In short
A two-part Travel with Rick Steves episode. First, photographer Greta Rebus shares favorite European hot springs and explains hot springs’ geology and long cultural histories. She contrasts community-oriented public baths (Iceland, Hungary) with the austere, sensory design of Terme Vals in Switzerland. Second, Tom Tursich recounts his circumnavigation on foot—28,000 miles across 38 countries over seven years—walking ocean-to-ocean on four continents with his dog Savannah.
Guests and backgrounds
Greta Rebus is a freelance photojournalist who grew up in the American West and later lived in Japan; she travels to collect stories for her book Hot Springs. Tom Tursich is an adventurer and author of The World Walk; he walked around the world after a friend’s death, starting from New Jersey.
Key claims
Hot springs form when groundwater reaches deep heat and returns mineral-rich; societies built architecture and spiritual narratives around them. Public baths foster equality and community; doctors in Hungary prescribe hot-water treatments. Tom’s core lesson: embrace constraints, know your values, and live one life fully.
Notable examples
Bath (Aquae Sulis) in England; Bormio linked to Pliny the Elder; Delphi steam inhalation; Pamukkale/Hierapolis legends of Cleopatra and Mark Antony; Baden-Baden Roman emperors. Tom’s highlights include Colombia’s Paramo moss and tapirs, and Chile’s Atacama “blanket of stars.” Biggest safety threats: cars; worst injury: a bacterial infection in South America; he camped ~95% of nights.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Hot Springs with Greta Rebus
0:53 to 2:42
Greta Rebus discusses her love for hot springs and her book on the topic.
“It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime and a remarkable feat that few others have dared to try.”
The Historical Significance of Hot Springs
2:42 to 4:00
Discussion on the ancient history and cultural significance of hot springs.
“And typically, human beings alter and adjust that hot water in a variety of ways.”
Stories of Famous Hot Springs
4:00 to 6:40
Greta and Rick share stories about notable hot springs, including Bormio and Delphi.
“He was right there where you were soaking.”
Public Baths: Community in Iceland and Hungary
6:40 to 7:56
Exploration of how public baths are integral to Icelandic and Hungarian culture.
“Greta Rivas is sharing a few moments with us at scenic hot springs that you might want to dip into in Europe or Turkey.”
Therme Vals: A Unique Experience
7:56 to 10:50
Greta describes her spiritual experience at Terme Vals in Switzerland.
“A lot of the Icelandic people that I talked to talked about how important municipal pools and public pools were not only to their daily life, but to the establishment of their country.”
Conclusion of Hot Springs Discussion
10:50 to 12:39
Reflections on the various experiences one can have at hot springs.
“You sense the sound of water echoing through these brutalist chambers.”
Tom Tursich's Journey Around the World
13:31 to 14:02
Tom shares his experience of walking 28,000 miles around the world.
“Enough to walk around the world, actually.”
Tom Tursich's Journey: Walking Around the World
14:02 to 20:35
Learn about Tom's seven-year journey walking 28,000 miles across 38 countries.
“he set out from his home in New Jersey and headed south.”
The Motivation Behind the Journey
20:36 to 24:23
Explore Tom's personal motivations and the impact of a friend's death on his travels.
“We're taking a stroll, just a wee stroll around the world today with Tom Tursich.”
Life on the Road: Safety and Survival
24:24 to 28:00
Discover the safety challenges Tom faced while walking and how he managed his lifestyle.
“You know, I've always thought, Tom, when I travel, I talk to people half my age, and I think, wow, you are really getting a lot out of life.”
Show all 19 chapters
Traveling with a Dog: A Unique Experience
28:00 to 30:30
Learn about the joys and challenges of traveling on foot with a dog.
“One that was versatile enough to camp anywhere and big enough for me and Savannah.”
Listener Haikus: Travel Memories in Verse
30:30 to 31:05
Hear poetic reflections from listeners about their travel experiences.
“with one of the craziest ways I've ever heard of for getting your steps in.”
Tom Tersich's Global Walking Adventure
31:05 to 33:18
Discover the route and lessons learned from walking around the world.
“Diana Turner from New Orleans sends us this haiku about an unexpected dinner in Morocco.”
Navigating Borders and Cultural Landscapes
33:18 to 39:08
Explore the complexities of borders and cultural intersections experienced while traveling.
“How did you get to the Pacific end of Eurasia?”
Physical Challenges and Safety on the Road
39:08 to 42:05
Understand the physical demands of long-distance walking and safety precautions taken.
“And 100 years later, they're still paying the price for this colonial greed and carelessness.”
Navigating Safety and Trust While Traveling
42:05 to 45:03
Learn about the importance of assessing safety and trust in unfamiliar environments while traveling.
“Kind of like a different world after dark in a lot of places.”
The Lessons of Traveling and Human Connection
45:04 to 48:19
Explore how traveling fosters a sense of humanity and teaches valuable life lessons about relationships.
“Tom Tursich is one of only 17 people who've joined that rarefied list of pedestrian circumnavigators.”
Embracing Life's Limitations and Values
48:20 to 49:29
Understand the significance of embracing life's constraints while pursuing personal values and adventures.
“No, I mean, and again, it's a reason traveling teaches you to be really good company to yourself.”
Reflections on a Seven-Year Journey
49:30 to 50:00
Hear insights from a traveler on the transformative experience of walking around the world for seven years.
“So it's sort of just being okay with one life.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Rick Steves:How does a nice soak in a geothermal spring sound right about now? There are many scenic spas you can visit that people have been enjoying for centuries. As Greta Rebus knows, hot springs can be a real highlight of any trip to Europe or Asia. There is still this hunger and excitement for those geothermal parts of the world. Coming up, she takes us to a few of her favorite hot springs in Europe. On the other hand, Tom Tursich had a goal to be one of the few people to walk all the way around the world. You need to cover the circumference of the Earth and then walk ocean to ocean on four continents.
0:37Rick Steves:He tells us how it changed his life over seven years, 28 ,000 miles, 34 pairs of shoes, and with a faithful dog at his side. Traveling teaches you to be really good company to yourself, because if you're not, then it's a bad time. Come along and embrace the moment with us for the hour ahead. It's Travel with Rick Steves.
1:00Rick Steves:It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime and a remarkable feat that few others have dared to try. You could call it a really long walk, one that would take him across 38 countries on six continents through deserts, jungles, cities, and mountains. And it would show Tom Tursich what the world and its cultures could teach him about the value of living day to day. Tom's one of the few people to walk all the way around the world. He tells us how he did it in just a bit. But let's start out today's Travel with Rick Steves on a more indulgent note with photographer Greta Rebus. Growing up in Idaho and Japan, Greta's always had a hot spot for thermal waters and community baths.
1:38Rick Steves:She takes us along to some of the world's most compelling thermal pools, springs, and spas in her book Hot Springs, photos and stories of how the world soaks, swims, and slows down. She's back with us on Travel with Rick Steves to explore some of her favorites in Europe. Hey, Greta. Hi, Rick. Wow, your book is fascinating, exposing us to a dimension of travel that many of us might not appreciate, thermal baths. Where did that come from? How did Greta Rebus become so enamored with hot springs? Well, I live in Maine where there are no natural thermal baths, but I grew up in the American West where there are tons and tons of hot springs.
2:16It was a big part of my upbringing, and when I was in my teens, My family moved to Japan, where hot springs were very different. So that sparked a curiosity about how different people around the world experience geothermal water. And I started traveling the world to collect stories about hot springs and public baths.
2:32Rick Steves:Now, just for sort of a basic foundation in appreciating this, thermal hot springs, what do they have in common geologically? Hot springs occur when groundwater goes deep into the Earth's surface and counters heat and reemerges, bringing with it minerals and warmth. And typically, human beings alter and adjust that hot water in a variety of ways. Oftentimes, they're building beautiful architecture around it, creating stories to explain it, or legends to help us understand it. So there are so many different ways to experience hot water. Now, your book goes all over the world, but what I'd like to do for this discussion is just talk about hot springs that you might encounter in Europe.
3:14Rick Steves:And one thing I noticed is that hot springs generally have a very long history. I mean, for centuries, people have been coming here, even before they understood why it was happening or what it's supposed to mean. You know, Bath in England is famous for its hot springs, and the original name for Bath was Aquasoulis. It was, I'm sure, the waters of the gods or something like that. And finally, they just called the town Bath. You talk about in your book Bormio, which says it's named for a Celtic god of healing waters in Italy. So we think it in terms maybe of a modern resort. But these mineral hot springs have deep roots historically.
3:55Rick Steves:Talk a little bit about that ancient dimension of hot springs. When I was at a wild public pool in Bormio, Italy, I was sitting with a local person who said, you know, Pliny the Elder was here and he wrote about this place 2 ,000 years ago. Yeah. He was right there where you were soaking. Exactly. And while we were sitting there, this man pointed to the hillside above us and told me of all the people that had been there. He said that there was a stone in which a Celtic god's name had been inscribed on. And there are records of religious practices that look very different than our soaking experience now.
4:43People climbing into steaming caves in order to prove their faith or their devotion to different gods or to explore different realms of spirituality.
4:55Rick Steves:I love that in our travels, for us to be open to imagining in an age when they didn't have electricity, when they've never experienced hot water, and then, bam, you jump into this thing and it's just coming out of the earth with fanfare and you can't help but think, hey, this has something to do with the gods. I mean, Delphi, the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, was a place where people traveled from all over the known world to inhale the steam that was coming out of the earth and then the priestesses would do that and they would babble and then they would think that was wisdom from the gods. I think when you go to Pamukkale, you write about Pamukkale in the antique pool of Heropolis.
5:37Rick Steves:You're standing on pillars that were carved by Greeks 400 years before Christ. Wow. Tell us a story about Heropolis. Antony constructed a hot spring pool for Cleopatra or so the legend goes. and it was surrounded by ornate columns with a roof that let the light filter in. And during an earthquake, all of those columns toppled into the hot spring pool. But the hot spring pool and the columns are still there to this day. And when you talk about that, I can feel my feet on those slimy columns because I've stood there and sort of skied down the fluting. And I think, I didn't realize this story, but that was a love gift from Mark Anthony to Cleopatra.
6:22Rick Steves:Exactly. And we can touch it as people have sensed that earthquake. But you have these opportunities. You go to Baden-Baden in Germany in the Black Forest, and you realize the Roman emperors traveled all the way from Rome to there so they could soak because they believed the water would cure their rheumatism. Right. It's interesting because I feel that there is still this hunger and excitement for those geothermal parts of the world where we can slow down, where we can feel what our body feels like in different temperatures and different minerals, and we can feel a bit of kinship with the people that came before us.
6:59Rick Steves:Greta Rivas is sharing a few moments with us at scenic hot springs that you might want to dip into in Europe or Turkey. Greta is a freelance photojournalist and features her favorite springs from a dozen countries in her book Hot Springs, photos and stories of how the world soaks, swims, and slows down. Her website is GretaRibus.com, spelled R-Y-B-U-S. You know, Greta, we're just featuring hot springs in Europe out of the whole globe, and a lot of these hot springs are in peripheral corners of Europe, Iceland, Hungary, Turkey, the Azores, and so on. And when I think of two societies as different as can be, it would be Icelanders and Hungarians.
7:44Rick Steves:But for both of them, thermal hot springs are a big deal. Can you give us some thoughts on how thermobads are a way of life for Icelanders and Hungarians and how that might be similar and how they might be distinct? A lot of the Icelandic people that I talked to talked about how important municipal pools and public pools were not only to their daily life, but to the establishment of their country. Iceland was a relatively new country wanting to catch up with the rest of Europe. And when they established a lot of their towns, they would create a few public features for the townspeople. So that would typically include some sort of way of having commerce and a school and a public bath.
8:28So the public bath is a fixture for Icelandic people before and after work, a way of recreation, a way of people to find equality and commonality with one another. A lot of times people are going to their local public bath with their co-workers or their community members.
8:45Rick Steves:One thing that's striking is every neighborhood, it seems, has a bath. You know, the tourists all go to the Blue Lagoon and pay$100 to go in there and soak. But locals wouldn't do that. They pay$6 and go to their neighborhood pool and hang out with the mayor. Exactly. And I feel there's this, is that the word egalitarian? I mean, everybody is equal. Yeah. And you get down to your swimming suit and feel like, hey, we're a community. I just love that. And then you go over to Budapest in Hungary, and you find the old guys, as they probably do several times a week, getting pruny fingers, playing chess in the corner.
9:20Rick Steves:And they're there in their bathing suits, soaking and playing chess like good Hungarians. It's kind of community, isn't it? I think a lot of it is about community and a lot of it is also about providing a community function. So in Hungary, the public baths were often used for either essentially like sanitation, helping people clean their bodies, and also for people to have a bit of recreation. And in Hungary, it also provides the function of public medicine. A lot of doctors are prescribing a hot spring soak or treatment or even exercises in hot water. I'd like to finish our conversation, Greta, with a hot springs that you covered in Switzerland at Terme Valls.
10:06Rick Steves:And when I read about it, it just seemed kind of brutal to me, very, very stripped down and stark. In your book, you wrote you had more of a spiritual experience than you expected. I think the austerity of it is not for everyone. It's essentially an art project by the architect Peter Zumthor. And when you're in it, you can feel that. So no phones are allowed inside the hot bath. There are no visible clocks except for these tall, thin posts with a tiny clock on top. So you really have to look for any sense of time. There are the big slabs of granite that your wet feet leave very temporary footprints that fade within a few minutes.
10:58You sense the sound of water echoing through these brutalist chambers. there's one pool that's extremely hot and glowing red and another pool that is extremely cold and glows blue and I was not allowed to photograph in it during their open hours I photographed in the few minutes of daylight that were remaining while the cleaners were using the pool and I just observed the way light moved and sound moved, the way temperature felt. And it was almost as if the simplicity of the space allowed for my senses to feel almost like this cacophony. And it was really transcendent to just be with my senses in that way.
11:52Whereas some of the other hot springs that I had been to were really about community and connection and vibrancy. And that's what I love so much about a hot bath is they all feel so different. And if you show up to them with that sense of intention to experience whatever magic has come up from the inside of the earth with the water, whatever magic that the people that created that space over history have made for us, then we get to have a truly transcendent experience that might be different from place to place. Hmm.
12:30Rick Steves:That makes me want to go, strip down to my bathing suit, and soak until the sun comes down in the next country I visit. Thanks, Greta, and best wishes with your work and your teaching. Thank you so much.
12:46Rick Steves:Greta Rebus also posts her photos of Scenic Hot Springs on Instagram. and she's co-produced a series of one-hour ambient soundscapes for relaxing to the sounds of a remote rocky beach, rain on a metal roof, and rolling thunder. It's called World Peace, spelled P-I-E-C-E. You can view her work and listen to her earlier visit with us from a link with today's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. Up next, Tom Tercich tells us what he discovered about life and himself as he walked 28 ,000 miles all the way around the world. And he did it with a trusty canine companion. He shares his story about the World Walk next on Travel with Rick Steves.
13:30Rick Steves:You could say Tom Tursich likes to walk a lot. Enough to walk around the world, actually. He and his dog Savannah walked 28 ,000 miles across 38 countries to become the 10th person and the first dog to walk all around the world. The idea came to him in the aftermath of the sudden death of a close friend in high school, and Tom realized that, boy, life can be fleeting. Let's get the most out of it. After years of planning and the day before his 26th birthday, he set out from his home in New Jersey and headed south. Seven years later, he returned home to New Jersey. Step by step, he experienced everything from extreme weather and illness to visa problems and loneliness.
14:14Rick Steves:But he also encountered immense generosity, breathtaking landscapes, and a deeper understanding of grief and courage. It's all in his book. It's called The World Walk, and Tom joins us today to talk about what it's like to walk around the world and why that's a good way to spend seven years. Tom, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Rick. Wow, 28 ,000 miles, 38 countries, seven years, and 34 pairs of shoes. Yeah, at least. I'd say that's a conservative estimate. Hey, legally from like a Guinness Book of World Records, what constitutes walking around the world? Yeah, so you need to cover the circumference of the Earth and then walk ocean to ocean on four continents.
14:59Rick Steves:Ocean to ocean on four continents. So you did that from New Jersey to Chile or something like that. Yeah, New Jersey down to Panama and then Colombia down to Uruguay and then Denmark down to Spain across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. So that's interesting. Across sea to sea. Sea to sea. Does it make sense? Because you had a lot of time on the road to think about this, these sort of requirements to say, yes, you walked. Because you could go up to the top of Greenland and you could almost ice skate around the world in two days, you know. That's true. You could. Yeah, that'd be a workaround. I mean, I guess you need something.
15:37It feels pretty arbitrary. I think it's more like you know it when you see it kind of thing. There's people who have walked around the world with less miles than I have. There's people who have done more miles. I'm probably a little above the middle out of the 10 of us. But you kind of know it when you see it. You've been out there a while. You're worn. You're tired. You've probably done it.
15:58Rick Steves:You guys are quite a club. Are you all alive still? Yeah, everyone's alive. Yeah, yeah, everyone. The first one, Steve Newman, is in Ohio. He's still alive. He called me on the last day I finished the walk. It was amazing. And I spoke with another one, Carl Bushby, who's still walking around the world before I began. So my adventure was kind of bookend by these other world walkers. Because you know if somebody's three years into this or if somebody's one year into it, you say, call me back in three years. That's it. Because a lot of people probably start out. Does it generally take five or six or seven years or something?
16:31Yeah, that's about right. I think the shortest that was a young Canadian kid did in three years. And Carl Bushby has been doing it for like in the 20 years plus.
16:42Rick Steves:Yeah. So, yeah, I'd say like four or five years. It depends. I was thinking about it. So you got seven years. You got 28 ,000 miles. I did the arithmetic. It's about, what do you figure, 11 miles a day? Yeah. 11 miles a day. 34 shoes. You said that's an estimate, but that's precisely 823 miles per pair of shoes. Yeah, that's pretty accurate, I'd say. I wore, I would try and replace the shoes as often as I could. I wore Brooks Cascadias. I had the first year I tried a bunch of different shoes and I was getting a lot of blisters, losing a lot of toenails and it was not quite working. And then a friend sent me who works for Brooks, a pair of Brooks Cascadia's and they fit my foot just right.
17:23And they saved me from a lot of agony. So then I did basically whatever I could to get those shoes.
17:28Rick Steves:I was thinking of you in some market in Vietnam looking for some tennis shoes or something. I did that plenty in Central America. I did that plenty and I paid the price. Oh, you realize, no, no, no, I'm just going to, they're going to ship it to me. Exactly, yeah. Hey, I just want to try to bring this to reality for most of us who, for me, 100 miles is a long way. A couple times in my life I've hiked 80 or 100 miles over the course of a week, and that's epic for me. And you did this for seven years straight. Of all that time, when you think back on it, where's a moment where you really were just enchanted by where you were?
18:07There's a lot of places. I think that's what was so amazing about the walk. I would get these little tastes of life in every place and see how just ordinary people are living. I think the one that comes to mind first off when you say enchanted is when I was in Columbia and I was up in the Paramo, which is this area above the timber line that gets about 300 days of rain a year. So it's kind of like a rainforest without the forest. And this moss grows on the rocks, you know, like 18 inches. You could push your hand in it forever and never touched a rock. And there's waterfalls and tapirs. And it's just a very wild, ethereal place.
18:53And that was, you know, one of these moments where I felt like I could live a life here in a certain way. You could live in a little shack up here and have your hot tea in the morning and live a very simple, peaceful life up there. But you have that so many times in all these different places where you get a taste of what life is like there. And you want a bit of it, but you only have one life. So you got to keep moving.
19:15Rick Steves:Related to that, because I just think of these words when I try to describe highlights of my travels. Awestruck. Were you ever awestruck? Yeah, of course. Especially in the Atacama Desert in Chile, which I was in for a long time. I walked down the coast of Peru in Chile for about six months. I was in the desert. Now, that's supposed to be the driest place on earth, right? I remember reading you had to kind of really be concerned about how much water you took with you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There were stretches there where I was going pretty regularly three, four days between towns, sometimes five days between towns.
19:50And then with Savannah, my dog, you got to carry extra water. And in the morning, a lot of time I'd wake up and my lip would be cracked because it was so dry. My hands were basically parched white because the air was so dry. But the benefit of that is that the stars there are unbelievable. There you go, awestruck.
20:10Rick Steves:I was thinking that it might be something to do with the skies. And at night, in the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert, three days walk between towns. Oh, baby. It was amazing. And every night I would just walk into the desert. I'd lay out my tarp, and then I'd wait for a million stars to appear overhead. And it'd be so many that it would feel like they're crushing you. They're just sitting on top of you. A literal blanket of stars. A blanket of stars is a good way to put it. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're taking a stroll, just a wee stroll around the world today with Tom Tursich.
20:43Rick Steves:And Tom's the author of The World Walk. In 2022, Tom became the 10th person to circumnavigate the globe by foot, along with his dog, Savannah. It took Tom and Savannah seven years to return to his hometown in New Jersey, and his route spanned in 38 countries, 28 ,000 miles, and a global pandemic. His website is tomtersich.com. That's spelled T-U-R-C-I-C-H. So during this seven-year odyssey of yours, people say have a safe trip. Normally I poo-poo that, and I say, well, you have a safe stay at home because where I'm going is statistically safer than where you're staying. But in your case, it's dangerous.
21:26Rick Steves:There's so much that could happen. What were the biggest threats to you just from a physical safety point of view? Would it be mean-spirited drivers on the road that you're walking? Would it be thugs with guns? Would it be animals attacking you? What did you think was a threat to your safety? Your instinct was right. It's cars for sure by a mile. You know, because I pushed a baby carriage most of the time, I'm walking, well, all the time I push a baby carriage, but most of the time I'm walking some road. Very rarely I was walking a path. And ideally I'm walking some small farm road, but there's a lot of times I'm walking a major artery.
22:06And when you're walking with the cars blasting by you, it is very stressful.
22:14Rick Steves:Sometimes people just are rude. I've been walking on roads and somebody throws a glass bottle out the window and it explodes at my feet. Yeah. I mean, and people are on their phones and they're driving big cars and it depends, you know, where you're at. And I would say that was the most common stress of the walk. And whenever I could get on a road that was quiet or it had a big shoulder, like I was talking about Peru and Chile. Yeah. That had a massive, it was the only road going along the coast, but it had this massive shoulder. So it was very peaceful walking actually for me. I wasn't super sure.
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22:45Rick Steves:Did you have some kind of a reflector or blinking light or something? No, I didn't. But, you know, I'm a tall, gangly, tall, gangly, pale guy reflecting the light. So that's not. And what was the worst thing that happened to you physically from a did you get wounded or hurt anytime? I was held up a knife point in Panama City, but luckily I wasn't wounded then. I was able to kind of work my way out of the pick up the book for the whole thing. Don't have time to get into it. But I picked up a bacterial infection in South America, and that really ate away at me over the months. I didn't realize it at first, but I ended up losing at its worst about 45 pounds, and I'm a pretty skinny guy already.
23:24So that was the thing that did the biggest number on me, and it took a while to get out of that for me mentally even. Yeah.
23:33Rick Steves:You know, when you're alone in the world, you're alone with 8 billion people, and you have to live with these people for better or for worse. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Tom Trisich, and he wrote a book called The World Walk, reporting on his little jaunt of 28 ,000 miles over seven years as he walked around this entire planet. What is it about you that you chose to do this? I'm not sure. I think I was in a certain way very fortunate where I was fortunate that my friend died, which is kind of a terrible thing to say. But my friend passed when I was 17. I was very close with her.
24:11And it woke me up to life in a way that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
24:16Rick Steves:Isn't that interesting? And through your book, you're doing the same thing. So you're making some value out of your friend's early passing. Yeah, hopefully. I mean, hopefully this is hopefully the book provides an adventure for people. You know, I've always thought, Tom, when I travel, I talk to people half my age, and I think, wow, you are really getting a lot out of life. And you don't have more money than the other person. You've just got more gumption than the other person. You don't have to have money for that. You don't need to be born with a golden spoon in your mouth for people to do something like this.
24:47Rick Steves:There are people that sit at home and kind of go, well, there's nothing to get too excited about. Woe is me. and there are people with the same exact circumstance that just say, damn the torpedoes, I'm out of here. Yeah. They have an experience. I think one of the strangest things when I would share my story, if there was any media coverage on it, one of the first questions or one of the first online comments was, what trust fund did he come from? It's like, my parents lost their house in the recession. I had to pay off student loans and I started with basically$1 ,000 in my bank account. It wasn't like, you know, this wasn't a thing where I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
25:25But like you said, it's a matter of just going out there and trying to make the most of life. And also walking around the world is a very cheap lifestyle. You're just camping.
25:36Rick Steves:So that is an interesting point, Tom, about money. Just generally, we're talking 2 ,500 days. Generally, where did you sleep and what did you eat? Because, you know, when most of us travel, it's$200 a night for a hotel and$100 a day for three meals. You weren't spending$300 a day, I don't think. I was spending very little. The first year, the first two years in particular, but the first year I slept in a hotel, I think for one week total time, I was so on fire with this need to prove myself also that I was camping and I was walking. even if it was a torrential downpour, like in Mexico, I remember crossing this mountain range in the pouring rain over three days where like, I'm camping no matter what, I'm not getting out of here.
26:24And then eventually somewhere partway down into Peru, when I, after walking 24 miles a day, every day on end, I stopped in this little town and I thought, you know, you should probably like slow down and see some of these places. You're going to do the walk, you know, I'd proven myself. So yeah, I probably camped 95 % of the nights, I would say.
26:44Rick Steves:And when you say camp, Tom, you're talking about just free camping, wild camping. Here's an abandoned building. I'll just crawl in there. Exactly. Yeah. Wild building out in the desert, in the jungle, in the mountains, wherever, on the edge of someone's land sometimes. Did you ask permission on a farm or did you just kind of go under the radar? I would if I could. But a lot of times you kind of just have to, you know, camp on the edge of someone's land and be respectful. and amazingly, I got found out a good amount of times, but every time the person did not care and usually they invite me in for coffee or tea or something.
27:17Rick Steves:Did you find a way to make yourself comfortable or did you just get used to sleeping in uncomfortable foundations? Yeah. Getting Savannah, adopting Savannah in Texas, that helped me sleep a lot better because I knew she was going to hear something before I would. Okay. But I'm talking, first of all, I'm just talking about, did you have a mattress? Did you have an air mattress? Oh, yeah, yeah. I had a mattress. The benefit of pushing the baby carriage is that I can carry a little bit more luxurious goods. And so I had an air mattress or, you know, a self-inflatable mattress. Okay. And so I was pretty comfortable, more or less.
27:53Rick Steves:Did you have like a little tent you could just pitch anywhere? Yeah, yeah. And that was, the tent was a lot of trial and error too, making sure I had exactly the right tent that I wanted. One that was versatile enough to camp anywhere and big enough for me and Savannah. And then about food, are you interested in the local cuisine? Or is it just, are the best nutrition you could get in a peanut butter form? Both, for sure, because I was burning probably 5 ,000 calories a day. So there was a lot of basically just calorie packing, peanut butter jellies, bananas, a lot of nuts and pasta at the end of the day.
28:31But, you know, one of the great joys of traveling is eating the local cuisine and the local food. And I had to eat 5 ,000 calories a day. So I had to do a lot of that.
28:38Rick Steves:Were you going to restaurants or were you just going to markets? Both. Yeah, I would do restaurants. I would do markets. That was probably my only expense. You know, when you're just camping all the time, the expenses are. It's new shoes and food. That's it. Yeah. Now you got a dog along. This was really interesting. I mean, and Savannah is the first dog to ever do this. So bravo to her. Why the dog? What are the pros and cons of being on the road with a dog? Cons, none, pros, all.
29:10No, I mean, it was very interesting. I adopted her in Texas and she was just a puppy then. And I was very worried at the beginning that, oh man, I'm getting a puppy and for a little bit, it's going to be really tough with her. But the benefit of that first month from walking down Texas into Mexico and training her along the way was that she knew no other life but walking. And so she was basically perfectly adapted to walking beside me every day for eight hours a day. So we were perfectly synced up. And then like logistically, crossing borders was way less of an issue, I think, than you would expect.
29:51I mean, when you fly into somewhere, you've really got to have your paperwork in order. And we always had our paperwork in order. It was just a rabies vax and a health certificate. But when you're crossing these land borders, probably 70 % of them didn't even acknowledge her because there's strays walking across the borders already. What do they care about?
30:07Rick Steves:You could probably just tell us that. I'll see you over there 100 yards down the road. Yeah, honestly. Yeah. I love the way you say we. It's like you and your dog. You were a couple on the road. We were synced up. We were synced up. I mean, yeah, she was there for every minute. I'm just walking my dog, singing my song. I'm strolling along. Tom Tursich is our guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves with one of the craziest ways I've ever heard of for getting your steps in. He writes about his adventure in The World Walk. Tom's also published a children's book from the perspective of the first dog to walk around the world as she and her best friend crossed the Andes Mountains.
30:48Rick Steves:It's called Savannah's World of Adventure. Tom tells us more about his world walk in just a minute. But first, here's what some of our Travel with Rick Steves listeners have written us about their travel memories and impressions put into a haiku poem. You'll find a link for sending us yours at ricksteves.com slash radio. Diana Turner from New Orleans sends us this haiku about an unexpected dinner in Morocco. Stuck in Marrakech, open the unknown tangene, eat uncertainty. Matt Harmon from Charleston, West Virginia, wrote this haiku after a jeep tour of a volcano in Iceland. Red volcanic rocks heat ham and cheese sandwiches, snowy crater shines.
31:35Rick Steves:And Jenny Bright from Greenville, Wisconsin, uses a haiku to describe the first time she ate rabbit for lunch with two families in France. A jumble of arms at a circular table. Grandma wants the head! And she adds this impression of Paris. Beyond the surface, see what we long to see, our own movable feast. Tom Tersich says that once you know what you value, you'll know what you can live without. It's one of the lessons he picked up over seven years of walking around the world across the better part of six continents. Tom writes about his adventures in his book, The World Walk, and he's with us today on Travel with Rick Steves from his home just outside Cincinnati.
32:21Rick Steves:Tom, this is so fascinating to me. Can you just review for our listeners the route just really quickly? because you left New Jersey, seven years later, you got back to New Jersey. Give us the whole circle. Sure. So it was first year down to Panama City from New Jersey, second year Bogota down to Montevideo, Uruguay, then a little bit of the island. So way up there, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and then Denmark down to Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, up Italy, along the Mediterranean, across Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. And originally the plan was to do Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Australia as well.
32:59But this was during COVID and that wasn't possible. So then after six and a half years of walking from Kyrgyzstan, I flew home or flew to the US and then walked from Seattle back to New Jersey over another seven months.
33:13Rick Steves:From Kyrgyzstan? From Kyrgyzstan. Yeah, exactly. Did you ever get to Vladivostok? No, no, I didn't. How did you get to the Pacific end of Eurasia? I didn't. Yeah. So Kyrgyzstan was the end of it because of COVID. Yeah. So did that still satisfy the prerequisites for walking around the world? Yeah, because I did the Americas and I did Africa, even though Africa was short, Africa and Europe. Because Africa was also a little bit short because you just went across the north. You did not go sub-Saharan Africa. No, very short. And yeah, I would have loved to have done Africa, but Africa is massive. Oh, yeah.
33:51And you need visas for most of the countries. so it would have taken me, I don't know, three years, four years.
33:56Rick Steves:So I'm curious, Tom, about your navigation. When you're driving, if you take a wrong turn, it's a drag. And sometimes you take a wrong turn and you're on a road and you can't get off it for a long time and you've got to come all the way back, you know. But when you're walking and you go the wrong way, you have to walk an extra six hours or something. How did you not make mistakes? Or how did you minimize those mistakes? Yeah, I mean, I definitely wasn't a perfectly optimized route, I'm sure, and you could take a better route. But it was very slow, you know, so you have time to figure out your mistakes, even if you walk 20 minutes down the road, I may realize.
34:31But when you do make a mistake, it can be really frustrating. So, for example, when I was getting into Panama City on the last day of my walking the first year, I woke up outside of the city and I'm so excited to get in there that I made the wrong turn. Basically, I just followed this other big road out of the city and I walked two hours that direction. And then I checked the map and realized I had gone two hours in the wrong direction. So it was four hours total walking back. And this is when I was supposed to be done. And I was so excited to finally get to hotel and relax. But also, this isn't the type of adventure where I really needed to be at one specific point at a specific time.
35:10If I took a wrong road, a lot of time was serendipitous.
35:14Rick Steves:Wow. Did you have some kind of a GPS thing where you could walk an hour and see where you're going and then course correct? Yeah. Well, with the phone, I was probably the first WorldWalker to do it with more modern technology and the cell phone. And so with GPS, that can work. That's a huge advantage. Oh, it's an incredible advantage. And if I stopped somewhere too, I could FaceTime my family or whatever. So I was still able to be connected with my family in a way that the past adventurers weren't. And connectivity was no issue? You're always connected? No, no. I mean, there's definitely a lot of times where I wasn't.
35:48Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria.
35:50Rick Steves:Oh, Kyrgyzstan is such a drag when you want to get on FaceTime. Oh, yeah. Nothing to see over there. It's a hideous place. You know, when I travel, I've got this strange interest in tectonic plates. Geological tectonic plates and cultural tectonic plates. Leaving Christendom, coming into Islam. Leaving Islam, coming into Hindustan. leaving Hindustan, coming into Buddha country. You know, this is where two great continents and two great seas come together, you know, the Rock of Gibraltar. Earthquakes, volcanoes, cultural earthquakes and volcanoes. Do you see the world a little bit that way after walking around it?
36:32Rick Steves:Talk to me a little bit about what I just said, how that resonates with you. Yeah, I love the idea. I definitely think the world in more geographic terms than I ever did before and realized that basically life is decided by geography. And it's something that is so enormous and so vast that you take it for granted. But say like you're thinking about Hindustan, for example. The reason basically Hindustan is just in India and a little bit in Pakistan is because of the mountain ranges on either side. It doesn't cross over. It has this buffer right there going into China or then going into Afghanistan.
37:07And so you start seeing the world in this way, especially when you're walking. You really feel the geography of the earth and you meet people who are just as kind as you are, just as smart as you are, just as driven as you are. But they're in the desert doing whatever they can to eke a life out. And you have an American passport because you were born in New Jersey and they weren't.
37:27Rick Steves:It's funny because I've been thinking about borders like you were just bringing up. And sometimes borders are dictated by a river or a sea or a mountain range. Sometimes it's just where livable land peters out. And then there's a place nobody wants, and livable land again then peters in. I'm just thinking of the crossing between Iran and Afghanistan, you know, because you cross so many borders, 38 countries, and you walked across it. These days, a big problem is most of us fly from big city to big city with no sense of a border. What is your takeaway on borders? There's a bunch of thoughts. I think the borders, the land borders get really interesting when there is a large economic gap between the countries.
38:08Because there's a lot of trade and there's a lot of pass-through, especially on the poorer side. So say...
38:17Rick Steves:Okay, that's like America and Mexico versus America and Canada. Yeah, exactly. We're sort of economically equal on the north and we're 10 times the per capita income between San Diego and Tijuana. Exactly. So then you get a lot of people making their living just trading goods and crossing the border every day. So you get a lot more activity when there's a disparity economically. And then also, I think the borders that are more naturally drawn, say even from Mexico, again, Mexico to Guatemala, there's a really natural border there. When you get to Guatemala, it's the mountains right away. As soon as you step in there, you're climbing a mountain and that's it.
38:55You go, okay, this makes sense as a border. But then you get to other countries, say, in the Middle East, for example, where it's just an arbitrary line that was drawn by the British. And, you know, and then you leave kind of behind this whole wreckage of cultural ruin.
39:09Rick Steves:And 100 years later, they're still paying the price for this colonial greed and carelessness. And that's just tragic because it ignores ethnic realities. It's very short-sighted and egotistical to think that you can just draw this whole country up. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Tom Tersich. Tom's giving us a firsthand account of what it's like to circumnavigate the world on foot. Tom is the 10th person to walk around the world. He completed this amazing journey in seven years, crossing six continents and 38 countries. His book is called The World Walk. We have more about Tom on our website at ricksteves.com slash radio, and Tom's website is tomtersich.com.
39:53Rick Steves:That's spelled T-U-R-C-I-C-H. How does your body weather this storm of activity? It's not just a long hike. It's day after day pounding. Does your body get stronger or does your body just eventually break down? Definitely stronger, for sure. I think walking is so fundamentally human that we are really made for it. And it takes maybe about a month or a month and a half to kind of ramp up to the 24 miles that I was doing today and feel comfortable doing that. But your body is kind of made to walk. It's ready to do these endurance sports. And you can get into this mental zone also where you kind of lose the sense of even having a body and you're just flowing.
40:42I like that.
40:43Rick Steves:I mean, I've done it on a tiny, tiny version, but, you know, hiking for just eight days in a row. By the end of it, my whole body is different. It's better. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I was a big fan of walking sticks. Did you use hiking poles? I had the cart or the baby carriage, so I didn't do it. But I would, yeah, if I was hiking, I would definitely use walking sticks for sure, especially going down, switchbacks or something like that. What about scary nights? Yeah, they're scary nights. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of scary nights. The first year especially, I think, in Central America. So the first year, especially in Central America, where I didn't have such a good scale of what other places are like.
41:24When you first start traveling, it's like when you're first alive for the first time and everything is new and you don't know what's important, what isn't important, what's dangerous, what is just different. And so all through Central America, which is a very densely populated region of the world, I would really hide away at night. I mean, I would go way into the bush and sometimes push it through.
41:44Rick Steves:You were hiding at night. I was hiding at night. That's a different thing than sleeping on the beach. Oh, yeah. No, I slept on the beach a few times in Mexico. But yeah, as I went down, I was hiding. I was pushing deep into the bush a lot of nights. A lot of that, though, a lot of the fear, some of it is rational because you don't want to be exposed at night and you don't want to be out walking at night. But the other part of it is when you first start traveling, you don't have a good sense of what is just people living their lives versus what is different and dangerous. Kind of like a different world after dark in a lot of places.
42:18Rick Steves:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You go to the same square in Rome in the middle of the day and at midnight, and it's a totally different vibe and danger level. And I think the thing is, too, is cities are much more dangerous than in the country. And I think for a lot of people, when they're camping, it's very fearful for them. It's very scary because they're out and they feel exposed and there's all these noises around. And you're actually much safer out there camped wherever you are than you are if you slept on a bench in a city or if you're even walking around a city at night. Were there times when you trusted someone that you wished you didn't trust them?
42:48There was a few times, I'd say, in the beginning. I don't think I had the gauge of a well-seasoned traveler or just a well-experienced person. I grew up in a very idyllic suburb in South Jersey and I never really had to face any danger. And so I didn't have the skill or the sense developed that maybe even a young woman does because I didn't have to deal with any odd people, any weirdos. But you learn pretty quickly when you're on your own that you have to trust your gut and you have to extract yourself from a situation if you get a bad vibe from it. And the other thing you learn later on is that you will meet people that you trust right away and you can wait for those people.
43:34Rick Steves:You mean you can actually trust them? You get a sense of it. You get a sense of it. Yeah. You get a sense of it really quickly and you just connect with them and you know this is a good person. So if I ever got a bad sense from someone, I learned pretty quickly to just keep moving because I knew up the road I would meet someone I would trust inherently. What's the general takeaway about people on the planet? Great people. Great. Fantastic. Yeah. That's what a lot of people that don't travel don't really understand. They're afraid. And there's no reason logically that they would be any different than us.
44:03Rick Steves:They got different life stories. They got different economic realities. But we're all people. I think that's one of the strangest things when you start traveling is – and when you travel for a while is that you just realize it's people hanging out everywhere. It's the same thing everywhere. It's just people hanging out with their family and eating different foods. We have the American dream. We have the American work ethic. My parents raised me thinking there was just one ethic. It was the ethic. No, no, no. That's the American ethic, you know, which is not right or wrong and good or bad. It's just we choose to have the shortest vacations in the rich world.
44:41Rick Steves:For us, time is money. And when you travel, you realize there are other societies that have a different work ethic. And it can be thought-provoking, can't it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's the great joy of traveling is that you're seeing all these different ways to live life. And when you come home after having seen so much of the world, you can't help but compare your own home to all these other places. I love it. Tom Tursich is one of only 17 people who've joined that rarefied list of pedestrian circumnavigators. Those are the people who have walked or in some cases ran around the world. We provide a link to that list in the notes for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio.
45:24Rick Steves:Tom posts photos from his journey with links to articles written about him. You'll find that on his website, tomtersich.com, and that's spelled T-U-R-C-I-C-H. His videos are on YouTube under The World Walk. You know, I like one thing about hiking, the solitude and the rhythm, because you spent thousands of hours just alone, and the soundtrack is the rhythm of your footsteps. Tell me just a little bit about that. Is that mesmerizing? Yeah. Yeah, no, it is. It is. There's this, that kind of transcendence I was talking about earlier where it takes maybe an hour, sometimes 40 minutes, sometimes two hours.
46:05But if you're on this quiet road, if you're on this quiet path, and if you can keep going long enough, you kind of fall into a rhythm with your steps and with your body. And then it kind of becomes nothing. And you're just existing in your head almost. And your body is just going through the motions. and it becomes really easy, and also time passes really quickly then. So when I was walking these long days, I would try in the morning at least to do like five hours of walking because I knew I could get like three hours in where I would be, the time would fly because I would be in this sort of meditative state.
46:42Rick Steves:So you're like going to work every morning. Oh, yeah, going to work, yeah. You had to get 20 miles in. Yeah, it was work. What about you're in that beautiful, tranquil, solitary, joyful rhythm, and then suddenly you're followed by somebody, scary people, children, animals, mean birds, ghosts. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would happen. You'd run into some people who would pester you a little bit, people who maybe wanted something from you. So, but I think Savannah was a good deterrent, I would say. People in a lot of places are very afraid of dogs. And even though she was very friendly, I think that was enough of a deterrent for a lot of people where they just wouldn't even kind of begin.
47:26Rick Steves:I would imagine people doing this hike in the future are going to learn from you and take a dog. Yeah, I mean, it was, yeah, it was the best decision I made for sure. Did you make any lasting friendships in the seven years? Yeah, yeah. I made fantastic friendships. When I was in Kash in Turkey, this little town on the Mediterranean, I kind of got stuck there during COVID. And there was another group of people, British girls, an Icelandic guy, a German girl, who all got stuck there at the same time. And so we really, really bonded. But then also just people that I met along the way, a family in Bordeaux who sold wine.
48:01And they kind of took me in and then gave me all these samples of wine.
48:04Rick Steves:You know, one thing about traveling is you get to say hello to a lot of people, but you always, for every hello, there's a goodbye. I mean, it's like for every meter you go up, you go down. You're at the same altitude right now as when you were born. For everybody you said hello to, you said goodbye. And for most of those people, you'll never see them again. No, I mean, and again, it's a reason traveling teaches you to be really good company to yourself. Because if you're not, then it's a bad time. Now, you set out to understand the world. You invested seven years in this. What's the takeaway?
48:35Rick Steves:You're a motivational speaker right now. What's your core message? Yeah, I'd say embrace your humanity in a certain way. I would say embrace having limitations, living one single life. And in order to do that, in order to get the most out of life, I think you have to know what you value. So then you can choose where to spend your time. I think it helps to have a really clear vision that aligns with those values. And then this thing that I talk about in my motivational speaking is to embrace constraints. It's this idea of accepting the limitations of one life and then working within that. So for me, for example, when I was walking, which is inherent to the world walk, but walking is a very real constraint.
49:20I had to leave everyone behind I loved for seven years. And then I was sore and I was tired and I was pushing through jungle and over mountains and through the snow. So that was a very real constraint that I needed to embrace if I wanted to live this life that I valued, one of travel, adventure, and understanding. So it's sort of just being okay with one life. And I think that's what you realize when you travel all these places and you see all these different people in all these different societies. Every one of them is living a great, rich life, but it's just one life. And yours is the same. It's just one life.
49:52Rick Steves:You can learn that by investing seven years in walking around the world, or you could learn a lot about that by reading The World Walk by Tom Tursich. Tom, thank you so much for sharing your experience. And it's just fascinating in so many ways. And I just wish you all the best. Thanks. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road. The stump of a tree, it's a frog, it's a toad. A sigh, a breath, a walk, a run, a life, a death, the rain, the sun, and the riverbank sings of the waters of March. It's the promise of life. It's the joy in your heart. Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton with Kazma Hall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington.
50:41Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Sheila Gerzoff handles affiliate promotions. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. Gretchen Strauch read our listener travel haiku. You'll find more about our guests at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week
50:57Rick Steves:with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Thanks for listening. You know, the busiest corner at ricksteves.com is our travel forum. That's where a vast community of Rick Nicks exchanges advice, experiences, and tips. This entirely free resource, which empowers real travelers to share real experience is a beautiful complement to all the content we produce. Think of any travel topic, hotels, tricky itinerary decisions, dealing with or avoiding crowds, and you'll find a world of advice based on real experience. Hey, we're all in the same traveler school of hard knocks, and it's okay to compare notes.
51:36Rick Steves:See you there at the Travel Forum at ricksteves.com.
51:45Thank you.
From the publisher
A photojournalist lets us in on her favorite European hot springs to visit, from Iceland to Turkey and points in between. And a man who spent seven years traversing the globe on foot — with his faithful pup alongside him — describes how his adventure helped him learn to embrace the now.
For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.