On the Hippie Trail Through Afghanistan and India, 1978

[Music] good evening everyone and welcome to monday night travels with rick steves europe i'm lisa friend and i'm delighted to be your moderator this evening as we caravan along the hippie trail with rick and his special guest so please put your travel dreams in the upright and locked position as i have the pleasure to introduce to you our tour guide for the evening rick steves hey rick lisa thank you so much for that nice introduction and i've got my swiss army knife and i'm making a bread and cheese and meat sandwich and this is what we would eat back in the old days when you could take a swiss army knife onto an airplane and nobody cared i've got my meat and bread and cheese i've got my melon cut up and put on a metal tray because that's how we got it in turkey back in the 70s i've got my pistachios and i've got lots of memories to share this is monday night travel it's so great to get together as you know this is where we meet we travelers rendezvous right here every monday night because we love to enthuse about travel dream about where we can go in the future and remember where we've been in the past and today we've got a special show we're thinking about what was for me the trip of a lifetime 1978 traveling from istanbul to kathmandu thank you so much for joining us i want to set this up right now and then i want to remind you we've got q a time afterwards we've got a lot of travel coming up and we've got a special guest that's joining us in just a minute but right now i just want to kind of let you know where we're going to travel this is the route the hippie trail from istanbul all the way to kathmandu and uh we're gonna go on this right now just like gene and i did back when we just got out of college and you can see from istanbul you get on that bus and you cross turkey then you go into iran to tehran and you keep heading east crossing the border into afghanistan the great city of eastern of western afghanistan herat over to kabul and then over the fabled khyber pass through pakistan to amritsar the capital of the sikh country and that's the punjab and a little side trip from there up into kashmir and then back to amritsar down to delhi beautiful ganges river valley and then finishing in nepal we'll go to the western part of nepal pokhara and then we'll go to kathmandu before calling it a trip and you know when we're thinking about this trip you don't want to do it alone that's for sure and i was very thankful to have my good friend jean openshaw join us and you know gene is the sort of the classic good friend from high school and gina and i just had so many travel dreams uh as soon as we got out of high school gene and i took the uh you know the best eurorail trip around europe and that was my first trip away from mom and dad and that's before we knew the beauty of packing light look how big those backpacks were gina and i slumbed around europe in 1973. uh gene eventually became part of our staff and here's uh you know rick steves europe now has a hundred employees but this is back when we had seven or eight employees and jean is on the far right there and jean was my partner in writing guidebooks right from the start whenever we do a book that is really important with history and culture and art i'm very thankful to have jean on board for many years gene was one of our lead tour guides and he the spirit of gene openshaw is still fundamental in our passion for history art and culture when we take our bus tours around europe gene could take anybody into a great museum in europe and inspire them turn them on and make the art fun and meaningful gene and i wrote a book called europe 101 history and art and culture for the traveler and uh we we wrote it in several editions it's still available and this is a book that i just have always treasured and so thankful to share the work with gene uh we wrote a sister book to that book called mona winks and mona winx was really um it was a uh it was a sort of a collection of self-guided tours to europe's 20 most exhausting and frightening cultural obligations and the book was a fun book to write but it really was dated after a while and we ended up doing an electronic version of it and that's our app to this day we have an app called rick steve's audio europe and it is the ghost of mona winks still surviving gene has produced and spearheaded the production of 60 tours inspired by the work we did for that mona winks book and today tens of thousands of people every year use this app in order to have us in their ear as they enjoy the art and the culture of europe jean's still working with us and when i have an art project i love to have jean as my partner in fact during covid the last book that i wrote i was co-authored with jean and gene basically uh spearheaded this and we gene and i decided what are our hundred favorite masterpieces of european art and uh this book is book that we're very very proud to have out right now for people who love art and couldn't have done it without gene openshot so jean and i got together immediately after graduation from college and we did this trip and right now i would like to welcome jean to the monday night stage and gene thanks for joining us well thanks for having me i am so excited to see these slides it it is uh i haven't seen some of these pictures in 40 years this is going to be a treat for me literally i know what you mean and you know 40 years ago people didn't have that many photographs i mean we had to carry the canisters i remember there was 36 shots on a canister we're packing light you get 10 canisters that's 360 shots so you parsed it out and uh and the quality of some of these photos will probably attest to that that's right so we're in istanbul gene and uh i kind of set it up as a trip but when you think about where we were at emotionally and and uh you know psychologically and whatever for this trip this was quite quite an adventure for a couple of kids just out of college yeah it was a trip um i know i approached it kind of you know they they call this the hippie trail and it really was carrying on that legacy of people who'd questioned western values and then went off somewhere looking for something else and personally i saw this as something of a i don't know a journey of discovery and and it was the eastern lands that had the allure back then the beatles going to see the maharishi and and drugs and opening the doors of perception and supposedly you could find that somewhere on the hippie trail and we did it and we had ventured off and we we are so used to we just take the internet for granted we take you know um electronic banking we take uh communication for granted but back then we had a money belt with travelers checks and we had no way of connecting with loved ones we were setting off into a hemisphere where nobody knew if we were dead or alive i mean it was an amazing uh it was heading out sort of a way and we didn't know where the end was we we thought the end was india and then we thought we'd get a one-way ticket back to europe and fly home but we didn't really know yeah it's with that that technology you mentioned is kind of a a security blanket in a way because it gives you the the information that you need and it always keeps you in touch with the world the familiar world you can always just boom and you're back talking to your family or or you know this shared reality that we have in our phones that would that that can reassure you you and i going off on this um we were kind of going on the dirt to the dark side of the moon i was almost going to use that metaphor the dark side of the moon and i remember in those days you would go to the american embassy just to sit in the lobby and look at magazines and hear somebody speaking english yeah yeah and that was it the american embassy was it and it was air-conditioned and you could get a time magazine or a newsweek and you could page through and go oh my goodness and otherwise you'd go back out and we would go in india we would either go to the embassy or we would go to a a movie theater just to get out of the intensity i remember a movie theater was two hours of american culture because you could just be lost in that movie and then you step back out and the heat hits you the intensity hits you the animals in the street hit you dodging the ox carts and it was back into the fray so let's get into the free right now gene thanks for joining us and we're gonna go to the hippie trail from istanbul to kathmandu you know we bought this map i remember we must have bought it in istanbul and when we spread it out we'd it was a ritual we would open it out it was like a big accordion and it would stretch as far as two seats on the bus and we'd been on this bus for 24 hours and we'd look how far we've gone and we go oh my goodness it was a long way and it was totally overland and uh it was just something excuse me could you show that map again could you backtrack again what at the top of the map what are those two things there that's that's toilet paper isn't it toilet paper and a bottle of pills i think that's kind of foreshadowing for this the kind of trip we're getting into toilet paper and a bottle of pills hang on to your passports here we go and this was uh you know this was uh dave herline one of the the seven people in that photograph i just showed you one of our very first employees he makes all our maps just this morning we asked dave to put this map together for us and he did a great job but here you can see where we're going to head out and uh so we are um we're in in uh istanbul istanbul is just an exciting springboard this is where asia meets europe this is uh you know uh the the leading city of europe for centuries and it is the springboard for venturing further east and while we're our first mission was to find a bus company that could take us on the first leg of our trip from istanbul to tehran so we found this bus company and uh well first of all we would get the information from the pudding shop and this is a good example of the different kind of information was available back then compared to today yeah it was uh you couldn't yeah there was no internet so the main information in fact there were no really there really wasn't even a guidebook card there was this thing called the bit guide but yes it was mainly it was crowd sourced as it were and these this bulletin board was essentially the internet back then fellow travelers who were passing along tips to other people along the way um no no it's like like don't don't go with the mash shed bus company which i think we went with but anyway go ahead and it was a a long way to india but there was a couple hundred people doing it and we kept seeing each other the whole time it was a very thin thread where the travelers would go and it was a little bit of um comfort in in crowds not that there was crowds but comfort in company i guess as we ventured away i go to the pudding shop even these days when i'm in istanbul just to drop by and reminisce and talk to the guy about stories of all of this but we did find our bus company we committed ourselves to a 36-hour trip from istanbul to tehran the capital of iran and this became an odyssey that took twice that long it took at least three days to get there and this man was our captain we called him the pirate he used to wear a bandana you can tell he's got the gold chain he kind of he's got the chest here he's got the scars he's got the scars and he and and he ran a tight ship i'll never forget gene we bought tickets and we had seat numbers and we thought okay we're row six a and b that'll be pretty good and everybody stampeded onto the bus and i thought you fools why are you stampeding on it you got seat numbers and i felt so smug and we waltzed onto the bus after everybody had staked out their seats and it became clear really quick seat numbers are meaningless there was uh you know 40 seats and 40 people and uh we were the last two and they we got the after thought seats that were jerry-rigged onto the back of the bus over the stairwell the only seats on the bus that did not recline so we were committed to a couple of days sitting on these seats bolt upright and i'm pretty tall and i had to get up every once in a while and stretch and i took this photograph because i can see the pirate looking at us from the driver's seat and he sees me stand up and every time i stand up he goes he screams mister sit down rick we we still use this this bus for our my way tours don't we this is the my way tour bus yeah this is it's for the experience that's right well talk about experience gene i was deep asleep and suddenly screams clouds sparks and the bus grinds to a halt what happened yeah we uh the bus jumped a median and and we were out in the middle of uh kind of out in the middle of the middle of nowhere and it needed to get fixed and suddenly what was supposed to be our neat little 36-hour trip to take us the 1500 miles to tehran turned into an odyssey that lasted i don't know four or five six seven days i don't know what yeah this was the disaster here boy do i you know i remember we had to wait for it to get fixed and uh actually one of my best memories comes from this you know how in travel misfortune can sometimes bring a mandatory travel experience that's rewarding i just remember waiting with this turkish mechanic mechanic and neither of us spoke a common language and so he whips out a pack of cigarettes and offers me a cigarette i'd never had one in my life i took it i smoked we looked at each other we smiled we nodded we blew blue smoke together and this was uh we kind of had a marlboro moment and it's one of the the things that one of the best uh memories that i have of the trip those little times interacting with the people intimate connections not with other uh westerners on the bus but with locals that we encountered for various reasons if you look at that crowd there's a lot of westerners the bus was filled with brits and aussies and french people and germans and americans and i remember we got the bus running and our the pirate could not drive 24 7 so there was a second driver and he didn't he just looked like a person who wasn't the the the sharpest tool in the drawer you know and he got behind the wheel no he got behind the wheel uh and about ten minutes after that he ran it off he ran it off and so we wouldn't let him drive again because we yes so the pirate understood and he said okay forget the schedule now i'm in command of this operation and it was just he ruled like a tyrant and i remember one time he stopped in the middle of nowhere and he made every apparently he didn't like the smell of the bus and he made everybody go down to the river and take a bath before we and he said we're not going until everybody takes a bath but we eventually you know we spent a few nights in hotels makeshift hotels like this and then eventually we got to iran and we were on our way yeah tehran was sort of the maker break point there i remember that where we decided do we keep going or do we go back and lie on a beach in greece um i remember rick you're the heartiest traveler i've ever i've ever met but even you were getting a little bit weak there and we're wanting to turn back in we were in a place what was it called um there's a there's a there's a kind of a a slum a ghetto for travelers in tehran where everybody hangs out and amir khabib ameer everybody goes there and there's all these cheap guest houses and so on and we thought you know this has been already an odyssey and we're only a third of the way there and everybody's having fun in the greek isles that's where all the kids are let's go back to greece you know but we decided no this is we're committed to this and we pushed on and just by the fragility of the portraits of the shah hanging in the market like this you felt like the shah was on his last legs there was there was a riot police in the streets i remember and it just felt like it felt like the shah was about to fall and he was about to fall wasn't he yeah and he did and and just like that the shaw falls and america is plunged into if people remember the iran hostage crisis and these people that you're looking at right now that we knew as friends suddenly became america's enemies and it was almost impossible to do the hippie trail for the next 30 years wow and we just got in under under the gun kind of but i can see these people all of a sudden the smiles are gone clenching their fists at the cameras saying you know death to america so we're moving on and now we've committed ourselves and we get to the border of afghanistan and when i looked at this when i pulled out our map it was a lot of miles but i really considered it as border crossings ahead of us because border crossings were the big stressful scary thing for me were we going to get across did we have our shots what kind of delays will there be when we change money are we going to be buying last year's money that's of no value this year because we don't know what it looks like this year and there's all these mysteries and pitfalls and how many borders are there between us and india and the border of afghanistan was was unforgettable it was it was in the middle of nowhere it was burly looking guards with surly expressions um we knew that if we got we'd heard those stories about travelers who were got caught trying to smuggle drugs across the border and we'd heard that people would plant drugs in somebody's backpack to try to get it across rick i remember you and i uh checking each other's backpack yeah before we crossed the border to make sure we weren't carrying so when you when you approached a border you you checked your bag and then you kept it on your lap so nobody could put any drugs in there that could make you have to be extorting your way out of out of a jam with the police yeah yeah it was hairy um and we but we did finally make it into afghanistan and that was and we're on our way and and then there there we were out welcome to afghanistan we're we're kind of out in the middle of nowhere but it was kind of a strange welcome because an hour later we had a little adventure yes and an hour later we got stopped again you know you hear about like these taliban checkpoints and so on well there's just so few uh highways going through afghanistan that they have these choke points well this one happened to be the bus stops a couple of a couple of mean looking guys come on guy whips out a big old knife and starts waving it and says and then the somebody translates and says hey this these people say we can't go any farther unless we pay them money so he was probably in on the scam myself what i think but he he so he says i just suggest that we all pony up a little more money and pay these these gentlemen and they will let us continue on and we eventually uh talked about it and decided yep that's what we're going to do i remember one guy was sort of earnest no as a matter of principle we can't be taken advantage and then everybody else goes just shut up we're all going to say three don't forget principal i can remember the knife glinting in the sun and then we're on our way and uh you know the bus rides across you know so far this whole trip just seems like a bunch of bus rides and that's kind of what it was the bus rides were odysseys and themself a tr a bus stop would be you'd stop in the middle of nowhere you'd get out and the driver would do whatever he wants he's been working everybody else is just hanging out so he you know sits down and has a lunch and then we all gather i remember they were skinning a goat and everybody just sat around in a circle watching them skin the goat and i don't think that's a goat i think that's a tourist that didn't pay the fare oh my goodness we were we were sitting there on our hunches in a circle and then i realized they're passing around um a hash pipe or something and our bus driver was in there smoking away and then after half an hour his eyes are red and and and he's just kind of spacing he goes okay back on the bus and we we carry on but uh it was uh you know it was just and then on the bus hours at a time this girl was staring at me and i was staring at her and i remember thinking what does she see when she looks at me what is her world like and i looked at her and her mother they're behind her on the left all covered up and then i think to this day i mean 40 years later this girl is there and god willing she's still alive she's living through all the 20 years of war and now the taliban take over afghanistan what is her life like boy the yeah gosh look at these faces yeah the the trip itself was hairy but the people were sweet the people were beautiful and we got to hirat and harad is the major city in western afghanistan not many cities in afghanistan i remember i love herad i don't know how your memories are but it's just something special about herat and for both of us it was a big deal to be in afghanistan and in this city and i remember back in 10 15 years ago as the war was raging and the united states was in afghanistan and herat was essentially bombed really seriously destroyed by bombs and it just saddens me because we had a few beautiful days in herat i remember our first night we went up to we stayed in one of the nicer hotels in town i mean we probably spent five dollars a night for the hotel you know we really splashed out and um we were up on the rooftop watching the sun had gone down and and we were watching these sort of iconic chariots that were with torches galloping through the night and it was just a dreamy moment and every day we would walk in a different direction and you could have six blocks in a row of shops and every every 10 12 meters there would be a new shop with like this and the commerce was so much fun to check out and then we'd go back to our hotel and we'd have that refuge we needed our refuge didn't we uh we did uh and i got to say hey ladies i got to see this every night and you were you were your heart out you were too sick to appreciate it yes i was in the in the bathroom uh reading the memoirs but you know from a practical point of view you needed a hotel so you could go somewhere where people weren't staring at you yeah our hotel you know you were talking about a herat man this wasn't a city it was a village it still had dirt dirt streets our hotel was right in the very center of town the most modern place the place people would come for their wedding receptions right they had one when we were there and yet there was not even a stoplight at that intersection at the time and each day we would uh get a bike or get on a on a some kind of a rickshaw and go exploring wonderfully painted trucks uh beautiful craftspeople artisans shops i mean just walk do you remember these kind of images gene look at that yeah we were you know i think maybe by now we're in kabul and just a kabul was just everywhere you would go it was just another scene into uh into these into a way of life that was very foreign to us and i remember in kabul um people wearing uniforms and for some reason i felt they had never really worn a uniform they didn't know how to wear the uniform they should be wearing their tribal robes and it seemed to me the capital city kabul didn't fit afghanistan but a country needs a big city for the for the capital but it just it all felt wrong to me yeah yeah i boy looking at these faces i remember you love to interact with the merchants you love to haggle yeah this guy was what's this guy doing here he was showing you he was showing me how to wear how he ties his turban on his head and there yeah and he was proud to show me that yeah these people that were workers and you got a real strong sense of uh the value of manual labor and the dignity of people who who built who make their lives uh with their hands and we think about what's going on today and we think about the civil war they've had and and we think about where are people's hearts and souls when it comes to the politics of things and do we really understand it you know um you know you can't have a taliban take over without some popular support and it's just very confusing to me and i i just i just doubt anybody who feels like they really understand where the people are at yeah one thing you know as i as you hear about all the politics of say afghanistan today that you and i have had is is we we've seen these faces and we understand a human side to the politics and that's so easy to neglect when you just read the newspaper or watch the the news stories that the dignity of these people the pride of these people i still every time i give a talk when i'm giving my political talk i i talk about the time i was sitting in a cafeteria in kabul and a man sat down next to me and i was just having lunch and he said can i join you and i said you already have and he said um are you an american and i said yeah and he said i'm a professor here in afghanistan and i want you to know that a third of the people on this planet eat with spoons and fork like you do motioning to the spoon and fork i was using he said a third of the people eat with chopsticks and the third third of people with their fingers like i do and we're all civilized just the same and he was a dignified well-educated leader in his community apparently and every day at lunch he had a mission he sat down where the where the backpackers sat and he made that point because he had a hunch that i thought less of him because he ate with his fingers and i with metal utensils and he was right and he he caused me to think about that a little differently you know i remember having a so-called political discussion in afghanistan and it was done without understanding english without a single word that we understood of each other i remember the guy we were talking about he he went uh because you could understand this much he talked with his hands and he went china is here yeah we are here and tibet is like a wall between china and us a buffer zone he didn't have to speak a word but we understood what he was talking about and this was when the the soviet union was uh about to invade i believe afghanistan so it was a it's a complicated time and uh we were an interesting opportunity to bring a little bit of the west in there i remember when we were in afghanistan now the sort of the the summit if this was sort of climbing a mountain the summit of the pass we had to get over was kyber pass and it's the fabled pass you know and uh and uh we left we were walking in the footsteps of of the silk road and cyrus the great and genghis khan and osama bin laden and yeah the kyber pass rudyard kipling and the man who would be king and all that kind of you know uh mystery and uh when we went through the kyber pass i remember on our map gene way back then this area was called the autonomous territories it wasn't afghanistan it wasn't pakistan there was a border you know between the two countries but this was so unruly and this is where um al qaeda went or after 9 11. this is where they hit out and uh it's no wonder nobody knew where anybody was because nobody could control this area and we saw these little fortresses and these uh you know noisy young men down there yelling at us as we drove by and wind tattered flags and we got to a town where we stopped and the driver said we have to pay a supplement to ensure our safety i think i almost remembered him saying it in those kind of terms and everybody looked at each other and we thought well here here you go you want to you want to get knifed or do you want to pay two more dollars you know so we paid our supplement and and then he made a big show of when we got across the border giving the receipt to the guy and all the money and they shook hands and then or whatever and then we we got over the mountain pass but here you see they're selling ice in the foreground you see in the background on the left there's a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder it's a man's world you don't see any women here it's just it was so foreign for anything you and i had experienced in our lifetime and then we got to this um sort of the the pinnacle of kyber pass and it was clear to me this must be rush hour on the kyber pass rush hour with all the camels heading out and we had been going all until now through islam muslim country arid from istanbul all the way to kabul arid just no not many trees just dusty and rocks and dirt and then we're coming out of this and you can look into the haze in the distance and you realize this is where islam hits hindustan and all of a sudden now it's going to be lush it's going to be monsoon country it's going to be densely populated and mostly hindu now we're coming into a subcontinent with a billion people and it's going to be a big big difference and i don't know about you but it just felt like we were coming home i don't know why because we had never been there before but pakistan and india of course they're different now but they kind of felt like the same best because they both had that british heritage didn't they yep and we we it's like we had we we've done all our hard work and finally we made it uh which actually reminds me rick i think this this deserves a toast hey dean here's to the first half of our trip yeah i think i'm glad we did it we could have turned back at tehran and gone to the greek house and hung out and the great thing is once we finally got here man were we happy i you know how how trips are highs and lows and highs and lows and so on well this was definitely a high i was so happy and so were you and uh and and we had half of our trip still ahead of us uh we we took a moment now to kind of gear up i think i remember we went to a tailor and got measured and and came back the next day and picked up our outfits and it looks sort of comedic for me to be wearing that but it really felt right at the time and both of us had our our local style outfits that were appropriate and uh you even got a shave yes i went the few whiskers that i had um and it turned it was like you know getting a shave was was kind of like um you know it was a dream yes you gathered a crowd yeah it's a it's kind of you know when you're when you're traveling you're sort of when you're a foreigner you stick out and you're kind of on stage the whole time i think even the barber here was on stage look at him he's very tuned into the fact that the whole village has gathered around and there's a couple of americans god knows where they came from i think i remember we were in this village thinking i don't think anybody's ever come here much less had a shave but you know part of the art of traveling in a country that has no turn styles where there's no guidebooks and no hours when things are open and no famous art galleries is to just find ways to connect if you see a guy thrashing his hay ask him if you can do it for a little while i mean he probably still remembers the stupid american that came by and rode the oxen around the hay to do his job and if you see a bunch of women going home with a bunch of hay on their heads you know let them bear their load for uh for a few steps there and uh she had no problem letting me carry her hay yeah we're so used to uh as americans thinking that everything's done by machine but when you when we went to some of these countries you realize that it really it takes people to do them whether it's uh harvesting the the hay or remember rick we were even in this office in this and they had one guy who was they had one phone in there and they paid this one guy to just keep dialing the number so he could get until he finally got through and so he'd dial and it wouldn't work he'd hang up he'd try again and that was his job was just to get through and you realize that that the tasks are not simple and you come to really appreciate the dignity of of manual work oh yeah and and this whole idea of um living in a society where time is not money it occurred to me you know we're we're wired to think of time as money think of how we talk about it we bank it we save it we waste it we invest it we treat time like money and it's woven into our vocabulary and it was really a frustration for me to be dealing with people for whom time is not of any great value so if i'm kind of going hey let's get it moving here come on you know and he's a bureaucrat who's got all day long and he's going to get paid either way and he's got all of this opportunity to make our life easy but just sit down and cool your jets it's it's kind of a humbling thing yeah hey come on rick let's get this show moving we got places we got to get going where are we oh yeah here we go talk about meeting people yeah yeah yeah i think we might have been in pakistan here and uh these are fellow students these were all college students and that's that's the age that we were yeah i remember talking to these guys and and telling them oh yeah i'm taking a little time off to kind of find myself and uh and pause my career and they were just i could just see it in their eyes they were going you're doing what because it was such a foreign concept to have the luxury of being able to pause your career when for them they were getting their degree and they're going to start work so they can make money for their family yeah um the and it is it is being privileged and i totally get that but i also do feel believe strongly that even if we've got the luxury to be able to travel travel can really open your eyes to new cultures and new things that's what we saw i remember that's what we saw right shortly after this when we got to amritsar and we went to remember the golden temple well there you go there it is there you go this golden temple was it's sort of the mecca or the jerusalem uh the holiest of holy places for the sikh people and this is a country called the punjab which is embedded in india but it is its own proud country with its own culture and gene you had just graduated from stanford with a degree in comparative religious studies i can't help but think that you learned a lot in the classroom about islam and hindus and buddhists and so on but what we experienced here must have complemented that in an interesting way it really was and when you think about it you know here here gosh here i am at the uh seek the golden temple something that i had read about and what was really cool about it that i didn't understand is yes it's their holy holies but everybody's welcome you know this wasn't a forbidden place we could go in yeah it was wonderful on our trip we passed through a veritable smorgasbord of the religions that i'd studied we went through the the muslim countries you know turkey and iran and afghanistan and then into the to the sikh area in northern india and the the hindu countries of of india and then we ended up in with tibetan style buddhism yeah um this was it really was sort of the rubber meets the road for the my studies it was wonderful you know this is uh this is this is a beautiful moment here we we did a side trip from uh amritsar in punjab we decided to go north up to kashmir it was a a sort of a side trip we went up and then back to the punjab but kashmir is sort of this mystical mountain kingdom sort of a on the it's the twin sister of the ladakh and the tibetan cultures and so on we went through this long tunnel and we came out of the tunnel and i remember we just had to get out and go whoa yeah we'd gone from yeah we've gone from hot lowlands wet lowlands and then suddenly you're in this in this mountain kingdom the area of kashmir and it's the town of srinagar it's like this tropical area that gets plunked down right in the middle of the mountains and with the altitude it was a getaway for all of the people of means in india who wanted to leave the squalor and the mugginess and the intensity and the heat they could go up to srinagar and you'd find these resorts these golf courses these places where indian big shots would go for a vacation and backpackers who had the same buying power as some big shot from delhi and it was all around this lake doll and lake dahl i remember we would get on a rickshaw or we'd rent a bicycle and we'd just explore around the lake and we'd find these amazing spots and the cool thing about cashmere is they have this flotilla of floating hotels and the fun thing is you hire a guy in a little boat and you go shopping for your we didn't have we never had a reservation for anything across the whole trip and you'd arrive and you'd look for a place to call home and we shopped around and we chose muzaffer for our home for a few days while we were in cashmere yeah they they a lot of these houseboats were part of the infrastructure as it were for the british aristocrats back when when it was still a colony and so they're like these little pockets of gentility um i remember being oh here we are being just like the uh the english country gentlemen or at least trying very hard to be that uh i'm not you know do you wear socks or do you not wear socks what's what's the edit proper etiquette but we we tried hard to to to play the role of being uh english gentlemen uh in this sort of class-oriented society you know i don't remember because this is 1978 and we were probably smoking marijuana here but um i think we must have set this picture up to say see if you can look like you're an aristocrat or come on have some have some style so here we are trying to play the role in our in our houseboat called muzaffar which had a cheaper little one next to it called the yellow submarine i remember yes and and look on the rooftop gene of our place uh that's where you'd climb in the morning and you'd have your breakfast and that's where you'd go for the sunset and you'd be sitting up there and the people there were as many there's a whole family living in a tiny shack nearby on the off not in the boat but in a place where they could afford to live and not lose any business and they would come and bring us our tea and and whatever and uh make us feel very much at home we had beautiful warm friendly welcome there and all the commerce came to us it's like uber eats uber eats kashmiri melon oh my goodness and beautiful scenes everything the whole world was on a glide path around me it was so graceful it was sort of this it was sort of this pristine uh wilderness ballet i and every night the sun would go down and every day we would we would have our melon and we'd have our tea and and then we took a side trip that i'll never forget up to a place called ghoulmark yeah this was up way high in the mountains and we got up there as you can see on these ponies that we rented um the the strange thing is you can see the guy that's next to me kind of kind of an old guy there he was he was our guide who led the two of us up on our two ponies he didn't even have a horse he ran up the hill to get there um and we ended up we got up there and i just remember we arrived at this big alpine met well there it is this big alpine meadow that just felt like it had been untouched by the modern world like we'd gone back to the stone age or something yes and we met this family there they lived in a stone hut with a thatched roof um and they invited us inside of course they didn't we didn't even understand they didn't we didn't have any common language between us um i think they were you know they didn't we we just had no real weight way to communicate yet they invited us inside they gave us some food they we we stayed there we we chatted with them in some weird way that we did to such an extent that gosh when i see this picture of them it's 40 years later and i still have a sense of warmth for this this family you know their daughter looked about as hauntingly beautiful as the remember the famous woman who was on the cover of national geographic with those uh mesmerizing eyes um i think i know what you're talking about like blue eyes or something yeah just yeah just sparkly uh vitality like totally um pristine like unsullied by urban rat race and so on and it's sort of a i don't want to romanticize the poverty but but just uh untouched and and just very very human so there we are at cashmere uh and that's our little side trip and for the rest of it now we're coming down the home stretch and we head down into india and we do the things you got to do in india see delhi go to the taj mahal go to the ganges river in the places of worship on in varanasi and then we headed up to nepal we decided to go into nepal through the back door in the western part of nepal going to pokhara and i'll never forget we flew remember we flew from some place to from from some place to near the border and we got out of the airplane and and uh there was a chevy came on the landing strip and picked everybody up and everybody in the plane packed into this giant chevy and that was the uh the the shuttle bus it was like on a it was like a a cow field and they had to herd the cows away for us to land if i remember right and and then there were people standing there in loincloths with spears and we just thought oh well okay now what do we do and we hired some sort of a little minibus to take us up to pokhara and then we went over to kathmandu and that's what we're gonna do now in india of course when you go to india you gotta go to the taj mahal look at these guys can you say ugly america here let's just go wade in this in the sacred pool here we were 22. yeah you know when i think back on it we were just in so many ways we just were we had no manners we had no bearings we had no limits we just were so we were so free and we were also it was pretty rick and jean's excellent adventure and we were clueless but we were we were earnest we wanted to learn you know i was going to say like we were clueless but innocent but i think ernest is a good you know we were just we were just we were a tabula rasa we were like okay we're open we don't get this right on us you know tell us help us better understand the world and we we went we stayed in maharaja's palaces and this was a jarring sort of look at the um power that we had as rank of muffins as just little backpackers we could stay in palaces of the uh impoverished nobility and we would stay in these places and this man with his rickshaw would would drive us there for 25 cents and we'd say okay thank you okay here's 50 cents just now go away i remember we did not want him hanging around and he says i will wait here until you need to go again and we're not going again for four hours just scram here's your money now go away thank you very much and he's and he was like a little puppy and we said okay and we ignored him we went inside and then three hours later we came out and he was there and we hopped in and he took us it was very uh it was a very awkward mix because we as americans are so egalitarian you know we're all just we're all just people i'm not better than you you're not my servant and now suddenly we're living in the caste system where there actually are people who are beneath you and above you and so on i remember in this maharaja's palace we would have breakfast in the big dining hall this big elaborate dining hall it's got this 20 foot long walnut dining room table and it's just the two of us it's the two of us eating and five or six servants standing around just waiting to attend on us just waiting for the moment when they can pour milk on our corn flakes uncomfortable and we were kids who were just very sort of down to earth and these guys were our our father's age you know yes and they were they were our servants and we had the caste system forced upon us and i think you know western tourists must have fallen somewhere in the caste system because we were certainly not up there with the maharaja because remember when he would come to visit his place or everybody would stand in attention and he'd come up with his old jalopy it was an old another old big giant chevy right it was a rundown car was kind of comedic but everybody gave him that respect because of his uh place in the cast system i think yes yeah wow and then uh related to that of course is taking care of the cows and as they are treasured in the hindu culture and marijuana marijuana is a like a religious herb and it's sold in the markets just with all the other herbs and spices and it was quite routine for people to be buying and selling and smoking marijuana it was yeah yeah right here we're looking at at the leaf of amer of marijuana that that most people are familiar with most common there i remember was in its hashish form the kind of the resin that you you'd have to mix it with tobacco right to to get it to light and smoke um but i can't inhale tobacco so i i'm worthless with that hash i just want the leaf yeah and so we like a lot of people we we smoked and um i remember going and buying at one time and the guy says oh yeah i've got leaf marijuana i've got hashish but you don't want that don't you want opium no no no we don't wanna yeah i'm good thanks i remember you know gene i think this is not overstating it i think perhaps one of the i'll say this so i won't get in trouble one of the five happiest days in my life was in later on a few days later in kathmandu at a place called pie and chai and this pie and chai was epic it was legendary among all the hippies and the backpackers going on the trail because it was the it was sort of the party at the end of the trip if you survived it even if you had worms even if you were emaciated even if you just you know were wiped out you'd go to this uh garden on the edge of town and it was uh a family industrious they were making apple pies like american-style apple pies out of a medieval brick tibetan oven high in the himalayas and they're playing the stones and the doors and the beetles and creedence and it's just filled with backpackers eating apple pie hot out of the brick oven smoking marijuana listening to the doors surrounded by himalayan wonder and every time you just felt like you know i could use another slice of apple pie one would come out piping hot from that medieval oven and you just kind of go god is good you know pie and shy and getting high and you know we deserve that though this was really this was kind of like the carrot at the end of the hippie trail after all of this stuff that we had to go through that was sort of uh when you think about it when you think of marijuana and hippies and you think of what you went through to get to nepal now i mean i never even thought of that but it's just it's just the appropriate punctuation or explanation mark or or blanket and a pillow at the end of that amazing experience so this was we're in the monsoon country now and this was the season that people prayed for and i remember thinking oh my goodness it's going to wipe away the infrastructure but everybody was celebratory when it was pouring down rain because that would nourish the the the fields and we would be we i remember in this one we were heading to a big city to catch an airplane and i was worried about getting there and we were hitchhiking and there was this kind of business going on and these are big trucks we hitchhiked in these big trucks and they'd stopped for us very quickly and we'd hop into the cab and there was just like there's like three guys in the cab already and then there's plenty room for two more guys and this is one long seat i ended up in this i ended up between the driver and his door that's a big cab yeah oh and then and then you've got this this whole cast of people who's whose career is begging and their parents mutilate them when their child children so they'll be more effective beggars and it's so hard to see it's so so just heartbreaking and here we have these guys who all their life every day they go out and they're unable to walk because their bodies are just ripped and shreds and they push their metal tin through the mud and the dirt streets and the kids gather around and people obligated i think they toss a few coins in there and these guys do their routine and they get enough money not to starve and it's part of life it's part of the fabric of this amazing culture that we know so little about yeah this was the hardest part of the trip was seeing the poverty seeing beggars um you know you'd give them some well you give them some money but uh but even that it was heartbreaking you felt helpless you didn't know what to do i mean i know the poverty still exists today and you couldn't get away from it you couldn't you literally could not turn your back on it because if you started to walk away there were all these kids poor kids running after you yelling back sheesh bakshi please give me a gift and you really needed a hotel for a refuge or you'd go crazy it's just it's stressful we're just kids 21 22 years old and uh i was not political until i was not political at all when i think back on it back then but i was having of course these powerful experiences that were planting seeds of thoughtfulness in me i remember in tehran the capital of iran seeing these shiny tall bank buildings and this elite kind of wealth amidst horrible poverty in the streets and you know homeless people desperate people leaning up against the the banks and i thought of it as a metaphor of between you know super privileged and desperate people and then we go to india and we see all of this poverty and uh you and i were just we were it was a playground of reality we were just frolicking through all of it we didn't have any immediate impact other than it made us more thoughtful and more aware that this world is complicated and we can be a part of it i'm just so thankful we had that experience and it and we you couldn't shrug it off it stayed it stuck with you it was it was a crash course in in uh in a lot of realities crash course in reality you got it and and then also uh with it with an elephant like this you could just have a crash course in traffic yeah exactly this i i remember this this was not like a tourist photo op this elephant was an actual we actually used these to go up from this bus stop here up a hillside to get to this archaeological site that we were visiting uh it was like the you know the at the getty museum and you got the tram but the we had elephants i was so in my elements on top of this elephant i remember as we were coming into the dock there was a big concrete dock it was like a concrete loading ramp and by the way look at the size of those elephant droppings in the foreground there are those um but i was just sitting side saddle on him my legs were hanging down and i was probably clowning around you know and then at the last minute i realized this elephant i mean i don't know how many ten tons is coming into the dock and at the last moment i pulled my legs out of the way and bam his hide hit that concrete stuff and i thought had i been asleep at the wheel there i would have lost my legs that would have been a horrible ending to a great vacation uh but uh and then you know all of them all of a sudden you're walking talk about a crash course in reality this is what the heck is this rick this is a wood carving of some kamasutra thing on a temple isn't it yeah they they did they had these uh a lot of the these were have religious significance and they had these erotic carvings decorating a lot of temples um both hindu and uh the tantric positions of the uh of of of tibetan buddhism yeah to us as 22 year olds it was just it was hysterical and then we went to varanasi and varanasi is a very uh rich and intense place this is not rich materially but just very emotional and dramatic and hindus go here from it's the ultimate trip they want to come here at the end of their life and if they die here they can have their ashes tossed into the sacred river of the ganges and it was so intense the streets there i remember jean and as tourists we would get up early in the morning before dawn and hire a boat and we would float down the river past the what are they called the gots the steps and we would just witness people um washington bathing in the in it washing the bad karma away and praying to the gods yeah oh what an experience that was and to be there to look at it and to witness it and then to realize that people come here to die and on the bluff overlooking it all there's six fires and on each fire there's a human body you can see on the left this this corpse's foot and uh it just was a fulfill their final wish to have their ashes scattered in the ganges yeah and um you know it's a beautiful thing to be able to experience as a traveler and then we headed north into the mountains and uh it was just great the final leg of our of our trip we we'd seen a lot of stuff and we kind of felt like we were ready now to take on this go up into the himalayas and and take on the final stretch of the hippie trail so i put on my best hat that's a good look for you rick this is men in nepal can wear that hat and look good uh i tried and uh the girl there on the left thought i was kind of cute i think you know so but uh it was so fun to be in nepal and our first town what was this town called khan zen or tang yeah tan san i remember this this was like this was a pretty magical place i well you wrote a song about it you wrote a beautiful song and performed it i i did write a song about it and it was inspired by what we experienced there which was um you know this street here is kind of rustic and beautiful by day but especially when night fell and the town was completely dark and then far off in the distance we hear music and we followed it and they were it was a parade through town with everybody singing accompanied by a harmonium and some symbols and they would stop in front of houses and the men would sing upwards to the windows the glowing windows up above and the women would open the windows and they would toss down these gifts um flowers or bracelets uh and we we asked somebody and the best they could explain it is they said you know what are we doing here this is a very local festival where we are celebrating our ancestors and thanking them for giving us this wonderful life wow you know i i this was you know of all the highs and lows of a trip this one was was way up there you know when i think about it we were at a huge disadvantage because there was not a well-developed guidebook industry for this region at the time tony wheeler the founder of lonely planet was doing this trip the same years we were and uh you know eventually you know 10 years later you'd come back here and everybody would have the lonely planet guide and i've been to india since and i've always had my lonely planet guide but for us we're a lonely planet for opening up whole stretches of the world that people would never have gone to yeah but for us we were it was like um everybody was sharing their own experiences they had these little mimeographed rags from different lands and i remember when we were on the bus we i would spend entire days just going through the bus and asking do you have any information can i borrow it for a couple hours and read it and i was hungry for information and the the richness of the cultural things that you and i are trying to figure out it we were at quite a disadvantage because you didn't have professional guides to hire you didn't certainly didn't have a guidebook and you're looking at this and you're trying to figure out okay tibetans these are tibetans they're not nepali what but they're the same religion and china is having trouble with tibet and they're coming over the border to take refuge and you've got tibetan refugee camps and nepal's putting up with them and nepal is so so poor that india gives nepal foreign aid and there's all this stuff that we're trying to put together but it's kind of a trick when you don't have a reliable and developed source of information you know this guy looking at oh sorry this guy this guy here you know is this guy a a poor homeless beggar or or or or not i remember meeting a guy like this and and thinking he was well yeah he's home he's like a homeless person he's i and and he spoke perfect english and he said yeah and he told me his story he said yeah i was i was a well i was a banker um i got married i had kids and then this is just what we do after my kids grew up and left the house and i'm an empty nester then you move on to the next stage of your spiritual progression he renounced it all he said goodbye to his material world and went out to wander and resumed the spiritual search wow well now i didn't i didn't remember that about this guy but when i look at this guy i think the same thing i look at him and he he seems to me he could have almost be somebody from the first world the developed world that got tired of the rat race and decided to just um go in a different direction i mean there's something uh elegant and there's something you know confident about him he knows what he's doing and uh i don't understand it but he does i think this guy is now the vice president of sales at dunder mifflin yeah look into his eyes this was right next door to the living virgin goddess do you remember the kumari devi yeah davey and we got to go to see to look into the eyes of the living the virgin goddess an actual living goddess i remember that virgin goddess it's dangerous to get related to get uh like you wouldn't take her out on a date so it was it was a she would come after you with a big sword oh maybe yeah and this man would whip his um prayer wheels around that's for sure and then everywhere in kathmandu here just wandering around and enjoying just slices of life i remember there was a lake we went out on and we hired a canoe we just had our own canoe and we'd float in the middle of this lake and uh and then we docked you can see the boat there we we docked in this lagoon and walked through the jungle we met the spiders and waterfalls and we you know and anytime you're in nepal with your best friend and uh you got nothing else to do for the rest of the afternoon and you're on a in a dug out canoe in the middle of a lake high in the mountains you're gonna smoke a little marijuana and uh we got we landed and we met him he's a retired uh gurkha fighter for the british uh for the in in britain british india i guess and then we went into the jungle and we went to battle with the leeches and gene i i think back on a lot of the the memories and i don't know if we were high or or not but the the memories were so crazy that you can kind of assume we were high but i'll never absolutely right because because some because some of what we did was just so psychedelic it was thank you you didn't need drugs you didn't yeah but if you had them it was more psychedelic yeah and but we went into the jungle and i remember we were we almost didn't know which way was up and we were deep in the jungle and then suddenly it was like we were surrounded by leeches and this is an army of leeches and they're small they're about maybe an inch and a half long and they are black and they are like little slinkies and they go head over tail overhead and they're coming at you from all directions and they are dogged they're little but they're they're unstoppable and we were just like we were we were overwhelmed with uh fear wondering what's going to happen and apparently one actually i think that's your foot but i can see you were bit by a leech yeah we had that story you tell sounds like a fever dream but i i swear it happened we were both we stuck together and then we made it and then we finally made it to kathmandu look at that what a shot that that woven bridge for pedestrians and then a beautiful temple on the hilltop yeah this was kathmandu i mean we we think of it now as a big metropolis but back then it really was just a a a village and and at the top of the bluff was this mystical temple with these gorgeous eyes looking in all four directions and this was the domain of aggressive monkeys this was their territory and they went to battle with the tourists and they loved to grab things like cameras or glasses and uh my glasses were a big attraction because they were precious to me and they kind of were wire frames and they they sparkled and also they they were like they were like the the monkeys from the wizard of oz these were very terrifying they were i don't know if which was worse the monkeys or the leeches but anyway go ahead and i had my comfort my blankie my my my pillow my comfort food was english digestive biscuits and you could they were in they were wrapped from a factory they were clean they were cozy and i always had some digestive biscuits that i could munch on and the monkey wanted my biscuit and i'll never forget he had i could tell he was he was faster than me he could swing from branch to branch and he wasn't going to leave until he had either my glasses or my biscuits and i hung onto my glasses literally and i kind of just threw my biscuits at him because i knew when i was beat and he didn't run away with my cookies he sat above me on a branch just out of reach and he ate them right in front of me that monkey with impunity look at him look at him see how smug he is ah jeez oh and then we will kept it with jack and yeti tell us about that oh this is great well you know we traveled 4 000 miles on the hippie trail and we'd gone through the leeches and our monkeys and our our dysentery and everything and this was one of our very final nights of the trip in fact it might have been the last night and i and it was actually a perfect kind of metaphor for an ending and a way to make a transition to the end of the trip uh rick you you remember it i oh yeah well it was called yak and yeti and it was in the most fancy first world hotel in kathmandu and every town every town anywhere in the world has a couple of hotels where the diplomats will stay and the vips and the rich tourists that just want to see the culture on stage and we decided heck let's just you know let's just buy the tickets and uh and i remember sitting there with you and every time this man would leap out from behind the curtains we would laugh because look at his smile and look at his eye contact he just he makes love to everybody he looks at and every time he'd leap out he would look at us like that yeah and this was as you said like the last night of the trip and i remember how it messed me up because we had an appointment we didn't wear a watch we didn't have appointments you know it was like after dark or just before breakfast or about high noon you know that kind of thing and here seven o'clock we got to be at this hotel to watch that show the yak and yeti show it just put a crimp in my style but as you said it was a nice way to ease ourselves back into our normal rat race and that's and then the next day we flew home and this was in frankfurt and this is kind of a cool photograph because it's just it's just a little bit of the east that's sitting here in the middle of germany it's like it's a perfect metaphor for how it was when we came home i i weighed like 128 pounds because i've been wasted away from dysentery but just look at us there it's like we are these islands of the east just plunk down in the middle of the modern world and a day earlier we were islands of the west plunked down in where what we're wearing was the norm so we kind of put on the clothes of that and we had this new experience and we're kind of laughing about our position and everything here but i think it stayed with us i think the souvenir we got gene and we have it 40 years later is uh an empathy for the or just a humbleness about how we are able to really understand the diversity on this planet yeah i think the humility is sort of what it was we uh you know we you and i kind of went on to kind of write guidebooks like we're these big experts telling everybody how to do stuff but our but what we had really learned in taking this trip was um that we when you get into a new area you you don't know anything we were we were clueless and it was and and it was and but we recognized that the world that we were in was very good and and we could do a service for other people who are coming into a new situation to try to give them information that would help them understand the meaning and better enrich their lives gene that's beautiful and maybe something that undergirds the value of all the information that we can help travelers with is to celebrate the humility that comes with being clueless also i mean just to be a just to be wide-eyed and childlike as we explore the world we can there's no age limit for that you don't have to have a certain budget for that rich or poor old or young man or woman you can enjoy the world you can explore the world and take home that most beautiful souvenir and just keep trucking on and there you go jean openshot thank you so much that was a trip down memory lane that was that was a lot of fun and uh lisa's got some questions i think from our our travelers that have been traveling with us uh lisa we have so many questions and first of all i want to thank you for what was assuredly the most philosophical of any of the monday night travels it really i think affected our audience and i know it affected me thank you that's the beautiful thing about traveling with gene openshaw you get a little you get philosophical and you don't even realize it whether you want it or not whether you want it or not before we begin could i have a word from our sponsor please yeah um thank you lisa you know um i guess one thing i'd like to do is i think i've even got the book right here is to remind people that gene works really hard on all of these books i don't have it with me but uh gene's written a lot of books with me and if you appreciate the kind of thoughtfulness that gene can inject into our travels it's kind of our mission and we've got a hundred people along with the three of us that work at rick steve's europe and gina has co-authored our books to paris london rome venice florence europe 101 history and art for travelers and just this last year gene and i wrote together europe's 100 greatest masterpieces which i'm just so thankful for for gene's leadership in that so if you're curious about the work that's gene's done you can go to our website ricksteevs.com and i also want to remind you that gene's passion for and my passion for history and art and culture is fundamental to our tour program and we are so excited that we're on a trajectory now to be able to travel early in 2022. i was just in paris last week and we're not i'm not promoting travel but i was just in france i'll tell you europe is getting its act together europe is getting serious about vaccines the world is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller for people who refuse to get a vaccination and we're all going to be traveling because the vaccination rates are going to go up they're ahead of us now in europe because they've got the message and um we've got we're almost sold out for our tours next year we've got uh 30 000 seats available we've sold 28 000 of them we've still got a couple thousand seats left and if anybody is curious all they got to do is go to our website and learn more about it but today i'm just so thankful to be able to celebrate the travels that we had when we were just just kids right out of school and that's been the fun for me let's have some questions lisa okay my first question is kind of two parts because i know that music is important to both of you um did either of you play music along the way and what music did you encounter along the way um rick bought a sitar that's true you know we uh if you might if anybody that's kind of old enough to remember indian music and particularly the sitar sort of made a sort of bled into american pop music i know the beatles and george harrison used uh the music of the great sitar player ravi shankar who by the way i think is the father of norah jones yes i mean you could google that but is it true i write on that yeah which kind of blows my mind but um yes we along the way let's see did we see music we went in the way gene we went to indian music concerts um when we were in because i learned what a t is i think it's in the anyone it goes da da da like um crosby stills and nash uses that a little bit da da da da da da da da da and but what's what humbled me about indian music was uh jean and i are both um you know western musicians and i'm trained just with my classics and i know about major and minor and three-part time and four-four time and so on you get to india they've got classical music but it completely doesn't relate to our notion of music meter mode no it's different and without any background or understanding you might think it doesn't sound very sophisticated or enjoyable but when you know about it it it becomes gorgeous and that's why i was sort of into it enough to buy that sitar i remember when we were flying home we had to sleep in the airport in frankfurt and i remember tying my sitar up to myself so if anybody stole it i'd go with it you know i just i really treasured that sitar next question sitar thieves at the frankfurt airport watch out [Laughter] on the on this trip dean i took home a sitar on my next trip to india i took home a squat toilet did you know that i did not i bought a porcelain footprint those you know the two footprints i've seen it and and uh we uh i put it in a box filled with hay a wooden box at the airport the man said what's in the box i said a toilet he said okay and check it but we had we had that at rick steve's europe so people could practice squatting and we had to have a sign on it said this is not plumbed so don't use it but you can squat over it to see if you can do that maybe we're all better off as employees that you stopped [Laughter] it's still in the basement basement at work um so there were some some so many questions about the specifics of the logistics so people wanted to know what time of year and what weather july and august which meant that it was very hot in the desert countries and was monsoon in the um in the subcontinent the indian subcontinent uh which meant that uh we were it was uh on any single day during the monsoon it would be within a single hour it would be very sunny and hot then very muggy and then torrential rain and then rinse and repeat and uh that so that that was that was every day it was very clockwork every day yes um so that it probably was not the best time of of the year if someone wants to do that kind of journey you survived it yes so the planning process how you know what was your inspiration how long did it take you to plan and how did you come up with a budget a lot of people were asking about the budget i mean these are memories from but we allah had some fuzzy idea that there were bucket shops in india where you could find a cheap one-way flight back to europe so we we didn't know for sure because it's just a rumor and we went to india not knowing how we'd get home and we had our money in our money belt in form of travelers checks wasn't it gene yeah yeah we took travelers checks um but there's no planning yeah planning um i seem to recall i was back in the states and rick you were in europe and we kind of communicated and you said meet me at the frankfurt airport yeah that was it and that's sort of how we how we started and at the frankfurt airport and and in fact we talk about this big 4 000 mile trip but we did a good 1500 miles getting from frankfurt frankfurt just to istanbul um through bulgaria smuggling smuggling contraband behind the iron curtain talk about exotic travel but that's you were really slightly you were reading khrushchev's memoirs in yugoslavia man that was yeah wow is there going to be another talk about that part of the trip yeah another question that came up was um did you meet a lot of western women along the way and i don't mean did you you know meet them just what was what was your observation of their experience at that time we were so sick if we met anybody with any intentions we would have gotten nowhere yeah i there were a few westerners say from norway or belgium or germany that were traveling along the same route and you'd see them you'd meet them in tehran and then you'd see them uh three weeks later in in amritsar or something and they were traveling usually as couples there weren't any solo women that i remember traveling um the the uh in fact i i got the sense that i would not have i'll just say i would not have taken uh my girlfriend along i just without carrying a big knife and being ready to defend defend her i that was the sense i got whether that was true or not i don't know but remember this was 40 years ago but you know we were we were um healthy single young guys that would would have jumped at an opportunity to have a romantic sort of adventure in europe but i don't think i don't think i even thought about it when i was doing this i was so focused on the adventure there was no interest in in doing any sort of uh romantic uh side trips i just was so it was a survival thing it was an experience thing the last thing i wanted to do is hang out with a bunch of cool backpackers i wanted to be immersed in the culture and i was glad i wasn't alone i had with gene you know but we were there to have that experience i think i think it's pretty obvious that you were there to immerse yourself in the culture from the pictures i think that's quite wonderful honestly um another tiny logistical question who took the photos before the selfie era i mean there's several pictures of the two of you who'd you hand your camera to whoever was there sometimes we had to explain to people how to use the camera push this okay but no memories there was always friendly that's the thing gene mentioned there was a warm welcome in islam foreigners are god's gift you know people take care of foreigners uh and in in the hindu country it's just a very graceful gracious kind of world in on its terms you've got the you know the the cast and all that kind of stuff but we were privileged people as far as a warm welcome goes and we were all also scourged with the we were the rich naive tourists that could be taken advantage of so there's an interesting kind of juggling going on there there's friendliness and there's also we're easy uh to extort or rip off or whatever and we just always had to be careful that way but i never felt i felt like we could go out on the streets and be extroverts and have a lot of fun with the local people how did this trip inform and impact your future trips in europe travel to europe suddenly seemed very easy after this one yeah that that's part of it um i think for me it was having uh having experienced the uh this complete culture shock um that i when i went to europe i tried to keep some of the same wide-eyed wonder that i had and try to always see things new again yeah good i like that you know when i i i've for 40 years and felt very strongly that india is my favorite place that i've ever traveled and when i think india i'm talking india kashmir nepal sri lanka south asia basically i just love it but i've also been sort of keenly aware that i don't teach it i don't want to teach it it's too personal it's too unpredictable it's too ethereal it's none of my business to tell you how to do india you see you can't put it in a box and say this is what you do if you got three days this is what you do if you have two days as opposed to europe where i think it's predictable when you're in berlin you do that when you're in ireland you do this and i can i can learn and i can teach and i can be direct but i see europe as the springboard for world exploration much as india is my favorite place i wouldn't i would feel crass and i would feel opportunistic and i would feel gross if i charged people to go to india with my leadership or me organizing i don't want to make that part of my business it's just too special i feel great about organizing people's experiences in europe but india is it's a poem and everybody will interpret it differently that's so beautiful [Laughter] um that kind of took me okay jean a lovely woman named catherine wrote in and she said she toured with you 26 years ago and she still remembers it as a wonderful time she would like to know what was your favorite memory from guiding from from guiding european tours oh wow um boy i having done having done dozens of tours that's a real hard one to to come up with i can tell you places that i found very magical that many of our viewers might also remember i can remember warm nights in venice after all the tourists are gone and the lanterns come on i can remember a nice uh i can remember uh going skinny dipping with some tour members in the mediterranean when we were in the cinque terre on company time you were naked with our tour members i'm afraid so don't tell other guys about that and i remember walking walking back up the main street of vernazza which some people may remember as well and uh with with uh with this old with this old guy who just oh gene we were just in the mediterranean swimming with these beautiful naked with these beautiful women and he's carrying his pants and he's just got his wet underwear on that's one of my great memories um i remember going to the top of the eiffel tower and having a glass of champagne with my with my child and looking out over the city of light and gene as a as a as an art teacher jean um for me there are a few moments as a tour guide i've seen it many times and it's no big deal but the big deal is introducing it to other people for their first time and i get there i get there first and i watch them as they enter that space you see it through their eyes exactly what's what's an example of a place that you enjoyed doing that um well saint mark's square in venice yeah yeah you'd lead people there um through through the backs through the back streets and then just as you knew it was about to emerge just like you say you could step back and you could watch them come out into that square and go oh wow look where i am you know i've got a memory of a of a tour doing that with a group and a woman whose husband had passed away and they had always dreamed of going to venice and she was able to go to venice after he he was gone and she and i it was the same thing saint mark's square or campos and marco and yeah and i was up first and i turned around and i watched and it was like ping-pong balls of jubilation were just raining down on everybody it was just oh it's so magical to come out of those dark winding alleys and then hit this warmly lit square a lot of times it's going from darkness to light like uh the tight spiral staircase in the sun chapel you you climb people up it and then after this medieval type staircase you step into the greatest gothic interior in europe with this cathedral of stained glass and to i always step first and then i watch people come in or saint peter's basilica to step into the greatest church you know from the narthex into the into the great what is it um hundreds who knows how long it is but it's it's overwhelming to people but those are the beautiful moments as tour guides and we miss when gene just did a had a great career as a tour guide and it's uh they put me out to stud yeah after you had infected other people with your passion and your your great with my ping-pong balls of jubilation is that what you just said ping-pong balls of jubilation hey uh before we go i want to i want to do my little show-and-tell i just took this off the wall i this is my beloved backpack from all of those years we saw a photograph of it there but this traveled with us and uh i just this thing is so it's got such a patina of of travel um it's got stitching very rough stitching in all of the easy to break points by local um tailors that people don't buy a new one you just go get it fixed you know so all of this is stitched and stitched by local people who helped out and uh the leather is shiny the american flag and the norwegian flag are tattered i just it's so nice to have things in your life that are are worn by your own body you know um when gene and i were in that little um boat ride in the lake in nepal and we met the gurkha fighter this is a gurkha knife and it's um this is what the nepali warriors have and it's it's a pretty formidable tool so stand back you see this is a very cool souvenir and we i didn't i don't i'm surprised i carried this around gene we were packing so late but i was like a pack rat i had this i had my monkey dum-dum drums you know this is kind of fun and i had my nepali fashion where i would just wow all of the locals by wearing their hat and then i kept it off by buying a sitar which is it's like a it's like a starving cello it's like a very skinny cello it's that big and then you travel home with that you just feel like whatever happened to pac and light but i think all of this stuff was purchased in the last week i think we we were very very tight until the very end and then i thought there's too much cool stuff here to buy like i mean when you get a chance to buy a gurkha knife and monkey dum-dum drums and a hat all on the same day are you gonna miss that opportunity did you haggle of course i haggled that's part of the fun rick rick was the master hagler trust me we spent i think he did it just as an excuse to to interact with the with the merchants we would go in there and and we'd so we'd sit down and we'd have tea and then we'd chat and then the merchant would give an offer and rick would get all humility you know take umbrage why you're not going to do that and and we'd start to walk out in a huff and then and the and the guy would wait wait wait and he'd call us back in and then offer make another offering and and then we'd walk out of there like two hours later and just with with the with the monkey dum-dums that he had just some dumb thing that just was an excuse and and when i finally paid his price ping pong balls of jubilation hey you guys this has been so much fun i'm just gene lisa thank you very much for moderating thanks to everybody for tuning in gene it has been a thrill to share these memories with you again uh it's people should all be so lucky to have a travel partner like you it has been wonderful namaste thanks for having me namaste jean and uh for everybody joining us today i want to remind you every monday night we celebrate travel next monday we're going to little europe you can take the five smallest countries in europe you can put them into luxembourg and they'll still rattle around okay there are so many tiny countries in europe and we're going to visit them all after that we're going to go to the netherlands not amsterdam but everything in the netherlands that's great except for amsterdam and then after that we're going to turkey with our good friend lolly and we're going to learn a lot about the beautiful country of turkey starting with istanbul gene thanks a lot again and i'd like to wish all of you happy travels and to remind you if it's monday night and you like to travel this is the place to be happy travels [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Rick Steves Travel Talks

Views: 13,437

Keywords: Rick Steves, Rick Steves travel skills, Rick Steves travel lectures, Rick Steves travel talks, Rick Steves Europe, travel advice, travel tips, europe travel tips

Id: MGGIp5zCejE

Length: 91min 2sec (5462 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022