690a Hamburg; The Art of Europe; Extreme Sports

You could never comprehend it all in one lifetime, but it's sure fun trying. Coming up, join me in celebrating the great art of the Western world, from the Stone Age to the Eiffel Tower. You just see the whole sweep of history and how one civilization and one art style and one people evolves into the other. My collaborator on a series of TV specials we produced joins us for a look at what it's been like to frame the great art of Europe for public television. Also, a pair of German tour guides helps us see what makes Hamburg such a great city to explore. It's traditional, but it's also very forward-looking, modern, a city that reinvents itself. It's the most worldly and cold city. And New York Times sports journalist John Branch tells us how he covers the kinds of people that are drawn to the adrenaline rush of extreme sports. A lot of people I report on do things that I wouldn't do myself. Come along, let's travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. In just a bit, we're going to take a second look at a TV series I produced a few years ago. I'm still quite proud of how we were able to profile the greatest art and architecture of Europe. And a sports journalist from the New York Times tells us about some of the greatest thrill seekers he's met. Lately, I've been singing the praises of many of Europe's second cities when the A-list cities get too crowded to fully enjoy. The old song goes, how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Paris? But they might also want to enjoy Marseille, or Lyon, or Glasgow, Belfast, Krakow, and Porto. When you go to Germany, sure, you've got to see Berlin, but don't overlook Hamburg. It started in the 9th century, with a castle built by Charlemagne. It survived invasions and fires over the centuries, and to date, it's Germany's number two city with more than 5 million in the metro area. It's also a major port where the Albo River meets the North Sea. Joining us to explore Hamburg on travel with Rick Steves are Tuberguides Holger Zimmer and Carolina Marburger. First, let's just hear your take, because you both live in Berlin. Carolina, what does Hamburg mean to you? It always has been my escape when growing up in the provinces, and I think that makes Hamburg unique. In Germany, it stands for freedom, being cool. Hamburg is the city of the port that's the gate to the world. It's the most worldly and cool city. A port city tends to have more influence coming in. It's where the sailor's quarter is, the craziness, the freedom. Isn't there a zone called the free height or something like that in Hamburg? The große Freiheit, the great freedom. That's where the Beatles were actually performing. Holger, what does Hamburg mean to you? Well, living in Berlin, it's all wonderful in the capital city, but once I'm in Hamburg, I'm by the river, and I hear the seagulls, and I see the big ships and the tall ships. It's like maritime, it's movement, it's connection. And it really, for me, I kind of grew up there. My first ever living apartment outside my parents' home was Hamburg, playing music, listening to music, so it is connected to just the first steps you take into the real world, and that was wonderful. And speaking of steps you take into the rest of the world, if there are German Americans listening right now, there's a very good chance their ancestors left Germany from Hamburg. Absolutely. It's an estimated that about five million people went through Hamburg, Bremen, Bremenhaven, kind of out to the new world, and so quite a good chance is they came through Hamburg, and that's quite often when we take people on a tour. They say, yes, I know my great-granddad, he went through Hamburg, and they look it up there. What impresses me when I go to Hamburg is how few Americans go there. Why is it that Americans don't think about Hamburg? It's just not known. Like Americans, when they think of Germany, they think about the South, Bavaria, Lederhosenbierre, and all of that. So Hamburg is kind of like sidelined, but for German tourists it is a big thing, and I love going there, and it is really fascinating to see when we start our tours there in Hamburg. Quite few people have been going there, but once they see it, they say, wow, now we know what this city is all about, because it's traditional, but it's also very forward-looking, modern, a city that reinvents itself. I think part of the American view of Germany is shaped by the part of Germany we occupied after the war, and that was Bavaria. The Gulf of America had any relative that was in Germany. He was in Bavaria. So you got Lederhosen, and you got slap dancing, and you got beer gardens. That's quite Munich, isn't it? But it's also because Germany is a federal country with an incredible diverse set of cultures, and northern German culture is because of what you just said, Rig, indeed very often overlooked, but for us it is just another part of German culture. And well worth visiting. And yes, it's very much like Scandinavian British a little bit, but nonetheless for us it's very German. It has that Nordic feel. I mean, it's right on the border of Denmark, right? It actually was literally next to Denmark, because Altenau, now a part of Hamburg, for 200 years, was Denmark literally. So you get that interesting flavor, and it was a Hanseatic town. What is a Hanseatic port? Hanseatic, well it belonged to the Baltic Hanseatic League that basically was the dominant economic power in the Baltic Sea in the Middle Ages up until the 15th century maybe. However, Hanseatic city is still what Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg are still called, and Hanseatic still is a term you would use today in German, Hanseat, and Hanseat, or Hanseatisch. And it still implies a certain culture and way of life and a way, for example, has to do with merchants. There's a very proud merchant elite that has nothing to do with their aristocracy. They are really against it even. It means you are reliable. A handshake is everything you need to do. You have a certain sense of self irony and all that means Hanseatisch. Holger. And this tradition is still alive in a way that Hamburg still to this day is a very affluent town, a very rich town because of hundreds and hundreds of years of trading. Hamburg still is the third largest port in all of Europe. It's where the goods come in. It's a huge part of the city, which is you don't really see if you just walk around, but if you, for example, go to the new Philharmonic Hall on the platform and you could look out and you see how far the containers, the whole terminal stretches. It's a huge part of Hamburg's economy still and you still feel this vibe of trading in the city. I think it's actually interesting to think of the port city because that sometimes throws people off because there are port cities and port cities. In Hamburg, I always tell people to understand that the richest people live on the Alps, you'll see, and they watch, they look onto what the port, because the port is the beating heart and it's the pride of the Hamburgs. It's not like a port that you shy away from because the dirty thing that makes you rich, but you don't want to see. Oh, in Hamburg, it's all you see. It makes us more happy than anything to see the industrial port. We were talking about this Hanseatic heritage. What is Haffen city because there's a Haffen? What does that mean? Yeah, Haffen means harbor and city is like the new part. Like a stop. And this is a development. It's about a third of Hamburg is bigger now because of this development. So they reclaim basically all kind of used land that now the modern terminal where the computers and stuff don't need anymore and they redevelop it. There's university there. There's new apartment blocks. It really will expand the city by like 45,000 inhabitants. So it's a new development that you can actually also overlook from this alphalemonic hall and you see the way forward, you know, kind of more biking, more green living. That's also what Hamburg stands for. It's a futuristic extension of the city taking the industrial waste land and turning it into something that can inspire city planners all over the world really. And Carolina, I remember standing on a bridge and there's these brick old warehouses that just goes forever and you think, whoa, this is 100, 200 years old and it's massive. And then that's just the entryway to this modern city. Yes. It's the warehouse district, the Speicherstadt, which is a UNESCO heritage site, which sometimes confuses people. It's not that old. It's just from the 1880s to the 1920s. Yet it was developed at a time when Germany just became Germany as a nation and therefore the free custom zone had to be removed. And so the Speicherstadt, the warehouse district is a red brick sort of storage house district galore that is beautiful and now, of course, loses its relevance, but has become just a site of museums and event places, restaurants and all that. And then it's adjacent to that new development. And we do need to remember when Germany was united in 1870 or so. Overnight, Europe has an industrial superpower and it needed a port and the port was Hamburg. And the Hamburg people wanted still to retain their tax-free status. That was very important. They made sure that that's when they got the Speicherstadt going, the largest warehouse district back in the day without paying taxes. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Holger Zimmer and Carolina Marburger. We're talking about Germany's, you could say Germany's number two city after Berlin, Hamburg. When we think about Hamburg, a lot of us think about sex and drugs and Beatles and Rieper Bonn. And I know that there is a tradition for young people in Germany to go to Hamburg and you don't go for a crazy Friday night. You go for three days where you don't sleep and it's just insane. Carolina, you're a teenager in Hamburg. What is this Rieper Bonn wild weekend? Well, it used to be that way, definitely. So we went to the Rieper Bonn and we went to the pubs on Hamburg Haberg. Maybe not the Rieper Bonn itself, but sort of the side streets and then you found bars and then you danced through the night indeed and what was then the Gemma Modrel Club, which had the best dance floor jazz of all times. And you waited until the subway would run again because that would only in the morning. So you definitely went through the morning hours or you went, of course, on Sunday mornings, you went to the fish market that starts at 5.30 and you need nothing better than a breaded fish roll. That is the best thing against a hangover to soak up all that. And then the fish market is the place to go. So yes, it has this kind of CD nightlife district tradition in a way just because it was like a poor town, the sailors were there. Like Amsterdam, Zee Dijk, you know. But it also, let's not forget it, it's still a musical city. It is like the home of Janus Brahms, you know, one of the amazing romantic composers. Gustav Mahler was there. And of course the Beatles. And you got theater. Yeah. But you also still to this day have like an amazing plethora of great music, like new modern bands coming from Hamburg. So that is also something worth checking out. And I think a lot of people remember the Beatles getting their start in Hamburg. Sadly for Beatles fans, the museum closed and there's essentially nothing to see about the Beatles in Hamburg anymore. In a way, but you still have the recordings, you have them singing in German and you know, without Hamburg and them playing like, what is it, three, four, five times a night for two years straight, more or less. Like they were just honing their craft and they could play every key change they ever was invented and they were good to go. Like without Hamburg and getting their training there, there would be no Beatles. Don Kassheen for Hamburg. All right, for music lovers. Hamburg is also a very green city. It's a wonderful city, even like with a family, has wonderful old buildings and has a lake in the middle of town. You can actually go sailing right in Hamburg, you know, in the city. You can go canoeing. And there's a wonderful park, Planten and Bloman. But remember, Hamburg was the site of a horrific firestorm, one of the worst bombings in 1943 and World War II. Tell us about that day. Eight nights, seven days, roughly, and 43, Operation Gomorrah as it was called. Gomorrah, yeah. Pretty much British bombers destroyed the city, like huge parts of the inner city. So it has also modern feel to it, but still I have to say, you still see like the damages in a way by new architecture, new big highways being built after that. So when you see the new, you can almost think that's where the bombings were. That's where the old were. But still, I think to me, Hamburg is a beautiful city, also compared to Berlin, which is a bit more kind of gritty in some parts. So Hamburg, for me, I would recommend it definitely in many respects to go there. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking about Hamburg, a city that I would say is underappreciated by American travelers heading to Germany. Our guides have been Holger Zimmer and Carolina Marberger. Holger and Carolina, let's just finish with a favorite experience that you'd like your guest to enjoy next time you took them to Hamburg. So I would take you down to the Landungsbrücken and jump on the ferry number 62, which takes you to Öwelgönne. Öwelgönne is the old museum harbour, and from there you can start walking on the incredible Elbstrand, which is the Elbe Beach, literally a sandy beach by which you can sit down, have a sip or walk and see the incredible container ships pass you by on the way to the harbour. And the Lange Brücke, or I forgive my German, but that's the famous pier where the emigration happened. Every tourist goes to this big pier. Yes, Landungsbrücken is basically where everything starts from. You might not want to spend too much time there, but that's where you go to get on the ferry. Catch the ferry and go to the beach. Great idea. Holger. I would take people up to St. Michael, der Michel, which is the famous landmark of Hamburg. It's the huge church with the largest clock tower that sailors would see rolling into Hamburg port. And you can walk up like 452 steps and have a nice view across Old Hamburg, the New Town, the Port, the Alp-Fillamonni Hall. So great views and you're right in the heart of the old town. In the name of this church again, St. Michael, Michael, der Michel. Great idea. Holger Zimmer, Carolina Marburger, Dankeschön. Say again, herzchen Dank. Thanks a lot. Thanks for coming. We'll look at what makes some people go for extreme sports within New York Times journalist in just a bit. But first, join me in celebrating the greatest art of Europe. Next on Travel With Rick Steves. It took me two years to produce the TV special on the art of Europe that we released just a couple years ago. It might still show up from time to time on the schedule of your local public television station. When it first started airing, I invited my friend and colleague, Gene Opencha, into the radio studio to celebrate a job well done and to provide an insider's look at the creative process that went into distilling centuries of European art into a six-hour mini-series. Gene and I did the typical grand tour of Europe together right after we graduated from high school. Gene and I go way back in collaborating on art projects and back in the 1990s, we wrote a book called Monowinks and that was guided tours to Europe's most exhausting and frightening museums, the big cultural obligations. And we were just working day and night on that. I remember, in fact, I remember one moment in our twin room after a couple of long, long days of Rome, we both were laying in bed awake but not ready to get out of bed yet. Gene said, shall I hand you your laptop as if I would be getting a little more writing done before breakfast. But Gene's co-authored our Europe 101 art book, our newest one is Europe's top 100 masterpieces and now this project's inspiring so many travelers to appreciate the great art of Europe. Gene, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for inviting me. Hasn't it been fun to grow up with our love of art kind of together from the days when we were just teenage dorks running around Europe with sneaking into churches from the back door to now. It is. And when you mentioned that thing about Monowinks, we were on a mission to make art accessible to people because when we made our first trip nearly 50 years ago, it was 50 years ago today. Gene and Rick taught the tourists to play, to enjoy the art. We were just a couple suburban kids. We, at least I came from a blue collar upbringing, knew nothing about art. We went over to Europe. We wandered around hopelessly lost in these huge museums. Nothing was really even in English back then. And so it inspired us to go, people need to know what this art is about because it would greatly up their appreciation of Europe. And I think that right from the start that got us on track. You know, I remember thinking, who cares about these old buildings, but it's raining, it's free and I'm going to step inside. So you're standing there at the entryway to a great cathedral. And I remember looking and thinking, boy, this is old and this is really big. Who's this statue of a guy with a spear? Yeah. And then we know now as after careers as tour guides and so on that the more you bring to your sight, seeing the more you get out of it, that's kind of fundamental. The more you bring with you, the better experience you're going to have. People want to know how do you get into the Louvre for less money? Well, it's going to cost everybody the same. But if you know what you're looking at, you'll enjoy it a lot more. Yeah. And this art series ended up being, I think, something like the harvest of these last few decades of what we learned as we traveled and our experience in our way being teachers as tour guides and writing books and so on. And this art series is sort of the culmination of those years of knowledge. So I remember a couple of years ago, we just had lunch together or something and I was thinking out loud and proposed it. And you said, sure, you jumped all over it. I had other stuff I had to do. I thought, well, Jean can basically write the script. Tell us how that whole script writing process and challenge was for you. Yeah, silly me because it really was a challenge. I mean, it seems pretty easy because you go, yeah, I know all this stuff. The hard part isn't writing it. It's condensing it into, you know, this is six hours, which is a lot of material. But when it comes down to it, you know, you're having to squeeze 5000 years of history into 10 minutes per century and make it flow. And we don't want to dumb it down. We want to make it accessible. But we have to respect the importance of teaching it right. And you can't dance around the awkward and complicated things. But it's got to be compelling. It's got to keep people's interest. Do you remember our mentor, Professor Stuffy Balding? That's right. Our fictional, this guy that we made up of this boring art history professor who is a stickler for all the names and dates and everything, but was totally boring. And we went, well, we need to make the names and dates accurate, but we don't want it to be Professor Stuffy Balding talking like this. We, it needs to, it needs to flow and it needs to be visually interesting. Well, there was a Professor Stuffy Balding. His name was Kenneth Clark. And he produced this wonderful series that inspired me because I've got this weird curiosity, but it didn't, it couldn't hold many people's attention today because he was just like you, Kara Kutcher there. And you and I work very hard. And as tour guides, we kind of know that that people have a lot of things coming at them and they don't have a terribly long attention span. And it's hot and it's crowded and I want a gelato. So now we were wondering how long should it be? Well, today the script is finished. The show is out. It's six hours and that's 90 pages of script. But, but we said, well, Jane just right at the whatever level it comes in. And, and I mean, you, it was in your court and you came back with a 200 page script. And it was, I, I respect your writing so much. I thought, I can't touch this, but it was two times as long. I didn't know what we were going to do. It was daunting. Yeah. It wasn't even just the, the writing was long. It's that we had so, there's so much great art and history. And, but we did it and we cut it down and we cut it down. And now it actually comes in at these one hour chunks. It was kind of a scary thing for me, frankly, to have to decide what are the modules going to be? Because we didn't know until we wrote it who deserves the hours. But we did it. The first hour was from Stone Age until till Greece, through ancient Greece, including Egypt. The next hour was all of Rome, 500 BC to 500 AD, the Roman Empire. The next hour was another thousand years, the Middle Ages from 500 to 1500. And then the Renaissance and then Baroque with kind of the flip side of broke the Neoclassical Age. And then the most exciting hour, I think from Romantic, you know, mid 1800s up until today. Now, when you look at that, we had to nail that down early. How did it, how did it come in? Well, we just had to make hard cuts, you know, if you're talking about Egypt, the beautiful bust of Nefertiti. Hey, sorry, princess, you know, you're on the cutting room floor. Yeah. You know, if you're choosing Gothic churches, there's so many of them. Wait, Westminster Abbey isn't going to even make the cut. No, sorry. Tishon, OK, we talked about Tishon, but I would love to see more Tishon. Yeah, everything here. I just wanted to say Tishon the Venetian. Because there's fun little ways to help people remember. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're joined by Jean Opencha, who's the lead writer of Rick Steves, Art of Europe. And this is a six hour mini series. And I'm just taking a moment to celebrate with Jean this exciting project that we've finished. But Jean, when we were doing this show, now we've got six hours. And you've looked at it many times and worked on the script from start to finish. What, what little moments are you most excited about to share with our audience on TV? What I like is when there's a perfect marriage between words and images. Because that's really what this is. We're not just telling the story through words. We had to also pick the exact right image that says it. You can say the Renaissance was an optimistic time, confident people gazing into the future. And it's great. But what you want to do is find an image like Michelangelo's David that says that, you know, the Renaissance was a confident time. Well, then you see David and he's, the plant has standing there and he's strong and he's muscular. His toes are actually gripping the pedestal. He's ready to do it. He's just intense, ready to do it. His powerful right hand. And then when you say, and he's gazing the future, then you've got this close up of the face. And that's, those are the segments that I think work the best. And you're so good at, at giving meaning to something like that. I mean, you can all say that's beautiful. But when you're looking into the eyes of David, you're looking into the eyes of Renaissance man. And what is David thinking? And why was it important to Florence? And what does that mean in the sweep of history? I mean, to me, David shows how Europe in 1500 was ready to be done with the Middle Ages and ready to charge boldly into the modern era. And the way that you can see it visually says exactly that. You know, one of the great things about this show is people might think, oh, it's a, it's an art history course. It's a slideshow. It's not a slideshow. You're telling the story through the, it's like when, like a director is filming something and he directs your eye from feature to feature to tell you the story exactly what you need to see. And we've been able to do that. And art is a conduit to the past. I think it's the value of history is so important. People, you know, the famous thing, if you don't respect history or doom to repeat it or whatever. The art takes you back and it gives you a context and an empathy with what was happening. And, you know, you can look at medieval history and think it's all churches, but you can look at, there's a tapestry that we featured in the Carnivalet Museum in Paris. To me, it's the exquisite other side of that fearful Middle Age church oriented stuff. It's sensuous. It's humanism. The lady in the unicorn. Tell us, what do you look at when you see the lady in the unicorn? Yeah, it's like you say, there's so much when people think of the Middle Ages, they tend to think of churches. It was the age of faith. It certainly was. But then you have this tapestry, which is a series of tapestries that show this beautiful woman amid a beautiful garden, flowers and vines. And it's her experiencing the five senses. For the first time, she's experiencing taste. She eats some candy or something like that. She's playing some music on a harpsichord. And in each of these things, it's like a new world is opening up. And touch. And touch. She's actually stroking the unicorn's horn. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. This is 500 years ago, and they had the confidence. We're just giggling like a couple of 18 year olds. The first time we saw it. But this is a very big deal. Humanism is one of my favorite things to remind people because humanism was controversial. I mean, no, you're supposed to bow down in church, but now humanism takes over. And that was the foundation of our modern age, I would say. And the lady in the unicorn is exactly that. It's just showing me, it's stepping out of the medieval period and into a beautiful and open-ended future. And the tragic thing is that so many travelers today, they have the opportunity to go to Europe, and they look at these great artistic masterpieces and they cannot see it in the context of that age. Almost a good side, a positive side, the fact that we had to condense this into six hours, is that you just see the whole sweep of history and how one civilization and one art style and one people evolves into the other and it unfolds like a time-lapse flower. It's kind of blossoming and ever-changing and you can see that evolution. And that's one of the beauties of it being so condensed. And we don't need to be or we've determined not to be professor stuffy balding. We've had professor stuffy balding, three of them from three different universities read the script. So we know they're okay with what we say. We had to vet it that way, which is really important and I'm thankful for that. But we got to build a Gothic cathedral out of 13 tourists. Right. It's one of my favorite things to do as a tour guide. You need six columns, six buttresses and one spire. And then when you've got it all in place, you understand the whole idea of the skeletal support of a Gothic church and the importance of a pointed arch. And to be able to show that in a fun, loving, creative way is just great. Another moment for me, Jean, when we were doing this was to go in tight on an Impressionist painting and look at the brushwork and the treatment of the color. Yeah. As I recall, we have Monet's water lilies and these beautiful things that show the water lilies floating on the pond in his garden in Giverny. And you're looking at it and you go, this is beautiful. I just feel like I'm immersed in it. And then like you say, you get close up on one of these water lilies and you realize it's just this smudge of red and white paint and green paint. But then you back up and those colors resolve in your eye and it looks like a water lily. And we said, voilà. Voilà. Voilà. I love that because it looks like an abstract kaleidoscopic explosion of color up close. Like some kid just went crazy with the brush, pull back and you see the magic of Impressionism. And then with that one example, our viewers, our travelers, when they do their adventure through Europe and they have this chance in a lifetime to go to Monet's Giverny Garden and the Orsay Gallery and see all these masterpieces, they understand why it's so special. My colleague and longtime friend and collaborator, Jean Openchise, our special guest right now on travel with Rick Steves. Jean was my original travel buddy on our first non-chaperone trip to Europe right out of high school in the summer of 73. We're looking back at the work we accomplished when the Rick Steves Art of Europe TV series was first released in 2022. Jean also co-authors my illustrated art books, Europe's Top 100 Masterpieces and Europe 101. And he shows up as my travel buddy in the memoir of our youthful adventures called On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Jean's also written his own unique take on Michelangelo's lifelong obsession to construct a landmark tomb for Pope Julius II. It's called Michelangelo at Midlife. Jean's website is JeanOpenChase.com. Jean, you have worked really hard on this and I'm so thankful for, I mean, it's like you wrote a 200 page book and then you had to bring it down to 90 pages. And now we had to put it all to images and it's so exciting to have it out there and in the public. What is your hope that our audience will have as it take away? That'll make all of this work and investment worthwhile. Well, I think of myself as a traveler, especially a young traveler, craving the kind of knowledge that would make, that would bring this art to life. And so that's what I'm hoping this would do. I'm hoping it will teach travelers. It probably could be used for students of art history. It'd be a great overview of it in an art history course. And maybe even, wouldn't this be great? It would even inspire other artists who can look at work that's done in the past, learn from it, be inspired by it and then go on and create their own art. Wouldn't that be great? You know, that's one of my favorite goals or triumphs as a tour guide is to be with a traveler who's never been to Europe for two weeks, seeing all this cultural wonder, all this great art. And you find people who have never written a poem, they write a poem. People have never sketched something. They sketch something beautiful. People who look through their cameras, if they are an artist framing something to take home and cherish. And if our art series lets people be inspired by people who have done that through the ages, we can join the party. We can make life more multi-dimensional, more beautiful. In a way, when you're looking at a beautiful piece of art and you're looking at the pure beauty, you're experiencing the very same things that people did in the past when that art was made. You're like a medieval peasant going into a Gothic church and going, wow, the soaring arches, the light through the stained glass and that sense of the soul being uplifted. Or you're just like the very first cavemen that were painting on cave walls and the sense of wonder that that would have been when people went in and they saw a bison or an antelope being portrayed on the wall and flickering across the wall of the cave by torchlight. And when we see a piece of that art now, we can experience that same sense of wonder. Jean, our six hour series started in one of those caves. It's just awestruck by the wonder of people, people like you and me. I mean, not that long ago, really in the in the vast span of things, doing those cave paintings. And we finished with gorgeous street art, filling entire empty sides of buildings all over Europe. Interesting. Yes. It's like the graffiti on a cave wall is now in the present day, the very popular art form, which is graffiti scribbled on walls in towns. And thanks to your work and your experience and thanks to our friends in public broadcasting, we're able to connect the dots from those early cave paintings to that street art that decorates Glasgow, Scotland or Athens and Greece today and celebrate the creative spirit of humankind. Thank you, Jean. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks, Rick. If you haven't seen the Rick Steves Art of Europe series on your TV schedule lately, you can watch it whenever you like from the on demand video we post on our website. You can view it in either half hour or one hour episodes in the TV section at ricksteves.com. Or simply follow the web links in the notes for what you're listening to right now at ricksteves.com. There's also a backstory to the thrill seekers that we sometimes get to see in action, jumping out of airplanes or working their way up or down sheer mountain slopes. Don Branch writes for The New York Times about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world. He shares a few of their stories next. Hello, my name is Lale Sürmen Aran and I'm from Istanbul, Turkey. And I'd like to teach you a tongue twister in Turkish now. It is cartal kalkar dal sarkar dal sarkar cartal kalkar. Eagle flies out the branch lifts back. Eagle flies in back the branch hangs down. And it goes as cartal kalkar dal sarkar dal sarkar cartal kalkar. His reporting on everything from rock climbers and bass jumpers to skiers tumbling in avalanches will often leave you wondering what motivates these thrill seekers. Do they have a death wish? John Branch has won nearly every major journalism prize for his sports reporting for The New York Times. Of the thousands of stories he's reported on, John gathered a few of his favorites in his book, Side Country, Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sports. He joins us now from his home studio just north of San Francisco. John, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me, Rick. So you collected 20 favorite articles out of the some 2000 that you've written for The New York Times. There are the small town coaches and sparring young people and the amazing bowlers. But it seems like a lot of people ended up in your favorites, who either were doing death defying things or things that were actually deadly. You know, I just watched the documentary Free Solo about climbing El Capitan without a safety rope and the climber, Alex, seemed ready to die for the challenge. What's your take on adventure sports and adrenaline and death? Yeah, I am really taken by people who do things that I can't imagine doing myself. And so there are a lot of stories here that sort of tickle that funny bone for me. You mentioned Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan without ropes and who's now become famous as this Free Solo climber. And whether he has a death wish. And he's very thoughtful about this, as the movie talks about and as I've talked about with him, because I've gotten to know him a little bit too. Does he have a death wish? No, not at all. He just sees the world, I think, a little bit differently than you and I might. And he sees what he's doing as relatively safe because he knows the protocols he has in place. I think most of these people don't see what they're doing as crazy just because they're in it and they respect the process of how they go about doing it. And if some Yahoo is going to do it, yeah, they're going to be dead next week. But if you're a professional and knowing your limits, I suppose it is not risk free, but it's not really reckless. Right. And I'll give you a crazy example. I've just been in Switzerland talking to Olympic athletes, talking to them about what scares them. And when you talk to a downhill skier, you ask them what sport in the Olympics would scare you. These people go 90 miles an hour down a sheet of ice and they say, oh, I would never do the half pipe. Or you talk to a half pipe snowboarder and they would say, I would never ever think about going over a ski jump. They're all scared of something else. And I think it's because to your point, they don't know exactly what that entails. And they know how to be safe in their area of expertise. Exactly. You know, in your Don Wall article, you talked about some hikers or some climbers from 1970 or something. Dean Caldwell said, everything is padded and comes with warning labels. I can see how that for a certain kind of person, you'd almost be belligerent about that. Everything is padded and they keep saying, be careful. Yeah. And I think people say that even more and more with, you know, helicopter parents and everything else, all the safety restrictions that we put on kids and adults. People, I think, are looking to sort of do something free and feel like they're doing something independent and that scares them. I think there's something liberating about doing something that scares you. But then you quoted Warren Harding in that same 1970 climb. He reached the summit and somebody asked him, why do you do this? And he said, because we're insane. Yeah, there is the old you 70 climbers, I think were a little bit insane. They were at the edge of the frontier there and they were the ones who were first climbing El Capitan and nobody else was like them. Now, of course, you go there certain times of year and El Capitan is covered with people like ants on the side of a wall there. Everybody's climbing it. But back then they were pioneers. I mean, when nobody had climbed Mount Everest, there weren't ropes in place for you and ladders in place. Everest is a great example. If you've seen those pictures of people, you know, the conga line of Mount Everest, they couldn't have imagined 30 or 40 years ago. No. And somebody did 30 or 40 years ago say, what is this? Just take me, you know, send them back to Disneyland or something like that. But in your Don Wall article, you talked about the reward. Why people do this? And in fact, you said there's the adulation and a warm shower. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, it's interesting. All these people that I've written about over the years that do these kind of daring things, nobody I've met is doing it for fame or infamy. Or if I thought they were, I probably wouldn't be covering them. They have their own personal motivations and people like the guys that climbed the Don Wall. They studied that wall for years and worked for years and years and years on how they're going to make their way up there someday that way. And so when they started doing it, they were doing it with an audience of three or four or five. And then I showed up, I caught one of it and showed up. And as the New York Times started to write about it during their 17 day expedition, suddenly television trucks started to show up. We sort of created, I think by accident, a little bit of a story where they were not looking for any of that. We kind of foisted it on them. I mean, when you fall into that culture, you egg each other on, you inspire each other, you conspire together. And there's a game plan. It can be a many years project, I would suppose. Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of these people. Certainly the Don Wall, certainly people like Olympians who spend four years for one moment in time. But yeah, they're trying to game plan this out. And again, not doing it for fame or riches. Who's paying you a million dollars to go climb El Capitan? Nobody. Right. You know, that's funny because when I was a kid, evil can evil. I think he was doing it for fame and riches, wasn't he? Yes. Yeah, I think he was. He was making sure that all the television cameras were on before he started, yes. Some of these guys, it's just an annoyance. It's an annoyance. And yeah, I think with the Don Wall guys, they were not pleased that all these people were showing up. And at one point, Tommy Caldwell, about halfway up the Don Wall, about eight or nine days into it, dropped his phone from 2000 feet and joked that it was an accident. I'm not sure it was really an accident. He was tired of getting text messages and calls. Yeah. Well, I would, I would suppose it would get in the way of their concentration and actually be contribute to the risk. Absolutely. And, and, you know, we talk about things like Kodak courage, where, you know, are we influencing people because we put a camera on them and we're making things more dangerous to them. Well, I kept thinking about that on Free Solo with Alex. And I think the movie, the filmmakers there, you know, Chai and Jimmy Chin, both said that. They said, are we contributing somehow potentially to his demands? So it took on a sub, a subplot. Are we all part of this? And if something goes wrong, are we sort of complicit? Yeah. And I think as a journalist, I'm very much aware of, I do not want to be part of the story and I don't want to influence the story. I want to be a fly in the wall if I can. This is Travel with Rick Steves. I'm talking with John Branch. He's written 2000 articles on sports for the New York Times. Twenty of his favorites are featured in his book, Side Country, Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sport. John won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on an avalanche in the Cascade Mountains just outside of Seattle. And that took the lives of three prominent skiers on a quiet Sunday morning in February a few years ago. He's joining us from his home in California right now on Travel with Rick Steves. We have links to John's work with this week's show at ricksteves.com. So John, I want to talk about a few other death defying sports and athletes that you've reported on. And I'm curious, how do you get access to these stories? And is it a kind of ambulance chasing? Are you looking for a disaster? I would like to think not, but certainly if there has been a disaster and I've written about, you know, the avalanche in Washington, about people who have died on Everest. I think there's a compelling story there. And how I try to frame it to the families and the people that are behind is that I'd like to tell the full story of what happened. These people may have been a blurb in a newspaper or a scroll across a screen on CNN or something. You know, we all live deeper and fuller lives than that. And so what can I do to help portray these people in an honest and full light? And that's where I try to go with these. Because it is a culture. Even I remember my roommate in college was a rock climber and one of his buddies died. And you know, the attitude was he died doing what he loved, you know, and it was, they sort of know it's a package deal. You got to embrace life and you live life to the fullest and it comes with some dangers. It's kind of beyond me, but that is, it is a culture. Yeah, it's a little bit beyond me too, which I think is why I'm fascinated by them. Because, you know, a lot of people I report on do things that I wouldn't do myself. And so I'm trying to tap in, I think, a little bit selfishly to figure out what makes these people tick. And they do it even if it's illegal. I mean, you wrote a fascinating article called Lost Brother. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Lost Brother was about Dean Potter, who was a premier climber and a bass jumper and a wingsuit flyer where he would jump off the cliffs and fly with one of those kind of wingsuits as much as he could. And he was a big proponent of legalizing bass jumping in the national parks. Most of the best bass jumping spots in the U.S. are in the national parks. They're in places like Yosemite or Yellowstone or Zion, the Grand Canyon, and it's illegal there. And so he would do it in the dark of night in Yosemite mostly because he'd have less risk of being caught and being spotted. And he and a fellow climber of his were killed a few years ago in Yosemite when they both followed each other. They jumped off a cliff and were flying with their wingsuits and tried to cut through a notch in one of the walls in Yosemite Valley and miscalculated and were killed. And that became a story I wrote called Lost Brother, again, trying to illuminate these lives and what made them tick. You have the opportunity to talk to their loved ones. It's like visiting an airplane crash site and pieced through the debris of their lives. It is. You're trying to piece together not only what happened but also who were the people that were there. I've written a lot of stories about people I've never met before. And it's in some ways, it's like writing a very detailed obituary. You're trying to talk to as many people as possible about who they were and what they accomplished and what they believed and what their values were. We've talked about rock climbing and we've talked about bass jumping and wingsuits. What's another extreme sport that you think is just flirting with death? Yeah, I think a lot of the Olympic sports are. I would never go down an icy run on a face first on a skeleton, on a sled or on my skis. I'm a skier. And the idea of going downhill at 90 miles an hour on what is literally a sheet of ice. Well, you know what's interesting for me, John, is you have to do it with abandon. Absolutely. It's rare that we do anything with total abandon. Right. And I've talked to Olympic athletes about this. They can't do that halfway. It's pedal to the metal, baby. Right. Because it's actually, in a lot of ways, more dangerous if you're just trying to do it halfway. And so you have to get the gumption and when it's your turn to go, you have to believe that you are going to make it and you can do this. You got a factor in safety, but I would just think when you're lunging off a ski jump or when you're going downhill or if you're in a luge, you've got to go full broke. Yeah. Because anything less than that could actually be more dangerous. And as soon as you let those doubts creep in, then maybe you change. And in some of these sports, we're talking about just minutiae. I mean, just in luge, for example, all you do is twitch your shoulders to make the thing turn. And so if you win, that could be the end. And that's the minuscule that you get to report on that we don't appreciate. I try to, yes. Yeah. One critic wrote that John Branch covers sports the way Lyle Lovett writes country music. John's our guest right now on travel with Rick Steves. We're talking about the people he's profiled for the New York Times who often engage in the most adrenaline pumping of extreme sports. He includes their stories in his book, Side Country. John's also written a profile of a Utah rodeo family and how they try to keep a part of the old West alive. That book's called The Last Cowboys. We have links to John's earlier interviews with us with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. John, I don't know if people are going to die at a rodeo, but from reading your articles on that, it's clear they are going to get injured and they come back for more and more. What's your insight on writing a bucking bronco just for sport? Yeah, I think I described it as eight seconds of a car wreck. I have never met tougher athletes than the rodeo athletes. And it's because they know they're going to get hurt. They know it's just a matter of time and they also aren't getting paid very much. If they don't ride eight seconds, they get zero dollars. They are doing it for that chance. And if they get hurt, they will jump back in the truck, maybe drive 500 more miles to a rodeo for the next night and try to do it again. And if they don't get on the horse or don't get on the bull, they have no chance of making any money. So these guys just suck it up more than any athletes have ever seen. And they know they're going to get hurt. And once you're hurt, it's easy to get hurt again. But they've got a grueling schedule. What do they do? They do three rodeos in a weekend. Yeah. I mean, they'll do 100 rodeos a year. Most of them crammed into the summer. And so from June to August, they are on the road back and forth across the interstates of the West, going to rodeo to rodeo to rodeo. You know, that's another dimension of this addiction a lot of extreme athletes have is once they're injured, they keep having to perform. And when you're injured, it's tough to perform to the limit you want to perform at. Absolutely. You know, the injury is snowball and they just keep thinking, if I can just heal through this, I'll be back to where I was. And one thing that I've found with every athlete, it happens in rodeo, it happens with Olympic athletes, is that they're all trying to figure out their exit strategy. They know there's a short window for what they do. It might be till they're 30, might be till 35, might be till the next Olympic cycle. And they're just trying to get there and trying to maximize themselves so they can get out safely and figure out what they're going to do with the rest of their life. That's probably a challenge. People that get all of this adrenaline have is your exit strategy. And then how do you provide for that once you're no longer in the saddle? Right. When you're no longer in the saddle or you're hurt, in the case of the rodeo family that I wrote about, it's by handing it down to the next generation and just sort of living vicariously then through the kids that do what you used to do. There you go. That would be a solution where you wouldn't get depressed, that you have a heritage. You have a heritage. You stay connected to it. John Branch, the book is Side Country, Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sports. You wrote an article called Deliverance from 27,000 Feet about climbers and sherpas who die on Mount Everest and the people they leave behind in the government rules starting to limit crowding and so on. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in Mount Everest. Is that a unique situation where it's just like the ultimate so it's got all these congestion problems? It just seems like a tragic thing if you're a great mountain climber to be dealing with a bunch of rookies cluttering up the trail to the summit of the greatest mountain on the planet. Yeah, you will find the greatest mountain climbers avoid Everest with all they can, because it's just a crowd place. It's a Disneyland. It's a place where people come who, in many cases, have no business being there. It's a bucket list item for them. And so it has gotten crowded and there are climbing companies in Kathmandu that maybe don't have your best interest at heart because they just don't have the financial poll or the right training and that sort of thing. So it has become dangerous. And again, Everest is one of those places where several people are dying for the most part every year. So, John, what do you think the greatest accomplishment or goal these days is for a mountain climber? I think it certainly depends on the mountain climber. There are people who are trying to climb all 8,000, I think 14,000 meter peaks. Some are trying to do that without oxygen. But you know, when I covered the guys that were covering El Capitan and the Don Wall, one of the things that Kevin Jorgensen, one of the climbers said was, find your own Don Wall. This was his Don Wall. This was his, I know it's going to be probably the greatest accomplishment of my life. I know it's going to be in my obituary someday. What's your Don Wall? And that's always stuck with me. I love that because I have a real short Don Wall and I just hiked around Mount Blanc. And for me, to go to the limit six days in a row was really a personal accomplishment. It's nothing for a mountaineer. Not at all. I was so proud. I felt so good. And it was something I'll never stop being thankful for. Well, you'll appreciate this. My Don Wall is probably taking my kids through a hut to hut hike through the Dolomites and making sure all four of us survived. It was not the craziest thing I'll ever do, but it was a great experience and it was nerve-wracking in all those ways when you're watching your kids step to the edge. So, do these adrenaline hikers or these adrenaline sports people that you've covered and you've spent years and years covering them, do they ever cross the finish line or are they just addicted to adrenaline? Is it just endlessly, I got to do that. I got to do more. I got to do it again. Yeah, that's a great question. I think they are always trying to find some other way. So, if they can no longer climb, they will drive cars or they'll become trail runners or something. For the most part, people are wired that way where they need something that scares them that they can then overcome. And if it's not climbing, it'll be something else. So, I just want to close our discussion and this has been a fascinating chance to explore what you've been exploring for years. I'm so impressed. We've been talking about adrenaline sports and extreme sports that can be deadly and you've been there. You've talked to people and I just wanted to ask you, what have you learned from the widows? Yeah, that's the toughest part and the interviews that stick with me are the ones talking to the widows and it's the regret. It's the what if. What if I had done something differently? What if they had done something differently? It's the people left behind. So, as much as the headlines are about the people who died, most of these stories are about the people who are left behind and what they're going through. It's the other side of the story that you don't hear very much about. Wow. That gives it a whole other dimension and that makes good journalism. I hope so. John Branch, thanks for being with us and best wishes with your continued sports writing. Thank you so much, Rick. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. 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