The guidebook writer and television personality reflects on his cancer diagnosis, social media’s corrosive effect on tourism and the transformative power of travel.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. The minute I left university, I put on a backpack and went to see the world. I climbed the Andes in Ecuador. I taught English in Cambodia. I spent months visiting monasteries in Tibet. It was the most transformative period of my life. Lately, though, I feel like my travel mojo is gone.
Instead of traveling to discover, I now travel to retreat. I'm often overwhelmed by the demands of daily life, so when it's time for vacation, I choose a destination that doesn't ask too much of me, and I don't give much back. Rick Steves has been helping millions of people, including people like me, expand their travel horizons since he was in his 20s.
The prolific guidebook writer and beloved PBS personality believes that travel can make not only the world a better place, but you a better person. He's 69 now, but his upcoming book is about how it all began, with a trip he took after university like me. It's called On the Hippie Trail, and it's the journal entries he wrote as he traveled the 3,000 miles from Istanbul to Kathmandu in 1978.
It's full of the joy of exploration and discovery. And I wanted to talk to him to relearn how to feel that sense of communion with the world. Here's my conversation with travel guru, Rick Steves. I was reading your newest book, which are the diaries of a trip that you took in 1978 when you were 23 years old on what was called the hippie trail.
When you reread those diaries, what did it evoke in you when you looked at that 23-year-old with the hindsight of age now?
Yeah.
What did that make you feel?
I forgot I wrote that journal for 40 years. I mean, I didn't forget. I never looked at it. It was just in a box. And then during COVID, I read it. First of all, what kind of 23-year-old would write a 60,000-word journal while on a hippie bus going from Istanbul to Kathmandu? And when I think about that, I was not a travel writer. I was a piano teacher. I just was writing that for me.
And when I read it, it was really insightful. It might sound immodest, but one thing I love as a writer is you can't go back to the United States and write it up. You've got to write it up right there in the humid, buggy reality with all the cacophony of culture all around you. That's where you take your notes and it's most vivid.
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