🙏We still have a lot to learn from Rick Steves
Becoming a temporary local is just the beginning
The New York Times published a new interview with European travel guru Rick Steves this morning. The timing is coincidental: As I wrote the other day, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City is deliberately modeled after the Rick Steves guidebooks for Europe though it differs in important ways as well.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Rick Steves. At heart, he is a teacher and someone who lives by example. And while his philosophies about travel and life are well-known to many, this interview expands on both in ways that surprised me. Go figure, but we still have a lot to learn from Rick Steves.
It's worth reading the entire interview. But I'd like to highlight several topics that are particularly relevant to me, this book Stephanie and I are getting ready to launch, and our lives in general.
One is a theme that comes up several times throughout the interview, and it’s tied to the difference between tourists and travelers and the familiar Steves mantra of "becoming a temporary local." In our book, Stephanie and I describe what we call "bucket list travelers" who go to places specifically so they can check them off a list and then never return. And then there are those, like us, who want to be in a place when we visit, and if we like a place enough, we return again and again and try to be a part of that place.
"To me, there are two kinds of travel: There's escape travel, and there's reality travel," he says. "I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet."
Yes. Tied to this is a related idea that visitors to a place should adapt to that place and not expect the reverse. This is why we're learning Spanish, for example. It would be easier not to try, to always fall back on English in every interaction we have there. But it would also be disrespectful to that place and its people. It would be wrong.
I love this Thomas Jefferson quote.
"I've just got this curiosity to get to know the rest of the world and to contribute in a way that makes the world a better place," Steve says. "Thomas Jefferson wrote, Travel makes a person wiser if less happy. I've always had this hunger to be more engaged. Not necessarily more happy, but more engaged."
Wiser but less happy. I may be projecting a bit here, but I feel like that is a concise way of saying that travel changes you, in part by introducing doubt and nuance to convictions you had before going anywhere else. In other words, the more you experience, the more uncertain life is. Those who are the most certain about anything are often the least experienced in everything.
This next quote was almost triggering.
"I remind people there's three kinds of travel: You can travel as a tourist, a traveler or a pilgrim," he says.
I assumed that last bit to be religious, and that was initially troubling to me. Faith is this thing that separates us from other animals, perhaps. But like so much else in life, faith is too easily contorted, in this case into overly specific rules and literal crusades to convince others that our overly specific rules are the only correct answer. But this isn't complicated: Just treat other people the way you want to be treated.
Fortunately, he takes it in a slightly more nuanced direction when pressed about this comment.
"A traveler learns about the world, but I think a pilgrim learns about themselves," he says. "And you learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance ... It becomes pretty clear when you travel that we're all in this together."
Yes. A million times yes.
Steves addresses concerns that travel may be too accessible, with crowds of tourists ruining otherwise special places and influencers on social media replacing experts who in the past might have written guidebooks, led tours, or made TV shows. There's a lot to this, of course–gentrification is certainly top of mind in Mexico City, for us and many others–and Steves has been criticized for contributing to this problem himself.
"More people are traveling than ever before, but there's not more transformational travel than ever before," he notes, once again dissecting the different ways people can travel. "There's this superficial Instagram, TripAdvisor kind of travel ... It's beyond me. I don't get it."
This next bit is particularly interesting to me, given all the work we've done this year on our own guidebook.
"A good guidebook would tell you about why you want to go there other than to take a picture to show off to your friends on social media," he says. You know, when I started traveling, there was a shortage of information. "Now there's too much information, and anybody can be a travel writer with social media. There's this sort of spirit of crowdsourcing: I just want to know what everybody's doing, and then that's what I'm going to do. You've got this problem now, that everybody's going to the same places at the same time."
Yes to all that.
It's not fully realized in the coming first preview of our book, but we think of the places we cover in it in terms of what, why, how, and when, which is as obvious as it seems, but the why is inarguably the most important bit. If we can't answer why, it doesn't belong in the book. And sometimes it’s not why, it’s why not.
This was never a plan of any kind, but when I think about my own social media posts, two things come to mind immediately. One, I'm routinely called out by people I know for taking pictures of food and other things that they feel are mundane. And two, what I've really been doing all this time is just recording the everyday. Oddly, this is also a topic for some of the same people because they mention they get a sense of what our lives are like, whether we're in Mexico City, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else.
Steves continues to define different types of travel.
"There are two I.Q.s of European travelers: those who wait in lines and those who don't," he says.
And then:
"There's good tourism and bad tourism, from the point of view of people who live in these towns, and the people who are angry with the tourists are not angry with my kind of travelers, who come in and stay in a hotel and buy dinner and are curious about the culture," he continues. "What they don't like is people who blitz in by cruise ships or tour buses, that stay in a big, modern hotel outside of the city, and the people don't leave anything in the town except their congestion."
Yes. The version of this we see in Roma Norte near our apartment is visitors from the U.S. who speak only English to everyone they encounter, regardless of the situation. Not a single "gracias," "por favor," or, "¿habla inglés?" I find this vaguely infuriating. OK, not vaguely.
"My challenge is to try to inspire people to be thoughtful," he continues, neatly distancing himself from social media influencers. "The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there and met the enemy."
I love this. We've told the story about walking by a local torteria (sandwich shop) many times when we first came to Roma Norte, and being nervous to go in. It seemed to be almost a club or meeting space for older gentlemen, and we were still uncertain with Spanish. But then we finally visited, and now we're regulars. Those older gentlemen all work there, they're funny and friendly in that special way we see so much in Mexico City, and they love us as much as we love them. Towards the end of each trip, we tell them we're leaving and when we'll be back. And they all come around the counter to hug us goodbye.
"When [people in other countries] meet me, it's tougher for their propaganda to demonize me, and when I meet them, it's harder for my country's propaganda to dehumanize them," Steves says, once again hitting on how travel changes you. "It's a powerful thing."
And then this final bit about how his career has gotten in the way of other aspects of his life. Which he regrets but also rationalizes in a way I can really relate to.
"It's almost a calling [in] a pastoral sense or something," he says. "This is why God put me here. It gives me energy. It's like breathing straight oxygen. And I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but it fits me."
As a writer, I've faced this paradox many times. And that's a great way to explain it. I love what I do. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Be sure to read the entire interview, if you can get past the paywall. And don’t forget to ask me to do my Rick Steves impersonation if we ever meet in person. :)