748a Quirky Oslo; Last Empty Places; Herbal

He's an American who married a Norwegian and is raising a family in Oslo. Curtis Rojak lets us in on a few of the unspoken rules for how they do things in Norway. Somewhere out there is an invisible boundary where Norwegians become friendly and smiling and are ready to say hello. Peter Stark has explored some of the blankest places on the American map, searching for a place to clear the mind. You fly over the western United States and it's remarkable how few people are down there judging on the lights. He tells us how the wilderness and the people who live there contribute to our national identity. And herbalist Mimi Hernandez wants you to understand the healing power of the natural world. Our own ancestors likely knew what to do with every wild plant in the backyard. Along the way those wisdoms get lost as we modernize and as we westernize. Let's explore the world together in the hour ahead. It's Travel with Rick Steves. There's probably an herb for that. Coming up on today's Travel with Rick Steves in Ethnobotanus tells us about the nourishing and healing herbal traditions from around the world. And maybe even your own backyard. And we'll hear what a journey through some of the blank spots on the US map showed author Peter Stark about the natural value of wild places. Let's start the hour with a look at what it's like for an American expat to make his home in Oslo, Norway. Every country has its cultural quirks and for a traveler to be clued in on these can be really helpful. Norway for example is a land with big windows but where are the curtains? It's a land where cabins are beloved but why suddenly are they a bit controversial? Norway is a place where electric cars have been hugely subsidized and now not so much. And it's a place where locals eat four meals a day and breakfast is the underrated meal. There's so much discussion in Norway about little things that we don't even consider like where and when do you say hi? Well we're joined today by Curtis Rojak who leads bike tours in Oslo and he's going to give us an insight on these quirky little bits about Norway. Curtis thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me Rick. So first of all you do not have a Norwegian accent but I understand you've been in Norway for about 25 years. How'd you end up in Norway? Yeah so I've been in Europe for 25 years. I first came in 1998 and I've been here more or less ever since bouncing around first in Norway in 2001 and love is what made me settle down here as I'm now married to a Norwegian and we've got three kids. Oh that must be such an exciting time. As you've been in Norway raising your family I asked you what are some quirky little things that might be easy to miss for a traveler but might be helpful for us to know about as we visit and you gave me a little hit list here. It's fascinating to think that in Scandinavia curtains are not that big a deal. Windows are huge but a lot of times you get a peek right into people's homes. Yeah you know Scandinavian interior design is famous around the world right. The use of the nice wood and the clean white lines very modern and you don't have to as a tourist go to some museum to see that. You can just peek inside people's windows because in a land of darkness of the winter light is really prioritized. So that means big windows, single pane, no curtains and you get to let the light in but that also means people on the outside can take a little peek but just don't look too long. There's a cultural norm where you take a little peek a couple seconds and then you turn away. So that's good. Don't stare. You can stroll by and notice how nice that interior is but you don't want to stop there and gather your friends and stare. It all looks so cozy inside you want to go in but don't follow that temptation. Just take a quick peek and keep moving along. You know Denmark has this wonderful endearing word, hüggli I think it is. Yeah hüggli, yeah. Hüggli, is that the same in Norway? Yeah, so we have hüggli and kusli kind of two terms, two sides of the coin and it's the same idea. It's more than just the cozy aspect, it's a whole mentality in a way and it is something that helps you get through the winters because there is this idea of you need to go over the top to really enjoy that level of coziness that you need to get through four or five months of pretty substantial darkness. It's interesting how the climate and the latitude has shaped the culture a little bit. American born Curtis Rojak is on the line from Oslo, Norway right now on Travel with Rick Steves. He founded the Viking Viking Tour Company in 2012 and he's guiding us into both the cozy and the quirky sides of life in Oslo. Every Norwegian I know seems to have a cabin. Cabins are a big deal in Norway but there's some debate around cabins now. There's a lot, we're talking nearly half a million cabins in a country of just over five million inhabitants. When you say it feels like every Norwegian you know has a cabin, yeah, usually you are a part owner of a cabin with your brother, your sister-in-law and some cousin you never see. It's always been kind of part of the identity of Norway, getting away into this rugged countryside. The cabins often have no indoor plumbing, limited electricity or no electricity, they're really bare bones. Cabins have started to become a bit fancier and I think some of the pushback has been about building all of these very modern cabins in huge numbers where all of a sudden people are going to the cabins and they have electricity and they have running water and they have plumbing and it's like we're getting away from the roots of the cabin and there's been pushback. Yeah, you know that's kind of the consequence of affluence. Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and why would you have a cabin without plumbing I guess. So it's an understandable evolution but then suddenly the cabin is less charming and has more of an environmental impact. But I'll tell you, people who have the fancy cabins, they don't talk them up. They'll actually downplay what they have often. There's almost like a certain level of embarrassment about having really fancy cabin. Now along the seaside that's okay but up in the mountains you're supposed to rough it a bit and you would never tell everybody that I've got this fancy cabin in the mountains. You would kind of make it sound a little bit rustic. That's good but I can see the same dynamic in our country. As you get more money, everything gets more comfortable and it has a bigger environmental impact. Speaking of environmental impact, I was in Bergen once and I noticed a Tesla going, it seemed like confidently in the wrong direction up a one-way street and then just parking wherever it wanted to park. And somebody told me, that's a Tesla, they get a lot of advantages because the government subsidizes electric cars. In fact a Tesla, when all the dust settles is not that expensive when you consider all of the subsidies it gets. It's been the number one selling car for, I don't know, seven or eight years the Tesla. So it's the equivalent of what's that in the Honda Civic in the United States. Well how do people save money when they have a Tesla because the sticker price is high but then operating it and owning it from a tax point of view, from a parking point of view. What are some of the advantages you get when you have an electric car and you mentioned that's changing now? Yeah so historically there's been no value-added tax or sales tax on the electric cars because it was seen as like an emissions tax let's say. And now they realize, well we still need to be bringing tax revenue in, we can't just do that. And electric cars also do pollute by creating local pollution through ripping up roads. There's a lot of micro pollutants that happen from electric cars, the batteries are very pollutant. So they've started to realize that we can't just give a free ride and they also have to start paying closer to regular tolls. There's a lot of tolls in Norway. They have to start paying their taxes, the insurance is starting to cost more so that all of the costs of having an electric car are going up and some of that is the government just needs to recover some of that money right? You can't just have all of these cars driving around for free. So the push really is to public transit and biking and pedestrian friendly zones? Absolutely. I mean electric cars have a place especially in Norway, a country where we get all of our energy needs from hydroelectric for the most part. So it's a very clean energy. We're not burning gas or coal, we're using dams. And so electric cars make sense. And electric boats, I was just touring the Oslo Fjord and when the boat comes in as the passengers step off of the ferry, this contraption, you can kind of remember it, it's like the tail of a whale. It comes down and it plugs in and the ferry recharges. It's totally electric and it just floats, it glides to the next port and no more fossil fuels on the ferries in the Oslo Fjord. No, just five or ten minutes to do a flash charge and the ferry has enough energy to spend the next hour going around hopping from island to island. Beautiful. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Curtis Rojak and Curtis leads bike tours in Oslo for his cleverly named company Viking Biking. He's joining us today to get us up to date on what's going on in Norway and you can learn more about Curtis' work at bikingbikingoslo.com. Curtis, when we go to Norway, I found that it's no longer as expensive as its reputation. It's totally a function, I think, of the exchange rate, but right now there's ten crowns in a dollar and I enjoyed eating in Oslo more than I ever have on my last visit because it wasn't so painful on the budget. And one thing you were reminding me is in Oslo, there's a little bit different kind of timing of the meals. There's actually four meals a day traditionally for a lot of Norwegians. At least some even eat five. Yeah, so breakfast is a big meal and if you're staying in a hotel, you might not expect it as a tourist but that's probably going to be the biggest meal of the day. Just a labyrinth over the top, breakfast is standard par for the course in a hotel and that means our lunches are very small. Norwegians eat lunch at 10.30 or 11 in your standard office job. It's just a quick little sandwich, so fill up on breakfast in your hotel, have a small little sandwich for lunch. We eat dinner quite early. People are always shocked when they come to visit Oslo or Bergen or anywhere else in Norway and they see the restaurants filling up at four in the afternoon, 3.30 in the afternoon in the summer and thinking, how are people eating dinner now and waiting until breakfast the next day? That's because we have one last meal. It's called keveltsmott, which means the evening food and I call it a poor man's tapas. Not as elaborate as what you get in Spain. It's kind of like, imagine anything you could pull out of the fridge, throw it on a piece of dark bread or crisp bread, make a little salad or something if you're feeling really elaborate and call it an evening meal. And finally, Curtis, you were talking about, there's actually a discussion about where do you say hi and how do you do it? Because I love in Norway how people just go hi, hi, hi, hi, but I didn't realize there's a sort of an etiquette here. Yeah, and there's the American side of me. I spent the first half of my life growing up in the U.S. with a very gregarious mother in particular, so you just want to talk to every stranger and say hello. And if you say that here, people would look at you like you are off your rocker. You don't go around saying hello, but there are places where it is culturally acceptable and this is the idea of the hi-hi-gänse or the hello boundary. At what point do you have to get away from the city, out into nature, that you have earned someone's hello? And in Oslo, we have this wonderful forest on three sides where we have no suburbs. We have a national forest, part of it's even a national park, 15 minutes from the downtown. And so some people say, well, once you're in the forest, you can say hello to each other. Others would argue, well, you got to work a little harder. Maybe if you spend an hour or two hiking, I'll give you a hello. And some people are finally saying, once you're out into the far lakes and you're in a kayak and I really see you're giving it your all, then you'll get a hello from me. So the hi-hi-gänse, it's not universally accepted where it begins, but somewhere out there is an invisible boundary where Norwegians become friendly and smiling and are ready to say hello. That is fascinating. So as a traveler, you could be just at a park in the town and you might be in a great mood because you're in a wonderful new country and you want to say hi to everybody, but local people, they would probably, you know, oblige you, but it would be a little odd. But when you're out hiking... I'm not even sure they oblige you, they might just look away. And you could wrongly dark conclusion that people don't like me here or something. You could, and then you would all of a sudden go up into the forest, take a 15-minute metro ride, get off and go walking 15 minutes in the forest and people are waving and saying hello and chatting you up. And you don't just say, I mean, in Norwegian, hello is, it is that very, very cheery hi-hi, right? Yeah, two times if you want to sound like a local, just repeat yourself and no one will know any different. You can't even hear an American accent when you say it. So people almost just think you're one of them. Hi-hi. Yep, perfect. And there's lots of ways to say thank you if you want to be polite. Tuck, manga tuck, what are some other ones? Yeah, talk in Tusen, talk. Tusen, talk. Are the most common. Tusen, talk of course is a thousand thanks. That I would think is the most common. It's the equivalent of thanks a lot. Curtis Rojak, thank you so much, Tusen tuck, for joining us today, sharing an insight into Norway and best wishes with your work at Viking Biking. Taksaluharik, thank you very much. Coming up, we'll explore the healing power of nature in the herbs and weeds that grow all around us. That's right after we find a lot of elbow room in the last empty places on the U.S. map. It's travel with Rick Steves. Have you ever looked out the window on a cross-country flight and wondered about those long stretches of rural America that appeared to be almost uninhabited? On the ground, America may seem like it's a teeming place with cities and traffic all connected by a circuit board of highways and roads that all seem to lead somewhere. But that's not actually the reality. Explorer and historian Peter Stark joins us to offer a bird's-eye view of some of those seemingly empty places on the map. In his book, The Last Empty Places, a journey through blank spots on the American map, Stark explores those blank spots and how each region adds its own story to the idea of American wilderness. Peter, thanks for joining us. Oh, I'm so pleased to be here. I'm looking forward to this time. Yeah, well, what a fun thing to be focused on, the empty places. We all know San Francisco and we all know Boston and we all know Orlando. But the black places, when you look out the window at night down below the airplane, what do you think when you fly across the country at night and you look out the window? I am utterly fascinated by doing that. And, of course, it depends on where you're flying on the continent, but what's surprising is how much blackness there is down there. You fly over the western United States and it's remarkable how few people are down there judging on the lights. So those are the places I wanted to go. And one of the things that I used to, you know, research to actually conceive this book, I talked to an old friend who's, you know, like a satellite geographer and he said, okay, here's what you do. You get the, you know, whatever it was, you get the NASA 7 satellite photo of the U.S. at night. And you look where the lights are and you go where they're not. And that's what I did. And in your book, you focus on four places in particular in northern Maine, western Pennsylvania, southeast Oregon and the desert of New Mexico. Before we get into each of those places, just how empty are they? Do people actually live there? Well, they do, but very far apart. Yeah. You've got elbow room. Stunningly empty. You want elbow room. And some are stunningly empty. Southeast Oregon is one that really just blows me away. You know, I've been there a couple of times and every time it's so big and there's so few people out there. And it's not necessarily National Park or wilderness or federal land. There's just a lot of private ranch land that goes forever and ever and ever without a house. Is it kind of sparsely populated because it doesn't have a lot to offer? I mean, it's just, you know, I've always noticed when I go up a valley, how close the towns are together really is determined by the richness of the farmland. This is just vast, hard to eek and existence out of territory, isn't it? That's exactly right. And you can make that same generalization for the whole United States. I mean, probably the whole world that the fertility of the soil determines population density. And so one of the funny things I realized is that in my search for the blank spots, you know, the dark spaces in the satellite map, was that some of them end up being bombing ranges. You don't want to go there. And others end up being really large swamps. So those are two big swamps and bombing areas. But I don't want to go to either of those places. They really show up, you know, as empty. So you did these four regions and I'd love to just dive into them and get your take on each of them and your experience in each of them. The first one is northern Maine. I was impressed to realize that there's a vast, relatively uninhabited region in the north of Maine. Tell us about that. Well, it's so uninhabited it shows up as black on the satellite photo. And it's really the border, the place we visited. There's a lot of Maine that's big uninhabited for us and a lot of it commercial timberland. But where we were was right up on near the Canadian border in a place called the St. John River. So it would be kind of logical that a border would be where the people run out. I mean, all over the world, I think when population pitters out and then there's a vast stretch of land, that's the obvious place to draw the line, right? Is that kind of easy? Yes, that is so much the case. And here's another one. Here's another little secret I discovered on this, that if you look at where the time zone lines are drawn in the U.S. And I suspect around the world too, but in the U.S. in particular, they tend to be drawn through the emptiest places in the U.S. Because you don't want to draw a time zone change down the middle of a city, rather you draw it down the middle of empty, empty country. So that's a good way to find a blank spot is to follow a time zone line. Perfect place to have a time zone line. Yeah. Now, when you went to Northern Maine, you delved into the Akkadian story, these ancestors from France that lived alongside the indigenous people. What did you learn about that? Well, it was a whole side of American history that I just didn't know very little about. And, you know, in our typical U.S. American view of history, you know, we were all about the British colonists coming here. And those were the French colonists who came. And there is a whole different way of actually intermingling with the indigenous people on the part of the French as compared to the British. How was that? I mean, that's an interesting statement. A different way to interact with the indigenous people. In a nutshell, how did the Akkadians in Nova Scotia work with the Indians compared to the American south of the border? Typically, in the French regions, there was less actual farming, settlement, homesteading, land clearing. And there was a lot of the fur trade and fishing was a big part of it. And the early French colonists intermarried with the indigenous people and they worked in partnership to work the fur trade and the fisheries. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with adventure and exploration writer Peter Stark now. Peter's taking us into America's most rural and desolate stretches of land. Stark explores the uninhabited regions of the United States in his book, The Last Empty Places, a journey through blank spots on the American map. And he weaves in layers of regional history and theories from America's early natural philosophers. Peter's also written, Gallup Toward the Sun, Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison struggle for the destiny of a nation. And you can learn more about Peter's work at PeterStarkAuthor.com. Okay, Peter, let's head south to Western Pennsylvania. And when I think of Pennsylvania, I think of a lot of people, but it actually made a slot in your book as one of the vast dark spots at night. What about the wild lands of Western Pennsylvania? Wild lands of Western Pennsylvania indeed. Yeah, that was a real surprise to me. After studying hours of looking at that satellite photo, I kept coming back to this this chunk in the east. And, you know, I would kind of like triangulate it. It was like between, okay, there's Pittsburgh and there's Detroit and then there's that Cincinnati and Philadelphia. And, you know, I realized I kept coming back. That's Pennsylvania. Why is there anybody living in Pennsylvania? Well, that part of Pennsylvania, it's the Allegheny Mountains. And so it's rocky, as we were just saying. There you go. That's the soil. So the soil couldn't really sustain a lot of people. And why would you struggle there? It's like the most difficult places in Europe ended up being the places with the greatest emigration to the United States, driven by the quality of the soil. And when they got to the United States, why would they go for land that was unworkable from a farming point of view? Well, actually, they had to go for some of that land because the soldiers in the Revolutionary War, the American soldiers were, you know, Congress didn't have any money. So they were promising these soldiers land after they got out. And a bunch of that land was out in Western Pennsylvania. I got a nice stretch of land for you out in beautiful Western Pennsylvania. Exactly. So part of the Revolution was won on the basis of rocky land in Western Pennsylvania. Promises of rocky land. You know, it's interesting that you literally got these NASA satellite images at night and you looked at the lower 48 and you just go, oh, what's that darkness doing there? Let's check it out. Is that really what motored your choice of chapters? Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I spent hours looking at it. I've always been, I mean, you're probably the same way. I can look at maps for hours and hours and hours and hours. You know, when I was a student, I remember that I'd spend hours and hours studying at this one great library at the University of Washington. And for a break, I would go to the globe room, you know, the map room. Oh, yeah. It was just good for my soul to just spin that globe and look at it and imagine and for you to look at the NASA satellite images after dark of the lower 48. And one big dark spot that you found was in Southeast Oregon. This is the part of Oregon that wants to actually join Idaho. Right. And as part of, I mean, Nevada and California, they all kind of merge there. And it's, you know, it's kind of a no man's land, really. And not only no man's land in terms of people, but also in terms of what time zone it is. And when I was out there, I was staying at this little in way out in a complete, you know, hinterlands. And a guest at the end was, I think from the University of Washington or Oregon had a page from the alumni magazine from the geography department at the university. And it showed something like what places in the U.S. are more than 100 miles from a Walmart, more than 100 miles from a Starbucks. And there was one other factor in there. And the only place was this little chunk of land near French Glen, Oregon, way out there. So it was like, that was it. Well, imagine if you're, you know, on the Oregon Trail or early settler and you're going through all sorts of hardship to go west and find the promise of some place for your family to, you know, put down their steaks. And you've heard about Willamette Valley. I mean, that is the quintessence of fertility. Willamette Valley. Why would you stop 100 miles east of Willamette Valley? Well, in fact, if you did stop 100 miles east of Willamette Valley, as some people were forced to do, it was not a good thing because there was nothing to eat, nor was there water. And so they were, they either moved on or they died, basically. Well, or it probably, I mean, there is a reason there are people living, you know, in these weird quirky places. And you wrote, you can still get lost here in the southeastern Oregon. And people do willingly or not. They get lost in a different way of life, a different rhythm, a different sense of boundaries and space. Once you've been there, it's easy to see why it attracted those who wish to live a life of adventure, those who did things their own way, and those who preferred by their own sense of necessity or for the sheer thrill of it all, to live outside the conventional boundaries of the law. That paints a picture. Well, there you go. And that still exists that way in some ways today. There was the rancher federal government dispute that happened in that very area. That's right. And then a couple of decades ago, do you remember the Bogwan Ratchaniches? Yes, you're right. They were Eastern Oregon, right? Right there, Eastern Oregon. So there's a quirky mix of survivalists and hippies and environmentalists and rednecks, you know, in these kind of places. It's not just one kind of people. It's kind of extremes in all the different dimensions. It is. And there's something that strikes a passion in these individuals. And we're talking about people of such variety of personalities who have as passion for wilderness, who are attracted to these empty places. So for some people, this desolate arid corner of southeastern Oregon could be their Walden pond. Precisely. Yeah. And that's a really good way to put it. And I think when you talk about transcendentalism, you know, Thoreau and Emerson, I was sort of raised with that, that I grew up in Wisconsin. And John Muir was actually a Scottish immigrant who came to Wisconsin when he was a few years old. And his family were homesteaders in Wisconsin. Likewise, Aldo Leopold, another great natural philosopher who I write about in last empty places, he spent much of his life in Wisconsin. And I think what the transcendentalists in the early 1800s were trying to distill, part of it in their formulation was seeing God, seeing spirituality in every aspect of nature. And so there's this real ethic of land conservation and the importance of the natural world. Adventure writer and historian Peter Starks joining us from his home in spacious Montana on Travel with Rick Steves. He's the most remote in America's most remote no-cows in his book The Last Empty Places, a journey through the blank spots on the American map. It's been reissued by Mountaineers books. He tackles the influence of the wilderness in his earlier books, Astoria and Young Washington. And he looks at how Ohio and Indiana were settled in Gallup Toward the Sun, to Cumza and William Henry Harrison's struggle for the destiny of a nation. Peter's latest work explores 300 years of indigenous resistance to the conquistadors and will be released in April. It's called Lost Cities of El Norte, Coronado's quest to the unconquered west and the birth of American Indian resistance. Alright Peter, just the last place we're going to visit before we call it an adventure, the high and haunted desert of New Mexico. I love it. Why? Well, again, it's like southeastern Oregon, it's unexpected. And the place we chose was the Gila Wilderness area. And I made a point of not going to national parks or wilderness areas for a reason that they're in a way kind of too designated. But I really wanted to go to the Gila Wilderness area because, one, it was very central to those early Puebloan civilizations, those early Indian cultures. And two, it was important in the life of Aldo Leopold, who was a young man who spent his time as a ranger in those forests that eventually became the Gila Wilderness. And it was there that this concept of American wilderness in Aldo Leopold's mind was really kind of formalized. And so I wanted to trace that arc. I would imagine when you're in these kind of places, you're struck by the light and the big sky, especially out on the desert. Any of these places, you don't have that light pollution. Was that an attractive part of being in this remote corner of New Mexico? Tell us about that. Oh, incredible. Incredible. And it's also, I mean, just, it's not in the wilderness, but not so far away. They call it the, what do they call it, VLA, very large array. It's this enormous array of satellite dishes on the desert that are aiming in the depths of space to hear signals from the deepest depths of space. I didn't realize, so that's interesting. Satellite dishes are attracted the same thing you are, a place with no lights. A place with no lights that, but these dishes are not looking for satellites. They're looking for signals from outer space. But they're big dishes. I mean, they'd look like a big TV satellite dish on the side of your house. But they're, you know, like 80 feet across and they're, I think 21 of them scattered across several miles of this desert listening, listening to outer space. Peter Stark, this has been so fun to just pick up on your enthusiasm for these last empty places. The name of your book, by the way, Last Empty Places, a journey through the blank spots on the American map. But let's just, I want to know kind of what the takeaway is. I mean, maybe it's just an opportunity to travel to places with quirky people and bright stars at night. Or maybe we learn something about America, about ourselves. What's the takeaway that you would like people to have from this experience? I mean, you've done it, you've written about it, we can do it. Why? One of the things that really attracted me to doing this is I start feeling, I get depressed that the world's a homogenized place. And American culture is homogenous. It's all the same. And by randomly going to these blank spots, I mean, actually the times I've randomly chosen to go a place on the map and you go there. And it's just amazing how cool it is and how, what a depth of culture there is in terms of the natural world, in terms of indigenous culture, in terms of history, in terms of settlement, in terms of what's going on there today. There's this incredible richness that you don't pick up on, I think, if you go to sort of the well-known places or, you know, if you follow the interstates, of course, and stay in the interchanges. But just choosing a place at random, those have always been the best travel experiences for me. You know, when you think of black spaces on the map at night, is it fair to say these are also red spaces on the political map of the United States? That's a really good question, yeah. I mean, I certainly, South-Eastern Oregon is. I would say, yeah, I think you could make that generalization. I don't know about Northern Maine, but it's, yeah, it's very much a rural lifestyle, and at least in this political climate. Yeah, it's a don't tread on me stuff. And when you're the next neighbor is five miles away, you don't even have to put that flag up. Well, but also the people really, there's a tightness to them, too, to those communities, even though they're scattered, that you've got to help each other out or you all die. Peter Stark, thank you so much for basically shining a light on an otherwise very dark dimension of that map of the United States at night. What a fascinating book. Best wishes, Peter. Thank you for having me, Rick. You'll find links to articles Peter's written for Outside Magazine on his website, peterstarkauthor.com. You can discover another world in your own backyard as you learn to identify and cultivate plants from the world's healing traditions. Herbal ethnobotanist Mimi Prunella Hernandez explains next on Travel with Rick Steves. Something is shifting in our society. People are going back to their roots and seeking traditional natural forms of healing and connection with the land. Last year, the global market for herbal medicine reached over $125 billion, but herbalism extends beyond supplements and what you can find in the garden. The practice dates beyond written history with early recordings of plants for medicinal use going back to ancient Chinese and Egyptian times, 3000 BC. With this renewed interest in a more natural way of being, herbalists like Mimi Prunella Hernandez are more sought after than ever. In her book, National Geographic Herbal, 100 Herbs from the World's Healing Traditions, Mimi takes us on a journey through the culinary, medicinal and natural world of herbs. Practices rooted in ancient cultures all around the world. Mimi, thanks for being here. Hi, Rick. Thanks for having me. This is so much fun to be here and talk about herbs with you and your fellow travelers. You are a registered herbalist and the executive director of the American Herbalist Guild. Clearly, you're evangelical about the importance of medicinal plants and their use. Tell us about the American Herbalist Guild. I am evangelical in spreading the good word about herbs and their uses. From a young age, I have studied herbal medicine and I found that it was really hard to find good schools, good mentors, clinicians to apprentice with. So, becoming an herbalist can be challenging for a lot of people, especially if they'd like to do it vocationally. And so, I really had to piece together, you know, education to prepare me to become a clinical herbalist. And along the way, I thought it was just a wonderful opportunity to align with the American Herbalist Guild to support emerging professionals in the herbal world and to give them the tools and help the communities who are looking for a high standard of herbal education and to help, you know, some of the herb schools and academic programs around the country with providing some criteria for clinical herbalists who wish to pursue study of herbalism. And, you know, when I read through your book, it has a personal dimension to it. It's beautifully illustrated and it's almost like you're sharing a religion. You've got this understanding of the value of herbs. Where did that come from? Well, it's definitely a deep wisdom. You know, the study of ethnobotany, which I really engage with is the study of different cultures associated with plants and how people interact with plants. You know, it comes from all of us. All of our ancestors practiced herbs for health. You know, I think it's just a common lineage amongst all people and all cultures have a legacy of practicing with herbs. And along the way, those wisdoms get lost as we modernize and as we westernize and as we become more digital and the internet and all this. So it's, for me, it goes to my roots, my family roots, my grandmothers who are both Latin American. I had a Mexican grandmother and a Colombian grandmother and both of them were really used plants a lot and healing and in the kitchen. And so I think just watching them really just planted a seed in me and I think lots of people watch their grandmothers play with herbs. We can see that being lost in the modern world with all the commercialism and giant industries and corporate values and so on. When we travel, we encounter herbs and this is a travel show. And as I was reading through your book, it occurred to me we travelers can incorporate an interest in herbs into our travel experience. What would your take be for a traveler who wanted to incorporate an awareness of herbs as they explore the world? I really love traveling and weaving the herbal experience into my travels. I think, you know, the first place I always start is at the markets, especially some countries like Mexico or I've traveled a lot in Latin America where there's a lot of open-air markets. And that's where the healers come together and they lay out their herbs on these colorful chappestries and there's even herbalists out there ready to tend to your aches and your sprains and with liniments and herbs and spices. And so I really love going to the markets to see what is available. And then of course I love exploring nature and hitting the woods, whether it's guided trails in the Amazon or mountain journeys in Oaxaca. I really love going into nature and seeing the different various plants in their respective habitats. And then, you know, learning from the local folks like the cacao farmers in Costa Rica or Ecuador or even, you know, I think my last trip was to New Zealand. I took my son and we had an experience with the indigenous communities there and learned about the herb kawa kawa and the traditional beverage that they make there. So, you know, it's just like really fun to go in and explore from their perspective. I like the way your book is designed where you've got these chapters that are basically themes. And I'm going to go through the kind of the chapter heads now and we're just going to brainstorm about some focus on herbs that we might incorporate into our travels. You've got a chapter called Sensory. Our senses are our teachers. You comment on how, for instance, the residents of the hottest climates really appreciate the hottest spices, cayenne, for example. Talk a little bit about how our senses are our teachers when it comes to herbs. Well, I think that that is really how we get to know herbs. This is how herbalists really get to know the properties of herbs because their actions are inherent in their, you know, sensory stimulation. So, we know that aromatics, by definition, help relax the nervous system and help relax smooth tissue. You know, they're good digestives. They help alleviate gassiness. We know that spicy herbs rev up the circulation system. We know that bitter herbs stimulate digestion. We know that slippery herbs are soothing. And so, you know, just through like that simple lens of the sensory experience, we can, we don't have to memorize every plant under the sun because there's so many. It's more about assessing their qualities and their patterns. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with herbalist and author Mimi Prunella Hernandez, and she's devoted her life's work to broadening the use of herbs in traditional and professional settings. Her book is National Geographic Herbal, 100 Herbs from the World's Healing Traditions. You can learn more about Mimi and her work on her website, mimeprunellahernandes.com. Prunella is spelled with two L's, P-R-U-N-E-L-L-A. Mimi, the next chapter is Kitchen. Herbalism begins at home, whether you're a traveler or not. You mentioned in there a beautiful phrase, variety is the herb of life. Exposure to a wide spectrum of foods is healthy. Tell us about some of the hidden medicine we might find in the kitchen. Well, I think, you know, that quote really says a lot, and I'm glad you chose that because, you know, I think variety and also the variety of the colorful patterns that we put on our dish are so important. It just exposes our body to kind of this buffet of natural components and phytochemicals, if you will, for the body to choose what it needs to assimilate, to stimulate, you know, various aspects of health. And, you know, when we get into a redundant simplicity of reductionism of foods that are selected for just sweetness, and, you know, if you look at the grocery store, most of our produce is like white potatoes, white corn, white bland lettuce. So, you know, over time, a lot of like fiber and color has been bred out of our food products. Yeah, it is a trend. I gotta admit, my shopping is pretty boring when it comes to visual. What kind of variety of colors am I stocking? And we can be mindful of that and inspired by that chapter. Another chapter is apothecary, and it talks about folk remedies. And you encounter this a lot in your travels. Teas, tinctures, concentrated liquid extracts, vinegars. When I was in the markets in Russia, each market had an army of maids who had honey, and it was very highly thought of as a medicinal treat for people. Talk a little bit about the folk remedies we might encounter in our travels. I think a lot of folks really love infusing herbs in honey because you can make a very simple syrup by just taking herbs like lemon balm or basil or holy basil and just putting them in a jar and covering it with honey and then straining it out a couple weeks later. And you have this like medicinal honey that's so easy to take. And you know, children like that, you can use it to sweeten your tea or your coffee and get some of the good stuff in that way. And the honey itself had different characteristics. I mean, they had little paper samplers, little wound up papers, just a humble little market. And every town had this in their market, and they wanted you to try this honey and that honey. And each one would, according to their folk remedies, have a different purpose. Another chapter you have is the garden, personal growth through gardening. I love the comment you made, the moment a seed is placed in the ground, a caregiver is born. Yes, it's so true. And I've experienced this recently in my own life because for the majority of my life, I'm a city dweller. And recently, I set down some roots out in the country in the foothills of North Carolina. And I've got land to steward now and gardens to take care of now. And it's just been such a profound experience to learn to tend to these plants the way they tend to me. You know, it's kind of this relationship building process. So yeah, it's been such a beautiful journey. One of my favorite chapters in your book, Mimi, was the one called Weedy, Wild and Wondrous Weeds. One person's woe is another person's wonder. And it is interesting to think that in our culture, certain things are weeds. They're just not wanted, but that is subjective, isn't it? Well, herbalists love weeds. We eat weeds. We pick weeds for remedies. And we also struggle with weeds ourselves. I tend to a lot of native habitat here, so I'm constantly pulling up honeysuckle so that it doesn't encroach on the native plants of the land. We use them. There's especially people who work bioreginally. We favor the plant of full plants. And so if there's a choice between something native or something invasive, we're going to take as much invasive remedies as possible. I'll never forget, my pastor had some fun one Sunday with a sermon. And the topic was, if you have a perfect putting green lawn, there's no diversity in it. And he just said a lawn full of little weeds and flowers and color and variety is healthier. And it's more fun and it's more fragrant and take it to an extreme. Maybe the grass is the unwanted weed. I mean, there's such a festival of diversity out there. And it's a frontier of wonder. Right. I don't know who doesn't want violets and dandelions and plantain and all these interesting little plants in their lawn. It's pretty, I think. Yeah. Well, I didn't realize until I read your book that dandelion, when you think about it, it's the tooth of the lion, dandelion. And it's actually, you called it a liver-loving bitter. The whole thing's edible, huh? The entire plant of the dandelion is edible and usable, a little bitter with those greens. But, you know, I'm used to it. I love putting dandelion greens in my salads. You can also stir fry them. And the flowers are good infused in a little white wine or you can make fritters from the flowers and the root. Oh man, you are freeing us up to all sorts of forbidden fruits of the... Mimi Hernandez helps us understand the variety of herbs and how they benefit us in her National Geographic book, Herbal, 100 Herbs from the World's Healing Traditions. She and her husband oversee the Ponderland Native Plant Sanctuary near Asheville, North Carolina. Mimi recently taught ethnobotany at Frostburg State University, where she helped local residents conserve the plants' end culture of Appalachia. Her website is mimiprunelahernandez.com Mimi, the next chapter that I just loved was Woodland. A stroll through the woods is a blissful antidote to the stress of modern life. And we have a lot of stress in our lives and we have more reason than ever to do what I think the Japanese call forest bathing. Tell us a little bit about the value of forest bathing. Oh, it's so simple. I mean, the value of forest bathing, is just going out and laying down, finding a nice little spot or taking a nice stroll through the woods and just sitting in silence and just listening. You know, here comes back to the senses again about listening to the leaves rustle or to the birds or to the little creek in the background. And just getting present with the moment is so, so good for your stress hormones and your adrenals and everything. It's a blessing waiting to be experienced, to be harvested. You wrote, A healing heart tunes into the music of the forest. Truly. Oh my goodness. And the final chapter I want to talk about is community. Herbs bring people together and there's examples of that all around the world, isn't it? Talk a little bit about social cohesion and communing together and herbs that give us a sense of unity and peace. Right. I thought this chapter was important to point to the ways that herbs bring folks together. Herbs like Kava, you know, that gather people in ceremony and herbs like even cannabis and hops are in this chapter because they are so medicinal, yet also recreational in the way they bring people together. Of course cannabis can land you in jail in some countries, but it is therapeutic, relaxing and mind-altering and that's why it's even incorporated into religions around the world, isn't it? I mean, marijuana is a religious herb in India. Yeah, it is for a lot of people. Hops is for a lot of people, a religious herb. And I was just in Morocco and tea, the ritual around tea is just fascinating and that is something that is certainly multinatural. You'll find that the importance of tea in many cultures. Talk a moment about tea. Right. And I do talk in that chapter about green tea because it's such a ceremonial experience for everything from selecting the tea to the utensils used to make that tea, to the pottery, to the setting of the table, so centering and so special to host someone for tea. And so it's just such an enriching experience and just the way that we tend to each other. I just love hosting tea parties myself and bringing people together. It's sort of an excuse to take care of each other, to take a moment with each other, to focus, to relax. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been speaking with Mimi Pranella Hernandez. Her book is National Geographic Herbal, 100 Herbs from the World's Healing Traditions. Mimi, let's just wrap things up with some advice from you. If you could travel anywhere and have an herbal theme, where would it be? What destination would you focus on and what would you, how would that be just a field day for somebody like you who's into herbs? I think I would go to Peru and really experience the Andes and the maca plants that are there. The maca is in the book. It's the maca root. It's like a radish and it's the warrior plant, but really, you know, now being marketed for energy and vitality and reproduction. I just love the little villages in the Andes Mountains where the original folk tenders are still there. I also would love to visit Greece. I've never been there, but so many of the medicinal plants that I wrote about in the book have a history to the Mediterranean, including our most aromatic plants, rosemary and oregano and thyme and sage. All of these are originate in the Mediterranean and I would love to see this oasis of rosemary on the cliffs and growing wild and wild oregano. I can't even imagine these plants that we've used so long here in our kitchen and just having them wild, you know, as far as I can see. My goodness, we can infuse our travels with herbs almost anywhere we venture. Mimi Pranola Hernandez, thanks so much for joining us and best wishes with your teaching in your book, National Geographic Herbal. Thanks, Rick. It was such a pleasure being here and spreading the good word about herbs with your community and your audience. Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Mora Hall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves, Europe and Edmunds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gursoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Quirt. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll look for you again next week with more travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. It's clear to me that if you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you will. That's why we offer a world of free content at ricksteves.com. 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