‘We travel in order to learn from culture shock’: Rick Steves shares lessons from his adventures at Northern Quest

Travel expert Rick Steves doesn’t want you to have a safe trip, he wants you to have a “bon voyage.”

Well, OK, he wants you to be safe, but he doesn’t want you to let fear dictate your travels.

He jokes that his mission with his renowned travel company Rick Steves’ Europe is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando, Las Vegas and Cancun.

Half of his book, “Travel as a Political Act,” which brings him to Northern Quest Resort and Casino on Friday, speaks of experiences he’s had traveling to places the government didn’t necessarily want him to go, such as Palestine, Cuba and Iran.

“That was a valuable experience, and I wanted to share those lessons,” he said. “I just love the thought that when you travel, you get to know your enemies, which makes it tougher for their propaganda to dehumanize us, and when we come home, it makes it tougher for our propaganda to dehumanize them. It’s a real important force for peace.

“I’ve long appreciated the quote from Muhammed, who, 1,300 years ago, said, ‘Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you’ve traveled.’ ”

Steves really does put the focus on the journey, not the destination, and said he travels in order to come home changed.

Steves has truly been traveling nearly all his life. As a teen, he traveled to Europe for the first time with his parents, touring piano factories, and visited family in Norway. He made a solo trek to Europe when he turned 18.

About a decade after his first big trip, Steves explored the legendary Hippie Trail with friend Gene Openshaw, an adventure that took them through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal.

Steves took a class about the Hippie Trail before embarking on his own trip but was disappointed in what he felt was lazy instruction from someone who didn’t respect the importance of sharing travel experiences with one another.

After returning home from the Hippie Trail, Steves, then a piano teacher, was determined to create the class he wished he could have taken.

“I was thinking ‘It’s a beautiful thing to gain experience through travel and then share it,’ ” he said. “Immediately after the Hippie Trail, I started teaching my ‘How to Travel in Europe’ class. I eventually gave up my piano students and started my travel business. My mission has been to help people travel better.”

Steves was aware that by turning something he loved – traveling and sharing those experiences with others – into a career, he ran the risk of burning out, but the need to encourage others to travel was too great.

And thus, Rick Steves’ Europe was born. Steves self-published his first travel guide, “Europe through the Back Door,” and has since gone on to release dozens of other guides, covering nearly every inch of the continent.

Steves spends about four months in Europe every year, looking for more facts and fun for his guidebooks and tours. Some updates are as simple as new addresses or phone numbers for businesses or restaurants, while others are a little more complex and involve deciding if something that has been in the guidebook for years, a restaurant, museum or other tourist attraction, is still worthy of inclusion and hasn’t just been grandfathered in.

“When I travel, I want to know what is new for viewers, and make sure that what we used to have is still reliable,” he said.

Steves also looks for things that give people pause, like crowds, the impact of climate change and scams tourists can sometimes fall victim to.

To help with the worry about climate change, Steves pays a self-imposed carbon tax of $30 per tour member. As per Steves’ website, “Scientists and development experts figure it takes about $30 of careful investment in environmental initiatives in the developing world to mitigate the carbon emissions created by one round-trip flight between the U.S. and Europe.”

To help with the issue of crowds, Steves pushes what he calls second cities. Everyone is going to Lisbon, he said. What about Porto? Instead of Paris, why not visit Lyon or Marseille?

“These are exciting opportunities for people to get away from the crowds and get more reality,” he said.

Steves sees getting more reality and being among locals as a form of travel as a political act. The book of the same name also encourages people to go beyond their comfort zone and “choose to be challenged.”

The pinnacle, he said, of Maselow’s hierarchy of travel needs is traveling in such a way that you end up learning more about yourself and your home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance.

In other words, recognizing that culture shock is a good thing.

“It’s not something to be avoided,” he said. “It’s constructive. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective, and it needs to be curated. That’s what I like to think we do is curate culture shock. We certainly do not avoid it. We travel in order to learn from culture shock.”