799 Irish Oddities; Viking Sights; Cycling the Silk Road

19:39Do you want to come join? People in robes running away. Yeah.

19:44Rick Steves:To hear you, you're such a dear soul, and to hear you talk about your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather like that. They were just a bunch of peaceful people in robes running away, and we took their silver and their gold. So, of course, when it sounds so easy to get all this wealth, all this silver and gold, of course you want to join in next year. Next year. So regular farmers, regular men, family men became Vikings in that sense. They'd have that hunting season when it was... Yeah, yeah, exactly. The winds were right, and they could go over. And I'm fascinated by the fact, I believe, that much of Europe, for many generations, when they said their prayer, they didn't say amen, but they said in their own language, and deliver us from the Viking, and deliver us from the Norsemen, amen.

20:32Rick Steves:That was the standard close of a prayer if you lived in the west coast of France or England. Yes, for sure it was. They sent shockwaves throughout all of Europe. And a lot of people underestimate the reach of the Vikings. I understand the word Russia is from an old Norwegian word, which was for the Vikings, the Rus. Well, from what I heard, this was a tribe from Sweden, actually, from the area of Ruslage, which made it into what is today Russia, settled there, and so that's where the name Russia comes from. Okay, and Normandy, a very important part of France. It comes from the root Norman, the Northmen, the Vikings who settled there, and they became good citizens, I guess.

21:13Yeah, land of the Norsemen. They made it all the way to Constantinople as well.

21:18Rick Steves:Wow. Paul Johansen is a licensed travel guide based in Oslo, as well as a sailor, filmmaker, and writer. He's helped me research the Rick Steves Scandinavia Guidebook. Pal also offers custom tours and trip planning advice and profiles the cities, regions, and fjords of Norway on his website, norwaywithpal.com. He also runs a YouTube channel under that name and a palace spelled P-A-L. Hey, we're talking about Vikings, and this is a travel show. Let's talk about Viking sightseeing. I know the big news in Oslo is the wonderful Viking ships museum out in Bigdoy across the harbor from Oslo has been closed for years, and people have had to look other places for their Viking sights.

22:04Rick Steves:What's the status of the big Viking museum in Oslo, and what is your advice for seeing the best real artifacts? Because there was another place in Oslo that was open because this major museum was closed, and there was no artifacts there. And I don't like paying 20 bucks to go into a place where there's no historic artifacts. I can sit down and read a book for that, you know. But talk about artifacts and the future of Viking sightseeing in Norway. You have some excellent options for Viking sites in Scandinavia. First of all, all I can mention is that you have the Viking Ship Museum, which you mentioned is closed, which will reopen in 2027 as the Museum of the Viking Age.

22:45And it will contain the three ships that have been found. And it will also contain one of the largest collections of Viking artifacts in the world. So really something to look forward to.

22:58Rick Steves:And that's still in Bigdoy? That's still in Bigdoy, in the same spot. They're making it bigger. It's going to be three times bigger. So just so people know, if you're going to the best open-air folk museum in Norway, if you're going to see the Fram, the Arctic Exploration Vessel, or the Kontiki, it's all right together there, a 10-minute ferry ride across from the harbor in Oslo, and it's a wonderful day out. Yeah, so in 2027, we'll have the Museum of the Viking Age. Sounds like better than ever. I interrupted you. Carry on for more sites on Vikings. So meanwhile, I would say the best Viking sites you find in Sweden and Denmark.

23:37In Sweden, in Stockholm, the capital, they have a great exhibition at the Historical Museum where they have a collection of 2 ,500 objects. So it's a really good, really good exhibition. So I would not miss that.

23:52Rick Steves:I was just there, and as a Norwegian, it pained me to say that the best Viking sites right now are in Stockholm. But it's an amazing museum just out near the Vassa and Skansen. but on the mainland, not across the bridge. That's correct. So I definitely wouldn't miss that. And then if you're going to Denmark, the Copenhagen, for instance, then I would jump on a train and I would go out to the Roskilde Museum, Viking Ship Museum, where they have five original Viking ships. But what I like the most about actually that museum is that they have an outdoor shipyard. So you can actually see how these ships were built and sea shipbuilders in action, you know, splitting the logs and hammering in the iron nails.

24:38And it's really fascinating.

24:40Rick Steves:You know, when you talked about that and those ships, because I've seen those ships and apparently they scuttled those ships a thousand years ago to block the harbor. And then in modern times, they were sunk intentionally there and they brought them up and remarkably well preserved. It's rare to find wooden artifacts from the Viking age because wood does not survive a thousand years, especially in a land that's cold and wet and wants to have fires to stay warm and dry, and people burn each other's houses when they get mad at each other. It's kind of rare to find wooden treasures from a thousand years ago, isn't it?

25:16It is very rare. So whatever is found is found inside burial mounds or on the bed of the sea, basically.

25:25Rick Steves:So in a nutshell, for Viking sites, I think you summed it up very nicely. wonderful museum in Stockholm. Roskilde, which is a city, a great city with a wonderful heritage where most of the royalty is buried in the church there. You have the Viking Ships Museum in Roskilde in Denmark, about an hour from Copenhagen. And in Oslo, which is going to be the best of all of them, I think, when it opens. Until 2027, it's closed. So Norway's out of the running for great Viking artifacts until 2027 when it comes back. But what you also have around Scandinavia are megalithic sites, stones, sacred places, burial grounds, burial mounds.

26:04Rick Steves:I've been to several places in Scandinavia where you can find stones like Stonehenge, you know, but erected in the shape of a Viking ship. And apparently that would be a ceremonial burial ground a thousand years ago. There was one in my uncle's backyard, essentially, in Sandefjord, south of Oslo. There's a wonderful one on the island outside of Kalmar in Sweden. And there's also up in Balestrand, there's a mound with a burial from a Viking king that's a fascinating thing. Talk a little bit about archaeological sites and burial mounds and big stones that were put up 1 ,000 years ago. Yeah, there's a lot of nice sites as well where you can see stones and burial mounds.

26:48Perhaps my favorite is just a bit south of Oslo in a place called Horten. It's called the Midgard Viking Center. And they have a collection of burial mounds. It's really fascinating. It's a big open area. This was obviously sort of a Viking stronghold a thousand years ago. And there are just tons of burial mounds there. And you can walk among them. You can walk on top of them even. And they also have built a replica of a Viking longhouse there. So it's a great site just outside of Oslo.

27:21Rick Steves:And the name is, what is the name of that again? Midgard Viking Center. Midgard Viking Center. You know, you mentioned in the 11th century the Vikings went from being pagans and plunderers to being Christian and more settled down and having to trade. And their shipbuilding skills, it seems to me, were translated into churchbuilding skills, and they built these beautiful stave churches. And again, they're wooden, so a lot of them did not survive, but a lot of them have. To me, that's sort of the echo of the Viking spirit. It's still lived on through the Middle Ages and right up today. What's your advice on stave churches and seeing those?

28:00Well, there's about 29 stave churches left. You can find one in Oslo at the Open Air Folk Museum. Except for that, you find them pretty much scattered all over the west side, the western parts of Norway in the fjord country. I think that's a real highlight when you come to Norway to visit one of these stave churches.

28:22Rick Steves:To think they're 800 years old. They were built by the Viking culture, essentially, and they've survived. And they must have had a sense of a good view because they are situated so idyllically, so beautifully in fjord country. For some people, they can think, oh, if you've seen one, you've seen them all. But I've visited four or five great Viking stav churches, and they are beautiful. They're all different. They all have their history, their charm. Of course, they are decorated with Christian symbols, but many are decorated with dragon heads. and you find, you know, pagan symbols on the inside and so on.

28:56So it can really tell you a lot about the minds of the people that lived back then and that you were in this transition between, you know, being pagans and becoming Christians and having a foot in each religion could probably be a wise choice.

29:12Rick Steves:Pragmatic choice. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Paul Johansson. Paul's YouTube channel and his website are simply Norway with Paul, and that's spelled P-A-L. You know, Paul, I'm a Norwegian-American, and I seem to want to celebrate the Viking in me, but I don't know why. You're Norwegian-Norwegian. Do you celebrate the Viking in you? Or just to close it off with a thought, what does Viking mean to you? That's a really good question, Rick. I think we celebrate the Vikings in a lot of ways, but we're not so aware of it. A lot of the big traditions that we have in Scandinavia, like for instance Christmas, which is called jul in Norwegian, is actually a word for an old Viking sacrifice that took place.

30:03So in many ways we are celebrating the Vikings, but we might not be so aware of it anymore.

30:08Rick Steves:And way over here, as far as the Vikings wandered in the northwest of the United States, my grandmother, my dear grandmother, rest her soul, she would say, God jul. God jul, which means happy midwinter sacrifice. So she would tell me Merry Christmas by saying happy midwinter sacrifice. Well, Paul, good travels to you and good teaching as a wonderful tour guide. And tusen takk for joining us and sharing a fascinating glimpse. into Norway's Viking heritage. Thank you. Tusen takkig, Greg. The same thirst for adventure that led the Vikings to sail far from home has taken scores of fearless travelers across the interior of Asia.

31:07Rick Steves:When I did it as a college-age vagabond, we called it following the hippie trail. Kate Harris did postgraduate scientific studies with travel to Mars in mind. But when she planned a very long-distance bicycle adventure from Istanbul to the Himalayas, her inspiration was the historic Silk Road adventures of Marco Polo. Up next, one of Canada's foremost modern-day explorers tells us about pedaling for weeks across some of the world's most remote terrain in the former Soviet stands of Asia. and on a long uphill climb to the Himalayas. It's getting wild in the Lands of Lost Borders, next on Travel with Rick Steves.

31:47Rick Steves:Kate Harris grew up wanting to be a globetrotting explorer, so she invited a childhood friend to join her on a bike ride across Asia along the fabled Silk Road. From Turkey to Tajikistan, and even sneaking into Tibet, they had quite an adventure, and she writes about it in her book, Lands of Lost Borders. Kate Harris, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me, Rick. What an epic bike ride. Now, before we get into the big discussion, can you just give us a quick outline of where the trip went, countries, how long were you on the road, and so on? Sure. We traveled through 10 countries in between Turkey and India, and it took us 10 months in total, and it was around 10 ,000 kilometers.

32:32I know this is America, so I put that in miles. That's right, 6 ,000 miles. Not sure. 6 ,000 miles. Whoa. On the bike over 10 months, all across Asia. You looped around through China and ended up in Kashmir, northern India. Yeah, that's right. Wow. Now, why? Just why? There's a lot of biking over 10 miles in places where there's no guidebook to help you out. Yeah, that's true. We could have used some of your guidebooks out there in the stands, especially. Why? Mostly sheer curiosity and desire to know what's around the next bend. And I was fascinated with The Silk Road as a child. My mother had this book that I loved that had been hers as a child.

33:11It was this illustrated, abridged edition of Marco Polo's Travels. And he just looked like the consummate explorer to me, you know, like rugged and bold and gazing off at distant, fantastic horizons. The Silk Road, I think of it as, well, it was a trading route back in the days of Marco Polo that took you from China to the gateway to Europe, kind of, in Turkey or something. but physically, what is the Silk Road? And what do you see when you spend 10 months biking on it? Is there anything that goes back that can evoke the days of Marco Polo? Yeah, well, the Silk Road is really a label we've put on to a network of roads that were trading routes between Europe and Asia.

33:47So they ferried goods, people, and ideas back and forth. It's still alive and well in a lot of ways. Essentially, in a lot of the historic trading hubs that Marco Polo visited, You can still see original architecture dating back to that era. What century was that with Marco Polo? 13th, 13th century. So the 1200, so 800 years ago, 300 years before Columbus or centuries before Vasco da Gama and Magellan and so on. This was before they knew the world was round. And it was just, must have been just so exciting to connect the West with the East. And so when you think about your bike ride, if you describe it, I was reading through the chapters on Georgia, for instance, and it sounded, Georgia, former Soviet Union, it sounded pretty grim and dull out there a lot of the times.

34:35What was it like day after day, 100 miles after 100 miles, pedaling across these vast expanses? Yeah, well, part of the dullness of Georgia, Georgia's an incredible country, and I would love to go back. But in the summertime, because we were there in the winter, and so it was pretty gray and cold a lot of the time. But the warmth of the people we met along the way definitely made up for that. I feel like there's so many ways to travel. And cycling in particular exposes you to the world around you in a way that few other modes do. You know, if you're on a bus or a train. The other thing we noticed with cycling is everyone rides bikes everywhere along the Silk Road.

35:14They use them to get to work, go out for a joyride. We would pass just like masses of school kids heading to school on bicycles, and we'd join them for a little spell. It must have been fun for them to see a couple of women from Canada on bikes and just plopping into their world. Alien invaders, I think they saw us in that category. Was there a circle of travelers that could share information? I've never seen a guidebook for the, quote, Silk Road. Did you get information online, or how did you know how to cross borders and what to eat where and where you might sleep or what you might see in the middle of Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan or whatever as you were biking across.

35:51We'd essentially do big information gathering sessions when we had access to the internet in some of the bigger cities. And in between that, we were kind of on our own. We would get information from families we stayed with that welcomed us into their homes or other cyclists going the other way. So we'd chat with them. It's a quite popular cycling route. I mean, lots of people bike the Silk Road. There's a lot of experience out there, and there are ways to share information. I remember when I took the bus ride, when I was a backpacker from Istanbul all the way to Kashmir, where you ended up, people had to share information, and there was a hunger for information, and you'd meet the same people all along the route because this was the route, the hippie trail to India from Europe, you know.

36:33Is there a dimension of that for biking the Silk Road? Did you meet other travelers at hostels in the middle of nowhere and so on? Yeah, there are certainly places where we all seem to congregate because there are so many variations on the Silk Road that you can follow, but everyone seemed to show up in Kashgar, for example, or Dushanbe in Tajikistan. That was in part due to embassies. These were the places where you had to get the visas you needed to continue traveling. Oh, so you're just hanging out waiting for your visas to be processed. Yeah, swapping stories. What about shots? Did you have to worry about shots when you crossed the border?

37:08Shots like... Inoculations? Oh, vaccinations? Yeah. No. No, we were never asked about that. That was a big deal back in the old days, crossing a border. Everybody had their yellow vaccination record sheet. And if you didn't have the right shots on your yellow vaccination sheet, you had to wait until tomorrow when the nurse came in. And I'll never forget being at a border and watching the needle bend as they put it into my friend's arm. It was such an old needle. And you can't cross the border unless you get the shot.

37:34Rick Steves:So you don't have to worry about that now. Did you have to worry? You went through 10 different countries. You crossed 10 borders. Did you need visas or did you just say, hi, I'm a Canadian and we're biking around? Oh, I wish it were that easy. We certainly needed visas. That was one of the biggest headaches of the trip. Central Asia in particular, all the stands, I don't know what it was like when you went through, I guess it was all part of the Soviet Union. Nowadays, the visas are, tourist visas are very restrictive. Like you have to enter on a certain date and leave on a certain assigned date.

38:03And so lining those up was sort of like this elaborate game of chess with the different rules that operate in Uzbekistan versus Kazakhstan versus Kyrgyzstan. Was that done one capital at a time? So you'd be in Uzbekistan and you'd go to the capital of Tajikistan or you'd go to the capital city to get your visa or learn what you needed for the next country down the road. Did you kind of think one country ahead or did you have it all laid out from the beginning? There was a bit of a strategy. So you had to think at least one country ahead. So, for example, to get our Chinese visa en route, the only country in all of Central Asia that was granting Chinese tourist visas to foreigners was in Uzbekistan.

38:44And so at one point it looked like we wouldn't be able to get to Uzbekistan. Our visas were denied the first time. And we just thought the whole trip was fragmented at that point because we couldn't weave together a route that would get us to China. But you talked about slipping through a border at night when nobody was there. Now, that just seems like you're looking for trouble. You literally snuck into a country when nobody was at the border just because you thought, heck, we got places to go. No, it wasn't a border per se. Although in the past it has been. We basically snuck into the Tibetan autonomous region within China.

39:19So this used to be Tibet, independent nation. And now it's a regional boundary. And they have checkpoints that restrict access mostly to locals. They're quite concerned about locals leaving that region. So yeah, we snuck in because as foreigners, you need permits, special permits and guides. And the permits really restrict where you can go within the Tibetan Autonomous Region. And we didn't want to be let around on a leash. And so we snuck in. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're joined by explorer Kate Harris. And she and her childhood girlfriend biked all across the fabled Silk Road. And she writes about that in her book called Lands of Lost Borders.

39:58Today, Kate calls remote northern British Columbia her home. Her website is kateharris.ca. Hey, Kate, your book is called Lands of Lost Borders. Why that title? Well, the borders were certainly not lost in a political sense and physical sense. We saw lots of walls and needed a lot of visas to travel the Silk Road. But I was hoping to evoke the idea that travel is about breaking down the borders in your own mind, most of all, and seeing the world differently and seeing ambiguities where before you saw things in black and white. So those are the lost borders I'm referring to. And did you come away with that souvenir from your trip?

40:37Absolutely. How so? I guess I have a deepened appreciation for complexity and just how complicated things are in countries that operate very differently from Canada and the U.S. You know, I've wondered about that, too, because we could just say, oh, they don't have a democracy. Let's throw out their leader and get them a democracy. But it's probably more complicated than that. Yeah, as Afghanistan is testament to. I think there's a way of, I don't know, we do things a certain way here in North America and think that that can be exported and successful in a different cultural context. And that's so often not the case.

41:13One of the stories I like to hold up from traveling through Tajikistan is the fact that national parks there in the form of sectioned off parcels of land that supposedly have rangers that patrol it and protect the wildlife and ecosystems within it just don't work. They're some of the most or the least biodiverse parts of Tajikistan. And the most biodiverse parts of Tajikistan happen to be within like hunting conservancies because foreigners will pay a lot of money to trophy hunt Marco Polo sheep, for example. And that money supports the protection of Marco Polo sheep, which supports protection of snow leopards by extension.

41:51And so the whole ecosystem is kind of held up by trophy hunting, which, you know, in Sierra Club card holding members back home, that's not really an appealing approach to conservation. But when you have a country as poor as Tajikistan that has few other options for doing conservation the way we do it here, it makes you think twice. Okay, let's go through your trip now, Kate, just very quickly. After pedaling 6 ,000 miles, what was the most jaw-dropping view you can remember from your bike? Oh my gosh, that's a challenging question. Or one of the very best. One of the best. We bike through Tajikistan, or sorry, Uzbekistan.

42:29I get all the stains mixed up even now. At night for the most part, because it was so hot by day in the deserts of Central Asia that it was pretty much insufferable to ride. And so we would camp out all day and swelter in our tent and then set off as the sunset and ride through the night until sort of dusk. And then we'd kind of crash. and biking at night under the stars. I feel like I came to know that country more by its constellations than by any terrestrial landmarks. It was absolutely surreal to be sort of flying through the stars. It was an incredibly flat desert where they seemed to come right down to Earth.

43:03What was the scariest close call? You pedaled 6 ,000 miles. Did you feel safe on your bike? We did for the most part. Certainly in terms of the people we met, we never felt at risk in the slightest. The scariest part was traffic. You're on the road with transport trucks and cars that aren't used to seeing cyclists in some cases, and they'll pass by as close as possible and honk their horn and wave, and it's the friendliest gesture imaginable, but you're terrified for your life. In the middle of nowhere, you don't have a 911 you can call. No. I was just talking to somebody about safety for travel, and by far the biggest cause of deaths for travelers is road accidents in countries where there's no 911 service.

43:45Yeah, I believe it. Did you ever get really discouraged or depressed halfway through your 10-month odyssey and think, why did we do this? Or maybe your friend said, what are we doing here? And you just felt like almost aborting the mission. Oh, gosh. I almost wanted to abort the first week when we were in Turkey. And it was January. And we were on the Black Sea coast. So it was extremely rainy. And it would sort of hover around being freezing rain and then would sort of lean into being snow. So we were just soaking wet all the time. And the Black Sea coast is very corrugated, so we were either going up or down.

44:18And we'd be super hot as we went up and then freezing cold as we went down. It was just a really hard start to the trip. And it wasn't the sort of dreamy, romantic expedition that I had envisioned. It was just hard. And I'm glad it came at the beginning of the trip. Yeah. I remember doing that. Not that my odyssey was nothing like yours, but I started and ended in the same spot from Istanbul to Kashmir. And I remember getting onto that. And they actually had a map that was the hippie trail from Turkey to India. And this map was long. It was like a long, skinny map. And you'd open it up and it had like six or eight panels as you opened it longer and longer and longer from the left to the right.

44:57And we would be on the bus for a couple of days and we'd open up this thing. It's like we've gone nowhere. This is going to take us forever. And you must have had a similar sense of that when you started pedaling out of Istanbul thinking, so we're going to China, huh? Yeah. And that's what people would ask us, like, where are you going? And we'd say Hindustan, which is what they call India in Turkey. They would just laugh. I can imagine that. Was there a euphoric moment that comes to mind over the whole trip? I think the final pass on the road through Tibet. So we'd been sneaking illegally across Tibet the whole time.

45:32And we came to the final pass, which is past Everest base camp turnoff. You're in the heart of the highest mountains in the world. and then you plunge from, I think it's about 16 ,000, 17 ,000 feet all the way down to 3 ,000 feet in Nepal. And so you go through sort of this lunar barren landscape and then get lower and there's more foliage and you get even lower and it starts to feel tropical. It was just an incredible day and 100 kilometers of pure downhill from that high pass. And this was coming into Ladakh? Into Nepal, actually. Into Nepal, yeah. Yeah, we had to kind of do this, as you described, this like spiral in to get to Northern India, mostly because of borders.

46:14At one point we were in Tajikistan, we were like 400 kilometers from our final destination, but we had to go 4 ,000 kilometers to get there because of borders.

46:24Rick Steves:Kate Harris is the kind of person who really doesn't let a border tell her no. For one thing, she lives off-grid in a cabin not far from the Yukon near Atlin, British Columbia. She's joining us from the Travel with Rick Steves archives and the CBC Studios in Toronto. Kate writes about her long-distance cycling adventures across Asia in her book Lands of Lost Borders, A Journey on the Silk Road. It won a number of prestigious literary awards when it was released back in 2019. And she's still working on a second memoir about what she calls Wanderlust Gone Local. Kate's posted photos and videos from her cycling adventures with her partner Mel with links to articles she's written.

47:05Rick Steves:It's on her website, kateharris.ca. And she's on Facebook and Instagram. Kate is also a facility editor at the Wilderness Writers' Retreat at Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, B.C. I remember when I was traveling across Asia, I would almost measure how far I was from my destination by how many borders I had to cross. What was it like coming up to a border on a bike when you're surrounded by, a lot of times at these borders you have a long line of trucks and cargo that's waiting to get across. Did you ever find a huge backup and you could go straight to the front, or were you just stuck there with everybody else who was laying on blankets under their trucks for days on end?

47:44I can tell you've traveled this route because, yeah, things have not changed in that respect. We would essentially jump the line with people's encouragement. So we'd bike right up to the front. So truckers would be waiting there for days and they'd see you guys like, go ahead, go right to the front and get to the front. And hopefully you've got everything in your passport in order. Yeah, we were always afraid at every border that they'd find some reason not to let us through, especially in the stands where they're very wary of foreigners, for one, but especially journalists. And so we would always get asked, like, are you a journalist?

48:16No, no. So you just said tourism. I'm a writer. Writer. You just said tourist. Tourist. That's the easiest way to cross a border. I'm just a silly tourist. That's right. Did you ever have to bribe your... Did you ever find yourself in a position where you had to bribe your way out of trouble or bribe to make something happen? Sort of. So in Uzbekistan, we needed to have proof of where we'd stayed each night. And since we were spending many nights in a tent, this was impossible. And so we found a hotel, and the hotel concierge was willing to, for a sum of money, willing to backdate a bunch of these receipts to fill in the gaps.

48:51They probably knew this. And so we were so proud of ourselves. They probably knew that tourists needed it, and they had a little business of adding overnights. Or they knew we didn't need it, as it turned out, because we were so excited to show our bribed receipts at the exit border, heading into Tajikistan from Uzbekistan, and they didn't even ask for them. I feel like it was a big make-work project. Oh, my goodness. But you never know. You don't want to go to the border and not be prepared. Yeah. They have a lot of power, these borders. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Kate Harris.

49:18Her book is Lands of Lost Borders, a journey on the Silk Road, talking about her epic bike ride. Kate, after this huge investment of time and energy and emotion, what do you take home from this adventure that you set out on? Well, it's so easy to despair by the state of the world based on what we hear in the news and in some cases that despair is justified, but I really feel like if you hit the road, especially by bicycle and travel at all anywhere, you'll see that the world is full of incredible, kind people who mostly want the same things that you do and it's an incredibly hopeful undertaking.

49:58I don't think you can come back from a trip like this without feeling a lot of hope for the future, which is hard to come by if you pick up a newspaper. I think the world would be a better place if everybody had a few days to be on a bicycle in Tajikistan.

50:12Rick Steves:I completely agree. Kate Harris, thank you so much for sharing your adventure, and happy continued biking. Thank you, Rick. It was a joy talking to you.

50:24Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington, by Tim Tappan, Kazmira Hall, and Donna Bardsley. Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Jerry Frank wrote and performed our theme music. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves.

50:46Rick Steves:Hey, Rick Steves here. In 1978, I was a 23-year-old piano teacher dreaming of trekking the fabled Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. With my buddy Gene, we booked the tickets, packed our rucksacks, and sat out on the adventure of a lifetime. My new book, On the Hippie Trail, features my journal and vivid photos from that coming-of-age trip. Squeeze into rickshaws, sail the sacred Ganges, and look into the eyes of the virgin goddess as you stow away with me on the legendary hippie trail. My book, On the Hippie Trail, is available wherever books are sold.