781a Potsdam; Emperor of Rome; On the Hippie Trail

It was the opulent playground of Frederick the Great and a hotspot during the Cold War. Come along as we explore Potsdam, a short ride away from Berlin. When they enter Potsdam, they are entering the city of a king. How do they control such a vast territory from Britannia to Palestine? Historian Mary Beard has been looking into the day-to-day lives of the Roman emperors. I'm as curious and fascinated by the stories of luxury and sadism and violence as anybody is. And for the ultimate summer adventure in the 1970s, let's relive what it was like to wing it across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan all the way to the Himalayas. It was a rite of passage we called the Hippie Trail. The end of the Hippie Trail, the ultimate mecca of freaks and hippies and us, catmandu. It's all just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. The elegant palaces and parks of the historic Prussian Kingdom are a quick getaway from Berlin. We'll hear why the city of Potsdam is worth a visit in just a minute. Hi, I'm Rick Steves. Coming up, we'll also visit with Historian Mary Beard. She's been exploring what life was really like for the rulers of the Roman Empire. Plus, I'll take you back to 1978 with me as we explore what it was like to be a fearless college graduate traveling with a high school buddy across Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran on the infamous Hippie Trail to Catmandu. The once royally important, now quaint and pretty town of Potsdam has long been Berlin's holiday retreat. And it's a worthwhile destination for any visitor to Germany's capital. It's about 15 miles southwest of Berlin and it's easy to reach by train. Potsdam offers a mini Prussian history lesson in its ornate palaces and dressed to impress architecture. It's a fun to explore city center and there's some fascinating Cold War sites. It's a small town experience that packs a historical wop. And to take us on a tour of Potsdam, I'm joined right now by Berlin based guide Jim McDonough. Jim landed in Berlin from Minnesota as a college student and never left. I guess that makes him the ultimate student of German history. Jim, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Rick. I love how you American students who love history visit Berlin and end up staying there. Tell us about your story and how you got into Berlin. Right. Well, I studied history as an undergrad and I received a full academic scholarship to go to Berlin for a year to finish my studies. And it was only supposed to be for a year. But then when I was completed, I didn't have anything planned right away at home. I was all graduated. And so I thought, well, what the heck? I'll stay in Berlin for a little bit longer and 19 years later, I'm still there. And of course, a frouline has a little something to do with that as well. There's always a frouline in the story, I guess. Okay. When we're going to Berlin and you're a guide and you're dealing with people all the time going to Berlin, you want to get a break from the big city. Right. And was Potsdam, it was accessible even during the Cold War because it was part of the West? Right. It was entirely in East Germany, but its proximity to the American sector of West Berlin made it more accessible than the other East German cities. Okay. And so people would go to West Berlin as tourists and they would want to know about Potsdam. They'd get their visa, they'd exchange their money and they'd go to Potsdam and see its old royal past. A lot of people do want this break from Berlin and they hear the word Potsdam and it's just a little overwhelming because, well, for one thing, when we sightsee, we're not looking at German sites, we're looking at Prussian sites. And we're looking at Bavarian sites and Franconian sites and this kind of thing because they were all of these different little countries that had their own palaces. And this was part of Prussia, wasn't it, in the Hohenzollern family, ruled Prussia just like the Habsburgs ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire or whatever. So you take the train from downtown Berlin, you go to the town of Potsdam. How's that experience and what do you find in the town of Potsdam? Well, it's very simple to get there. You can either take the S-Bahn rate from downtown Berlin, that's the city train, and it will take you a half hour to get there. You can get there every 10 minutes or you can take the fast regional train and get down there and half the time and that runs every two lines run twice every hour. And once you get there, you are in the old Prussian capital and it's important to understand Potsdam's once place in the world. This was the residence of the House of Hohenzollern, as you said, and they ruled the mighty kingdom of Prussia all the way up until 1918. And you had nine kings who took turns transforming Potsdam into a representative royal city. That is to display grand architecture, build beautiful palaces, and to really remind visitors that when they enter Potsdam, they are entering the city of a king. The greatest of those kings, I think, was Frederick the Great, wasn't he? Without a doubt. Tell us about why he's such a big personality. Well, Frederick the Great's father was the so-called soldier king and he spent his entire 27 years on the throne enhancing the Prussian army, turning it into the aristocracy of Prussian society. And he builds it into an elite fighting force and so in his son, Frederick the Great comes to the throne, he uses dad's army to bring large territorial gains to the kingdom and really turn the kingdom into a European powerhouse. This is the guy who fought off the Austrians, the French, and the Russians all at the same time. And so what he wanted to do was basically have grand symbols, grand palaces that would display Prussia's importance and he did that in Potsdam. And you've got to remember, Prussia was a mighty might. It competed with much bigger countries because its emphasis was on strict militarism, strict duty to the country. All of this, you know, aggressive, we're going to be strong in a very difficult reality. Berlin based tour guide Jim McDonough has taken us to historic Potsdam right now on Travel with Rick Steves. Now when we look at the palaces at Potsdam, it can be a little confusing for the visitor at first, but there's two main palaces, right? There's the Sweet San Suci Palace and then there's the Grand New Palace. Correct. Tell us what we're in for there. What's nice about them as a visitor is that they're both in the same park, Park San Suci. And so you basically go to that park and there's not just these two palaces, there's also these other royal delights. Little gazebos and fountains and places to kiss and so on. Exactly. And the new palace that was built right after the Seven Years War, that's when Frederick the Great fought off the Austrians, the French and the Russians all at the same time. And he built that basically for visitors. So if you could imagine this grand palace and visitors visiting monarchies would go to Potsdam and they would turn up at this beautiful Baroque building just enormous in size. And they would say, wow, we're staying here. Well, where's the king going to stay if we get this place? And so the king then stayed where Frederick the Great, what he built was the San Suci Palace then on the other side of the park. And that was his beloved summer retreat. Okay. And we should make it really clear the new palace is massive. It's like 200 rooms. And San Suci, that would be the king's little elegant retreat. That was just like six or eight rooms, right? Well, it was about a dozen rooms actually. But it was this very modest one story palace and it was also designed in this Baroque style. It's called Frederic and Rococo. So Rococo you're getting. So modest in floor plan, but not modest in decor. Exactly. And there's nothing really too impressive about it about the palace itself. Now it sits atop a hill with beautiful gardens, this Baroque garden. The idea was to emulate the gardens that you'd see at Versailles. But once you go inside, then you start to see Frederick the Great's taste and what he wanted as a residence. Beautifully designed rooms. You can go in today, you book in advance online. And it takes about 45 minutes to go through with the audio guide and it is just a wonderful, wonderful treat. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking about Potsdam, which is the most elegant royal retreat Versailles kind of palace experience that you can have as a quick side trip from Berlin. It's just 15 miles away and the trains are leaving every few minutes. Our guide is Jim McDonough. So Jim, we have all of this amazing, Hoennsoleran stuff, the royal family of the Prussian Empire. But we also have some World War II history and some communism history out at Potsdam also. Why after World War II did Potsdam get into the history books? Potsdam was put on the world stage in the summer of 1945. And that is when the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, the leaders, the so-called Big Three, came together and met at Potsdam for 17 days to talk about the fate of post World War II Europe and to really make decisions as to how to deal with the defeat of Germany. Wow. And you can actually visit and see the room where they sat and they reconstruct the excitement of that time. Exactly. The idea was to hold the conference in Berlin, but Berlin was so horribly damaged that Potsdam offered an alternative. And it was the Cecilienhof Palace, the last palace that was built by the royal family. And the big great room there was used for the conference where 13 plenary sections took place. They have the big oak table that they brought in from Russia, especially for the conference itself. And you go in there today and it is all set up. It all looks exactly how it looked back in the summer of 1945. So who again were the great leaders at the table? The great leaders at the time were Winston Churchill of Great Britain. He had Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and he had President Truman then who met and represented the United States. Churchill, Stalin and Truman. 17 days. 17 days. Holy cow. And we can go there and it's quite a fascinating historic thing. Of course, that was in the immediate aftermath of World War II and they were figuring out how they divvy up the spoils, I guess, and what do they do with their victory. And of course, a good part of Europe became a satellite zone of Russia ruled essentially from Moscow. And in order to do that, they had to have a good, strong secret police. Absolutely. And you had to keep people down by having a good prison. You did. So I wonder, was there a KGB prison nearby? There certainly was. And that was all, Potsdam fell in the Soviet zone of occupation that then became communist East Germany. And so the Soviet zone of occupation, the KGB had their own prison, just a stone's throw from the Cecilienhoff Palace. And so political dissidents, anybody that they felt they needed to keep an eye on who could have been a threat would have been in turn there at the prison. So it's just a short walk from the Cecilienhoff Palace where the big convention was. You find this KGB memorial prison and what I remember is you're walking through, you've got to remember this is not old architecture. This is like a mid-20th century neighborhood and you're walking down a nice residential street. It looks like ambassadors' houses or something around. And one of these houses, you go through the hedge and suddenly you're in a Russian KGB prison. And the building itself really sticks out like a sore thumb. You certainly know which building it is when you come up onto it. And yeah, they have the prison cells that are still intact. You get to go through, you read about the biographies of the people that were there. It was a horrible, horrible place where torture went on. But today it's part of that national identity of Germany, of confronting its past. It's now a documentation center. We learn about this history today. This is a beautiful, inspirational, admirable thing about Germany considering its hard history are these documentation centers. Dealing with concentration camps and prisons and all of this dark recent past of theirs. And it's a powerful site. And of course, when you have all of this intrigue going on with the KGB and everything, you've got espionage. If you're a good movie producer like Steven Spielberg, you know, you can maybe cash in on the whole romance of that or the whole excitement of that, the drama of that and make a movie 10 years ago called The Bridge of Spies. That's right. Yes. That was where the famous spy swaps took place then back during the Cold War. It was the bridge that was the only place in the opening of the wall where the Soviets basically controlled their side. East German guards were everywhere else. And so it was so remote, it was off limits to the public. And so when those spy swaps took place, that was the hotspot where that happened. And Jim, I was so caught up in the excitement of that. I was on that bridge with my local guide envisioning it. And then all of a sudden my attention was stolen by a raft that was going under the bridge and it was a party raft. They were looking like they were having so much fun. What was I seeing there with that raft? Well, it's be the equivalent of what we would call, I guess, a pontoon boat. And you can rent these. They come with a grill. They come with a little refrigerator where you can keep drinks in and you basically go through the Havel River and to the lakes. And you have to remember that the Royal Family was so interested in making this their residence. A lot of that due to the recreational opportunities, especially during the summer months. And now all these years later we get to enjoy those same attractions that initially drew them to Potsdam. What a great way to round out a visit to Potsdam. Jim McDonough, thanks so much for clarifying for me and for all of our listeners how Potsdam can be a wonderful day trip from Berlin. Thanks a lot. My pleasure, Rick. To Potsdam, under the Eichen. Have you thought about the Roman Empire lately? Distinguished history expert, Mary Beart, takes us into the everyday life of a Roman Emperor next. And in just a bit, we'll relive the dusty hippie trail to Kathmandu of the 1970s. It's travel with Rick Steves. How on earth, 2,000 years ago, did the Roman Emperor effectively rule a vast empire of 50 million people that stretched from Britannia to Palestine and beyond? And who were those emperors? How did they live? How did they rule? That's the question Dame Mary Beart set out to answer in her latest book, Emperor of Rome. After more than 30 years teaching and writing about ancient Rome, she's Britain's best known classicist. Her best seller, SPQR, told the sweeping 1,000-year story of ancient Rome, and now she brings us the story of the Emperor. Mary Beart joins us now to strip away the myths and stereotypes to show us the figure of the Emperor as complex, constrained, and human. Dame Mary Beart, thanks for being here. It's great to be with you, Rick. Thank you. And I've never said Dame anybody, and I just want to ask you, is that how you're supposed to be addressed when you're a British Dame? It is, but I would prefer just plain Mary. Just plain Mary. Well, good. But I'm glad I started out with the formal Dame. What does that mean, actually, Dame Mary? Well, it's the female equivalent of Sir. People are more familiar with Sir. Well, Dame is what you get if you're a woman. Okay, so Sir Paul McCartney and Dame Mary Beart. Well, congratulations on that, and it's nice to have you. Now, when we think of Roman emperors, to be honest, it's the Hollywood thumbs up, thumbs down, fiddle while Rome burns, lunatic emperors, right? Did that inspire you to write this book and either celebrate that or straighten it out? Yeah, in part it did, and I've just been watching Gladiator 2, and it kind of put iron in my soul over that, I think, because I'm as curious and fascinated by the stories of luxury and sadism and violence as anybody is, right? You do that so English, luxury, sadism and violence. That's right. Very English lady way of saying it. I also want to say, look, can we all pick some of those stories, just a little bit, and get to the bottom of how emperors ruled, how they lived, what they did all day. I mean, what's the job description of a Roman emperor? That is luxurious and sadistic. That's absolutely true. But I have to say an awful lot of it is a lot more low-key, boring and hard work, you know? You know, it's interesting if you look at... Every time I watch a Gladiator movie, I think, now, wait a minute, somebody's got to run this place. It's amazingly impressive that they would run an empire before there was telephones. Yeah, well, you know, you've hit the nail on the head there, Rick, because if these guys, and they are all guys and no female rulers at all, if they were the kind of psychopaths that they're written out to be, then it makes no sense that the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did. So, in some senses, I think, we, looking in from the outside, both on today's dictators and on dictators in the past, we have partly exaggerated that luxury to just to try to work out what these guys were doing. But if you say there is an empire there to be run, I'm afraid an awful lot of what the emperors do is what we would call paperwork. And they're very busy. And somebody like Julius Caesar, who's the kind of the first proto-emperor, even if not an emperor, he gets terribly told off by the public because he takes his letters and his correspondence into the shows and the chariot races because he can't afford to get behind. The public hate this because they think that he's neglecting their pleasures. So, he's supposed to be this party master, and actually he's got some work to do but during intermission or during half time. Yeah, I mean, I kind of think it's a bit like what would happen in the UK if somebody like Prince William went to a football final, you know, and was caught on his mobile phone doing his email, you know? Right, yeah. Our special guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves is Mary Beard as we explore what it really took to rule the Roman Empire. Emperor of Rome is the title of her most recent book. Mary's been teaching and writing about ancient Rome for more than 30 years as a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. She's well known in Britain for about two dozen books and many TV and radio documentaries. We provide a link to Mary's work at the Times Literary Supplement. You'll find it with this week's show at ricksteves.com. Now, I've got a sense of how you ruled in the Middle Ages. My sense in the Middle Ages of Europe, a king to be effective had to be on the road a lot just to assert his authority, and it was a matter of delegating. I mean, he couldn't physically rule, so he would delegate control of the land to a lord below him who would then do the same thing to smaller lords. Was there a similar kind of reality of rule 2,000 years ago? That's pretty much the structure of Roman rule, that they rule the empire essentially by a kind of set of collaborations. The Romans collaborate with the local bigwigs in the province who raise the taxes for them and collaborate with the next level down, and everybody is bound up in the system. And I think that's really important. Now, the problem about the Roman Empire is it's so vast. It's one thing getting around the Kingdom of England in the 15th century is quite another, getting around the Roman Empire in the second century. England would have been a small province of this vast Roman Empire. It really was the entire Western world. So what they do, I mean, they do travel, and they put quite a lot of store on the emperor being seen somewhere else. But what the Romans really invent is the idea of mass propaganda. So the emperor can't be everywhere, but his statue can be everywhere, his image can be everywhere, and he's getting everywhere on the coinage. In Europe, we tend to think that the idea that the ruler's head is on the coin is just self-evident, really. It was really Julius Caesar and the Roman emperors who kind of saw that one of the ways of getting the Roman emperor's image everywhere was to stamp it on the coins. You know, that's brilliant. Every time you buy something, you dig into your little pouch and you pull out and you're reminded that, hey, this is the emperor's money. Mary Beard is giving us a look into what's been discovered about the everyday lives of the rulers of the Roman Empire right now on Travel with Rick Steves. Her book, Emperor of Rome, delves into what it took to rule such a vast empire. Her 2015 bestseller, SPQR, chronicles a thousand years of life in ancient Rome. Her newest title is due to be released in May. It's called Talking Classics, The Shock of the Old, and points to the surprising influences of antiquity on life today. Mary, what I really appreciate about your book, Emperor of Rome, is the design. Rather than the predictable chronological coverage of Rome, you designed the book thematically. And, you know, all of us in high school who took an ancient history class probably had to memorize all of the emperors in a row. Who cares, you know? What you've done is kind of make it more generic, right? That's absolutely right. I mean, you know, I get really bored. Even I get bored with the idea of going through one damn emperor after the next, you know? There's Augustus, and he's followed by the nasty Tiberius, and then there's the mad Caligula. And what that conceals from us is that actually most emperors were much more similar than they were different. You know, we big up their different personalities. But essentially, they're doing the same job from the same place with the same staff. So why not try looking at them together, I thought? And it kind of releases you from having to go through every little bit of insignificant conspiracy or warfare. And get to what's really important, I think, which is how did emperors rule? How did they eat? You know, what was it like to visit the palace? And what I'm hoping to do is to give people a sense of what it was like to live under any Roman emperor. How did you think about the person who was ruling you? What did he really get up to? And how do you understand all those mad stories about the luxury inside the palace, the fantastic dinner parties? Did those really happen? Yeah, but what we know what was really happening was the empire was ruled. And it was ruled in the standards of those days really, really well. Now, apart from the technology available and everything, the rudiments of running a government and a state, there's a lot of similarities. But one major difference is killing as a way of solving problems. And you write about that. And I've picked up somewhere that during like a 50 year period, there were 18 assassinations of emperors during the fall of Rome. Is that about right? Yeah. I mean, one of the problems that the Romans never solved, they were good at solving problems, but they never solved how you transmitted power. You know, there's no election for being emperor. How does the next emperor succeed the one that comes before him? Yeah. There's no mechanism for that. But this is primogenitor, the oldest son would take over the throne. It's not as simple as that. I mean, we're used in medieval European monarchies. We're used to it being the eldest son takes over. And there is a certain simplicity about that. It means that everybody knows he's going to be the next king. The problem about it is that he might be hopelessly unseatable. Now, Romans never had a system of primogeniture. It helped to be the eldest son of the previous emperor, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't sufficient. And what they gained was a sense that you could choose from a much wider pool of people who might become emperor and who might be better at it and might be a better choice. Now, what they lost is that there was one hell of a fight about who was going to succeed almost every time. Because you wrote that the corridors of power were always blood spanned. I love that line. They are. I have to say that most corridors in Rome were pretty blood spanned. But you also talked about they could game the system by adopting the most capable successor as the son. And then when that emperor was gone, his adopted son would take over. And then you've got that primogeniture clarity. Exactly. And we still, I think, have a vision of son succeeding father, which is not right, not technically right, the Rome. And through the second century AD, for example, almost every emperor, almost every emperor was the adopted son of the previous one. That would make sense. And there's how you get that whole string of quality emperors during the Pax Romana, the first two centuries after Christ. That is what's always said. That's what's always said. See, that's the problem. And as a tour guide, I always hear what's always said. Mary Beard is an expert on classical Rome and teaches at Cambridge. She's taking us deeper into the Roman Empire right now on travel with Rick Steves. Her book is called Emperor of Rome. Mary, I understand that you created a series of lectures on laughter in ancient Rome. And I just laughed her in ancient Rome in the imperial court. It's just, was it always mean spirited laughter as somebody is being brutalized or was it just good natured? I think quite a lot of it was mean spirited, but I think quite a lot of laughter always is mean spirited, actually. I'm not sure that the Romans were meaner, but I do think that there is something in the idea of humor and jokes that we overlook when we think about power. I mean, they're human beings and some of their reactions are brilliantly similar. So there's a marvellous story at the end of the second century AD of a senator who's a historian who goes to the Roman Colosseum and he comes face to face with Commodus, who was the antihero of Gladiator I. And Commodus apparently goes wild and first of all shoots an ostrich, cuts the ostrich's head off and goes up to the senators on the front row and jangles the ostrich's head in front of the senators and waves his sword as if to say, watch it guys, you know. Man, oh man. But what the senator says, called Dio, says, and it just really captures for me that kind of double edgedness of the Roman Empire. Dio says, do you know what I really wanted to do? I nearly giggled. I was so, I was terrified, but I just couldn't stop laughing. But I thought, if I laugh, I'm for the chop. And so I plucked a leaf out of my laurel wreath on my head. I put it into my mouth and I bit on it really hard in order to stop myself laughing. And I told the guy sitting next to me to do the same, you know, bite hard. And I thought, I remember doing that in primary school, you know, what kid has not bitten on their ruler in order to stop themselves laughing at the teacher. And here's Dio doing exactly the same, you know, centuries ago in front of the Roman Emperor. You wrote about how after so much study of ancient Roman the emperors, you gained a new appreciation of autocracy and ancient autocracy and also how it's opened your eyes to the politics of our modern world. How so? When I finished, you know, my publishers quite rightly said, so what's the message? What's the take home for us here? And I think that I'd used to think that these autocrats, they stayed in power because they were violent and vicious and they ruled by the salt. No, they do. The corridors of power are plug-stained in ancient Rome. That's true. But that is not what keeps the Roman Empress in power most of all. It's the fact that people go along with them, that the senators do their business, they want to collaborate. They are doing the emperor's business for him. Because they're power hungry and they just want to be close to power? Partly because they're power hungry, partly, I think, that throughout history people have collaborated with dictators. I mean, we always like to think of ourselves as the people who would stand up and be counted and say, you know, I'm not going along with this, you know, this is monstrous. You know, we'd like to think that that was what we did. So a dictator with no collaborators is just a raving nut job on the street. That's right. Dictators exist and continue because they've got collaborators. And if we want to stop them, I'm afraid we have to stand up and be counted. And that's the message for me from the Roman Empire. Mary Beard, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for writing Emperor of Rome. And just a very last thought, because I'm always fascinated by how a little historical artifact can give you that little avenue into appreciating the humanity of what you're looking at. I'm thinking of a delicate exquisite hair net made of gold in the National Museum of Rome, or exquisite wax portraits of people who have died on a coffin lid. That let me know these are real people. What is something that you have seen in your studies in person that inspired you? Yeah, I mean, I think it's the ordinary people that are the wow factor for me really more than the big guys, actually. And the gobsmacking moment when I was writing this book was going to the Imperial Palace in Rome. And it's now pretty much a mess. It's very hard to make out. But I was taken to one room that is currently not open to the public, but is going to be, they promised, and is part of the slave quarters. And on the wall, it was covered with graffiti written by the enslaved servants. And some of it was smutty, like Roman graffiti often is. It was pretty filthy. But it was also very poignant. And I remember seeing just a little name of a guy scratched on the wall. And then it said, I came from Haerson in what is now Ukraine. And so what you see is you've got these a really multinational, multicultural set of people enslaved. You know, there's a guy, we know nothing more about him, except we know that he still thought about where his home was. I came from Haerson. That's moving. It is touching. And that should be our goal in our sightseeing as we bring the rubble of Rome to life. Dame Mary Beard, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for writing Emperor of Rome and best wishes with your teaching and your work. Thanks very much, Rick. Mary tells us how Emperor Claudius showed the sense of humor that an emperor was expected to have. It's in an extra to today's interview. You can listen in at ricksteves.com. Up next, we get up close and personal, as I take you back with me to 1978. A just graduated history major teams up again with the high school buddy he shared his first non-parental adventures with Bumming Around Europe. This time, we take on the great unknown of the legendary hippie trail all the way to Kathmandu. Oh baby, it's travel with Rick Steves. In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied hippie trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. As a 23-year-old, I made the trek and like a travel writer in training, I documented it in my journal. Leaping off a moving train in Yugoslavia, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for my first time in Harat, battling leeches in Pokhara, making the scene on Freak Street in Kathmandu. It's all in my 60,000 word journal, which is now my newest book. To celebrate the release of On the Hippie Trail, I'm joined by my travel partner on that trip, Gene Openshah, to reminisce about that epic adventure. And you're invited to stow away with us now as we spin a few yarns from what was absolutely my trip of a lifetime. Gene, thanks for joining us. Namaste. Namaste. Hi. Yes, you know, we traveled together in 1973, did a typical European whirlwind tour. And then when we graduated from college, we teamed up again in 1978 and did what really was the ultimate trip on this planet for kids just getting out of school, the Hippie Trail. Looking back on that, it really was a special trip at a special time for two young guys, wasn't it? Yeah, it sure caught us at a kind of watershed point in our lives. We just graduated from college, 22 and 23, and we're not looking forward to launching into the conventional corporate path. And we were looking around for what to do and some kind of adventure, you know, and it was also the spirit of the times. Remember, this is 1978. There's still that idea of you want to find yourself and the road less traveled. And I think we got caught up in the spirit of that and what fit the bill for that, the Hippie Trail. You know, now I travel because I know things and I want to see them. I think on this trip, I just wanted to go behind the dark side of the moon. I wanted to be away. India was like the edge of the world. You know, there'd be dragons. And I think that was part of the allure for us. And for younger people, it's hard to imagine a world with no safety net, no internet. You can't withdraw money. You've got it all in your money belt. You've got no guidebooks. You've got no way to connect with your loved ones back home. Kind of scary. Boy, I think you just put your finger on it that you just, you don't have like today, you don't have that connection to your familiar world. You're out there on your own. Wow. And so I don't know what got into me. You must have thought I was kind of boring because every night, apparently I wrote in this journal just fiendishly interested in documenting it. But this was years before I was a travel teacher. I was a piano teacher at the time, but I had this journal and then during the pandemic, I kind of just discovered it. It was vivid. And you and I both worked on this book, editing it. And I'm just so thankful that you're my editor anyways in so many of my writing projects, but you happen to have been my travel partner on this trip. What was it like for you to read that journal 40 years later? Yeah. It was like encountering your 22 year old self again. He just sort of walked in the door and it's you and me and this couple of guys that I kind of forgot even existed. And then here they were. You know what really struck me as I read your journal? It was our bravado. You're writing about this stuff, you're journaling and it's really good. And you're just describing what we do in a very matter of fact way. And I'm looking at it going, yeah, but it was wow. Wow. I've never thought about that bravado. I mean, I don't usually think of me and bravado in the same sentence. Or foolishness, whatever it is. Yeah, it was bravado, baby. I got to admit, if I was my parent, I'd be nervous about what we were about to do. Oh, absolutely. We were clueless. We had no money. We were not reckless, but we were also saying yes to serendipity. Yes. But we didn't know what we were getting into. That's the thing. We got into harrier situations than we expected. And I remember every time we got 100 miles farther away from the Greek Isles, I kept thinking we could still turn around and have a vacation. And we had a huddle because it got scarier and deeper and we decided to keep on pushing. I remember that moment when we were talking about turning around. We were in Tehran, if I remember. And that's like almost halfway to India. And we went, do we cut bait and run or do we keep foraging ahead? And I remember, in fact, the exact moment. We were totally tapped out from just getting as far as Tehran. And we're on this street corner in Tehran. It's 95 degrees. And we're lost. We pull out a map. And then suddenly we hear this guy go, hey, can I help you? That was Abe. Remember, we ran into this Iranian who took us in, fed us, let us stay in his apartment for a couple days. And I think that was the moment we kind of went, yes, we can do this. We can carry on. We were in Squalor after a three-day bus ride in Tehran, hanging out with grease monkeys and hippies, barefoot people whose feet were like hoofs. We were learning that on this hippie trail, there was two kinds of travelers, those who know they have worms and those who don't know they have worms. You were sick at the time. And we met Abe. And it was just that nice oasis that we needed on this long journey. You know, as I think about the trip, there's kind of like three chapters of it. We go from Istanbul. We cross the deserts of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. And that was kind of this rough stretch. And then we continue on to the sort of Shangri-La of India with all that intensity. And then we finish the trip at the end of the hippie trail, the ultimate mecca of freaks and hippies and us, Kathmandu. Oh man, this is Travel with Rick Steves. I'm joined by my buddy Gene Open Shop. And we're sharing memories from our epic hippie trail trip from Istanbul to Kathmandu back in 1978. Gene was 22 and I was 23. And we had no money, but we had lots of what Gene just called bravado. Gene Open Shop is a travel writer. He's a composer, a humorist, a philosopher. His latest book is Michelangelo at midlife. For more on Gene's work, you can go to his website, geneopenshop.com. Gene's been a collaborator with me for writing projects for decades. And along with many books that we've co-authored over the years, Gene edited my newest book, which is what we're talking about today, On the Hippie Trail. So Gene, you were talking about the arch of the trip. It was a long way to get from Istanbul to Kathmandu. And there was no guidebooks. And you and I are both into guidebooks. What are your memories of traveling without information? Oh boy, yeah. There really wasn't. It was kind of like a 3,500 mile, like you called it, the dark side of the moon, sort of radio silence. And we didn't know. There was that one guidebook, the bit guide, but it was a staple bound, mimeograph thing. And most of the information that we got was from our fellow travelers. You know, they might call it today, you know, crowdsourcing or something. Crowdsourcing. But our crowd was the international gang of backpackers on a bus for 42 hours across Turkey. And I would like a little beggar go up and down the aisle. Yeah. It was that, you know, the code of the road when someone would know something, you owed it to your fellow traveler to pass that information along. And that's what the bit guide was. As you mentioned, a staple bound collection of these loose communicates from the road, which also included to just sort of goose the adventure dimension of this. People who were busted at borders and were in prison and what they needed for their own comfort and health. This person's doing time in Afghanistan because he tried to do this at the border between Iran and Afghanistan and he needs blankets. It would actually say that. Talking about borders, you remember getting to the border of Afghanistan. You know, my memory of that border is a dull needle stuck in my arm because they decided just arbitrarily that I needed a vaccination that I didn't have on my card. And my memory was the way that needle bent when they tried to put it into your arm. And then we got on a bus finally and headed for Harat, which was just a delight. Let me read a little bit about Harat, the first stop in Afghanistan. This is just from the book and I'd like to stoke your memory of that. We took a nighttime walk. Mingling was a bit intensified. I didn't know if it was because of the hashish or because I was in a very good mood, but I was tickled by little things like a man weighing tomatoes. Hustlers became playful. The sun had gone down. The lanterns came on. Chariots with torches charged through the darkness. Harat is small, but it really doesn't matter because no street is ever the same if you walk through it a second or a third time. I just love Harat. Oh yeah, that's kind of where the trip sort of began after that long stretch from Istanbul through Iran. Maybe that's also because that's where we first smoked hashish, but... Where I first smoked it. You were the experienced pot smoker. Well, relatively speaking. Yeah, I wasn't exactly Snoop Dogg, but yeah, I was kind of more or less. And I had decided I only want to smoke where I feel comfortable and there's no peer pressure and it just felt so normal in Afghanistan. So I said, Jean, take me there. But then we would walk, whether you're smoking pot or not, you would just walk in a different direction. And every five or six meters or yards, there'd be another shop, another artisan. And we didn't need a guidebook. We'd just walk and immerse ourselves in that culture. Yeah, it was almost like in a movie or something and you'd look at one thing and then you'd take five or ten steps and suddenly you're in a different scene. Or like these major like settings that the incense or the smoke is coming out and... And with the lantern light, it was like a Rembrandt painting. The light sources were just vivid. Yes, and we were getting these little glimpses into Afghani life and it was very wonderful. And I remember it was curious for us, how do we properly wave to somebody or greet somebody? What is the physical thing? And we tried different things and we came up with in Herat, you kiss your hand and then you bring your hand to your heart. And that's how we would greet people and that resonated with people. It did work and I'm glad that we came across that because bridging that cultural divide was very difficult. We didn't understand it and we were about as culturally sensitive as people would be in those days. Nowadays we take globalism so much for granted. Everybody knows different cultures and accepts them, but we grew up in a time when that was just not as common. We were trying very hard to bridge that divide between us Westerners and the people around us. My longtime travel buddy Gene Opencha is with us today on Travel with Rick Steves to help us relive the epic travel adventure we shared just out of college in 1978. The one that helped us fall in love with the world. Gene helped edit my journal and we turned it into a fun memoir called On the Hippie Trail, Istanbul the Catmandu and the making of a travel writer. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller and it's now being re-released in paperback. Gene, we went finally from Afghanistan over Khyber Pass and I remember it was like a cultural and an environmental continental divide. We left the Muslim world and we entered the Hindu world. We left the vast Arab expanses and we entered the Indian subcontinent which is so lush and it was monsoon time. We never saw the mountains but we saw lots of monsoon and it was a beautiful, vibrant, luscious sort of life. I remember crossing the border of India thinking, I'm coming home. It was the weirdest. Do you remember the border of India? I definitely do. What were your feelings as we crossed into India? Well, it was a lot of work to get there and it was finally a sense of just accomplishment. When you enter into Pakistan and India, you're also entering into a little more familiar territory because there is that British infrastructure. People spoke English more commonly and they were used to Western travelers. I did feel like when you say we were kind of coming home. Yeah, it was and we were ready for a break so we turned left and went up to Kashmir. Yes. In Kashmir is this mountainous land, Hindu part Muslim. It's today conflicted so I don't think there's much tourism there. But it was a dream land and even in British times the elites, whether they were Indian people or English people, they would go up to Kashmir to get away from the heat. And there's a lake there and to this day it's got the same houseboats that housed the British big shots a century ago. And from the journal I wrote, we closed the deal on our houseboat on Lake Dhal, checked in and within minutes we're lounging on our sun deck. The houseboy stopped by to tell us that the hot water was prepared and we could shower before our duck dinner would be served. We were like rags to riches. Yeah, we'd spent all these weeks living on mutton and lambs, eyeballs and... Tough buff we called it. Tough water buffalo. Water buffalo and you couldn't swallow it but you'd chew all the nutritional value out of it and you'd spit out the gristle. Yeah, it was finally getting the payoff for all of our hard travel. And you could sit up there and the world would come to you on this floating commerce and we'd have a family that was at our beck and call. And I remember you and I come from a more of an egalitarian world and we weren't comfortable with our own servants. And it is more of a norm in India than what we were comfortable with. Yeah, I did find that part of it uncomfortable. You know, yeah, we were traveling and you saw abject poverty all the time and it was really horrible. And then you saw that big divide between the rich and the poor. Remember when we were staying in Jaipur in India and we were staying in a Maharaja's palace? Oh yeah. We were in this lap of luxury, just paying like, I don't know, $2 a night or something to stay in this Maharaja's palace that was now a hotel. And you know, we'd be at breakfast eating at this long table, just the two of us. And servants are hovering over us just waiting to pour milk into our corn flakes and you'd think, oh, this is great. But it was really awful because like you say, we were from a very egalitarian mindset. We were almost rude. We almost said, get out of here. But it was totally inappropriate for us to do that. Yeah. And then the finale of the trip, the emerald city of the hippie trail is Kathmandu. And I'll never forget the square. Here's a bit how I wrote about it. This is a tangled, medieval-ish world of tall, terraced temples decorated with erotic art. Fruit and vegetable stands, thin, wild and hungry people praying, going through rituals, children oblivious to it all, playing tag among the frozen Buddhas, rickshaws dodged bread carts, holy men were holy, beggars begged, hawkers hawked, and dwarfs and hunchbacks did their thing. I wasn't very politically correct back as a 23-year-old. But Kathmandu met my expectations. What was your memory of Kathmandu? My biggest memory was Pai and Chai. Oh, yeah. Because it was like our last night there. It was a little restaurant that catered to Westerners on the hippie trail that served fresh apple pie. And you're surrounded by fellow travelers. They're playing like the Stones and Dylan on the stereo system. And you just look around and I'm going surrounded by that's, I swear that's John Lennon scribbling in that notebook over there. I swear that's Cardinal Rishi Lu playing chess. And it gave us a chance to reflect on our trip and say, we did it. 3,500 miles, all the things that we'd endured and we finally reached the end of the hippie trail. We are in hippie nirvana and we experienced the ups and the downs of travel, that kind of cocktail of good and bad and happy and sad that's what we would call life itself. For me, it was becoming friends with the world and realizing you can give sparkle to your life by reaching out and getting out of your comfort zone. And you know, young people ask me now because a lot of people say, oh, I wish I could have done that, but you can't do the hippie trail anymore. I think you can do that now, but you can't go on the exact road we went on. But I get to talk to young people who have had this kind of experience just last year and they had the same approach to travel that we had. They just found a different trail. I think what you said about getting out of their comfort zone, that's what travel is. Yes, the geography of the world is better known today and these countries are better known, but the essence of travel in some ways is that you have to find out a way to navigate something that's uncomfortable and unusual and learning how to look at the world around you that's strange to you but embrace it. In other words, you can't be so risk averse that you're in this guarded hotel where nothing can go wrong. You go overland, you get your fingers dirty in the culture and people can do that in their travels and then they take home the most beautiful souvenir and that's just an appreciation that this world is a delightful place to get to know. That's the feeling that I had when we sat there at Pai and Chai. We'd experienced friends that had helped us, the wonders of the Taj Mahal and Kashmir, and we experienced the bad stuff, dysentery, boredom, long bus rides, hunger, difficulty even getting food in our stomachs. Needles bending as they go into your arm by some doctor that wants to make sure you got every stamp in your yellow international certificate of vaccination. But Jean, there's some fresh apple pie just coming out of the oven and look at the Himalayas around us. Amen. Jean, thanks so much for sharing that adventure with me, for helping me on this book and joining us today. Thank you, brother. You'll find a list of where and when at ricksteves.com. Look for you again next week with more travel with Rick Steves. Dang good one. Find them at your favorite bookseller and at ricksteves.com.