It’s crawling into a train and being part of that sort of commotion.”

In the book, Steves takes in India’s beauty and pain. He’s charmed by the colors of Jaipur, where he stayed in the same hotel as royalty. But a page later, he encountered locals who were maimed by their parents as babies so they could earn more money begging on the street.

In each of the countries Steves and Openshaw traversed, they ran into recurring issues of logistics hiccups, backbreaking sleeping arrangements and questionable characters. Episodes of misfortune don’t make him regret the trip (even if he does write that he’s “looking forward to the end of it all” during a particularly trying afternoon in Afghanistan). Instead, they make the happy moments even sweeter.

Seeing extreme poverty made him aware of how privileged his own modest life was in the United States. Spending the night on a rattling bus made him worship a clean hotel room. Having his norms “walloped” made Steves more appreciative and empathetic; he wanted more travelers, particularly comfortable Americans, to have the same epiphany.

“Maybe I incorporated that philosophy into my early tours, when I really wanted people to experience some tough times in order to appreciate the good times,” he said, stroking his chin. (In the 1980s, when Steves began taking Americans on European trips as both their tour guide and bus driver, he says he’d sometimes refuse to book hotel arrangements until the last minute so his customers could feel the anxiety of housing insecurity, among other instructive approaches.)

These days, customers who book a Rick Steves Europe tour are given reliable food and shelter, but Steves does encourage travelers to take trips that get them out of their comfort zone.

“A lot of people go to la-la land, and they celebrate it. … That’s where all the easy travel thrills are,” he said of the typical American vacation. “But I like the growing pains of a broadening perspective.”

3. Slow down for deeper connections

In a journal dispatch from a houseboat in Kashmir, Steves was steeped in gratitude, drinking tea; he considered the 25 days and thousands of miles he had slogged.

“Never have I worked so hard or traveled so long for a single moment,” he wrote. He’d felt as if he’d earned this moment in paradise.

Some 40 years later, Steves says he still believes taking the long way yields more joy than getting somewhere as fast as possible.

“If you visit four countries and you fly between each of those capital cities, that’s good — but you could do much better if you took a few extra days and went overland,” he said.

When we fly, Steves tells me, we miss the urban end of one culture melting into the rural side, not to mention “the no-man’s land between two cultures.” We’re less attuned to the “beautiful ebb and flow of cultures.”

Slowing down also comes with more opportunities to connect with locals, which Steves argues is the most powerful part of travel. It’s not checking India off his bucket list that made the visit so special; it was hitchhiking with friendly bus drivers (sitting five to a bench in the front seat) or rethinking everything he’d believed about music theory after watching a sitar performance.

“You need to make a point to recognize that what carbonates the experience is not seeing tired clichés onstage, but it’s to meet real people so that you can learn from [them],” Steves said, waving both hands for emphasis.

4. Your adventure might look different

Steves and Openshaw caught the Hippie Trail in its final summer. The year after they completed the journey, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Iran underwent revolution. The region has only become more complicated in the decades since.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have a similarly transformative trip. Steves suggests re-creating revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s motorcycle journey through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama to Miami. Or trekking the Trans Canada Trail through every province, or biking through the American South.

“The hippie trail is leaving home and celebrating culture shock, seeing culture shock as a constructive thing — the growing pains of a broadening perspective,” Steves said. “The hippie trail is freedom. It is doing things with abandon.”

Steves was 23 when he took on the Hippie Trail, but you don’t have to be a wide-eyed youngster to follow suit — even if it can feel more daunting to take the plunge.

Traveling with such abandon “is something that we grow away from when we get more careful, more wealthy, more interested in creature comforts, more focused on getting my selfie with the right frame,” he said. “Everything is scheduled. Everything is careful.”

Steves says that’s a shame, particularly now.

“I’m afraid of cultures and people and forces on this planet just like anybody else,” he said. “But my feeling is, if we get out there and get to know it, we’re going to be stronger and safer and less fearful.”

2025-02-05T13:03:49Z