817 Budget Travel Tips; Moonlight Express; Hola South America

24:25You can be packed into a very simple couchette arrangement, or you can have a private stateroom on the train. What are the options that way? I think this is the thing I love about train travel at night. There is an option for everybody, depending on what your needs are. There are women-only compartments. There are private two-berth compartments. There are six-person couchettes with mixed travelers. I always opt for the mixed couchettes if I can, because that just gives me a variety of people. I get to chat to lots of different people. A mixed couchette would be, is it a triple bunk and two triple bunks facing each other in one compartment?

25:01What do you prefer? I liked the top bunk just because I had my own little zone. But there's a case to be made for the bottom bunk. Which of the three bunks do you like? So couchettes can be either four person or six person. And I always go for the top bunk for exactly the same reason. I like having that little private area where I can just go up whenever I want to. Because if you're on the bottom, you have to wait till it's bedtime before you can spread out and sleep. Otherwise, everybody's sitting down there. Oh, that's right. The beds fold out from the wall when it's time to go to bed, right?

25:33So otherwise, you've got three people sitting on one big, long bench. Facing each other. Or the conductor comes in and folds them down when it's time to make up the beds? Or is that in a different class? No, not anymore. You have to do that yourself now. It's all self-made. And then you get handed your bedding in sealed plastic, all ironed. And then you got these, you got to be a little bit of an acrobat to get up into the top bunk. For me, I had to spread my feet out so I looked like an A-frame or something so that I could fit my six foot two inch body without touching the top and the bottom.

26:09That's tricky. That is tricky. You're probably not six foot two, so you never had to worry about that. No, I'm not. But I did travel with a friend who was six foot two who always slept at a sort of right angle at the bottom. But I did also discover that there is an etiquette when it comes to making up the births and that you don't all try and do it at the same time. You step outside into the corridor. That's true. You let your neighbor do it. That was just a sort of decency. And I didn't know that was the actual thing. But I always felt like, OK, this is too crowded. We don't need me and one more body in this compartment right now.

26:38I'll go out into the aisles. Exactly. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Monisha Rajesh. Her book is Moonlight Express, Around the World by Night Train. So very quickly, we're just about out of time here, Monisha, but what if people are worried about safety concerns? You talked about going into a couchette with six bunks. I mean, you can pay a little more and have two doubles instead of two triples, but it is a bunch of strangers, men and women, in the same compartment, unless you find a way to book something otherwise. What has your experience been with safety and the safety of your luggage, and where do you leave your bag when you're going up to the dining car, and when you're sleeping, what do you do with your valuables?

27:19And is the door something you can count on being locked at night? And are the conductors smarmy characters or are they there to look out for your well-being? To date, I have never had a problem on a sleeper train. Perhaps I've just been very lucky, but I've found this from most people I've traveled with. Like we were saying earlier, you are a unit when you travel together and you want the journey to be great for all of you. You all want the same experience. So I think there's an innate trust when you're on these sleeper trains in these compartments that you guard each other's luggage, you watch each other's laptops.

27:51I always keep my money and my expensive stuff on me. But equally, I don't travel with nice watches and lots of jewelry either. If I have four people in a compartment, I make friends with each of them. So they all know me. They didn't know each other before that. And then when I leave, they're kind of all looking out for me and I'm looking out for them. So once you've established that, I think you're right. It just feels like we're a team here and we're going to get through this ride and have good memories. Yeah, and I think people all have different levels of vulnerability as well. I guess it's all very relative to each person.

28:24But, you know, women-only compartments are there for that reason. And I often travel in them with my children because my two daughters just feel happier having women around them. Well, you know, I should mention, in a lot of Muslim countries, a restaurant will have a women's only zone, which is where women and children can go, or it's a family zone and then a men only zone, just for the comfort of people. And a woman can go in the men's zone, but the men can't go into the women's zone. And it's probably, there's sort of safeguards like that for people's comfort levels on night trains. Yeah, well, in fact, on the Dogu Express, the train from Ankara to Kars, women cannot travel in another mixed couchette compartment with men that they don't know.

29:07They can if they come in a group, in a mixed group, but you can't move them around in that way. That makes sense. Hey, Monisha, one last question. I love to have little mementos of great travel experiences. Is there any little souvenir that you have from your train riding, something physical that you've taken away from this that brings you good memories? I often get given little trinkets from people along the way, and they feel like little Ed memoirs when I come back to write my books. But one stands out, which is a really beautiful, heavy brass whistle that I was given by a train driver in Ankara, who actually found me on Twitter a few months before and said, if you ever come to Turkey, you have a brother here.

29:47And he took the day off work driving high speed trains and came to meet me at the station. And he presented me with this whistle that he then allowed me to blast into the rafters and it was such a kind of lovely childhood moment of hearing this fantastic whistle and I still have it at my bedside table. Wow, I would love a heavy brass Turkish train whistle and that's just such a great souvenir. So many, you know, you don't think of taking the train in Turkey, for example. For many years we took our tour groups from Istanbul to Ankara on the train. That's the one modern train, I would say, in Turkey.

30:23But for you to just to think of going east from Ankara, from Ankara to the shadow of Mount Ararat, the border of Armenia. Wow. And then to make friends with a conductor and go home with a little souvenir. I mean, that's the epitome of what a souvenir is all about. Monisha, if you don't put yourself in a situation where you'll have that kind of serendipity, you'll never enjoy it. And that's one great thing about your book, Moonlight Express, around the world by night train. It reminds you there's a lot of serendipity out there, and when serendipity knocks, you open the door and say, come on in.

30:56Thanks, Monisha, and happy rail travel. Thank you. All aboard now for Dreamland We'll choo-choo-choo-choo to the skies So if you want to go to Dreamland Well then just close your eyes

31:30Monisha Rajesh's latest book is Moonlight Express, Around the World by Night Train. She discusses the pastimes people engage in on the train, things that can connect us with the cultures of the places we're traveling through. It's in an extra from today's interview, which you can listen to at ricksteves.com slash radio. A freelance journalist who's made his home in South America for the last dozen years gives us a taste of what we can discover in the other America. That's next on Travel with Rick Steves. I know a lot about Europe, but I know very little about South America. I just had dinner with a friend whose son studied in Paraguay.

32:09He married a local girl, and he would far prefer to raise his kids in Paraguay than in the United States, in Paraguay. I don't know anything about Paraguay. I just can't imagine choosing that, rather than the United States of America, to raise your children. There's got to be something about it. My son, Andy, fell in love with Colombia. It's an amazing country in South America. It's people, it's temple of life, and now he owns a condo in Medellin. And I'm starting to wonder, maybe I should give this continent a better look. American-born Mark Johansson. is a, I should say, North American-born Mark Johansson, is a journalist who's ended up in Santiago in the country of Chile.

32:52He's the co-author of Lonely Planet guidebooks to several South American countries, and he's written about his travels for National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, and Condé Nast. Mark's just written a book about Chile's desert. It's called Mars on Earth, and he joins us now to share his take on South America. Mark, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Rick. Happy to share a little bit about South America with you. You've spent a decade traveling across South America. What are we missing? Yeah, you know, I think it's not such a weird thing that somebody might want to live in South America instead of back home.

33:25There's a lot of reasons why people enjoy living down here. The cost of living is generally lower, especially if you're making dollars. There's much more focus on the environment than there is in North America these days, I would say. You know, Chile, where I live, Santiago, has the largest fleet of electric buses outside of China. Uruguay runs 98 % of its country on sustainable energy. I mean, there's lots of wonderful little factoids that I could share about South America that would make you challenge some of the things that you might see in the news every day. You know, I talked to a man whose work is connecting businesses between this whole second tier of economies around the world, Brazil, Colombia, you know, Korea, and so on.

34:12It reminds me there is this economic massive world that's not the G7 or the G10 or whatever. And a lot of that is the countries we're talking about in South America. So we have stereotypes and we have misperceptions. As you've settled into South America, what are some of the misperceptions that we might have about South America? Yeah, I think sometimes when you look at the news coming out of this part of the world, at least the news that reaches the United States, it's oftentimes about crime or drugs or in general negative news. And what often doesn't leave the continent is all the beautiful, wonderful things that are happening here in terms of the food scenes in Lima or the art scene in Sao Paulo, the architecture on the coast of Chile.

35:00You have such wonderful aspects of this part of the world that most people don't know about unless they are fortunate enough to come and visit and see for themselves. So I always think, living in the United States, Mexico City is just a quick flight south of Houston. It's easy to get there. Why don't so many people recognize it's perhaps the greatest city in Latin America? It's right there. You're based in Santiago in Chile. When you want to go somewhere, I would imagine there's a wonderful hub of air connections. Border crossings are easy. Everybody speaks Spanish. I suppose most educated people speak a little English, too.

35:38Yeah, unless you're in Brazil, we're speaking Portuguese, yeah. So what is it like living in Santiago as far as using that as a springboard for adventures across South America? Surprisingly, Santiago is kind of far from everywhere in the world, to be honest. Yeah, you can get to Buenos Aires in about two hours. Buenos Aires is one of my favorite cities in the world. It's the food, the nightlife, the wine. It's just wonderful. The theater as well. You can get to Sao Paulo in four hours. You can get to Peru in four hours. You can get to Rapa Nui, Easter Island, in five hours. So it takes a little bit more time, but you do have access to some of the most amazing places on the planet, in my opinion.

36:18Now, you've been there for over a decade now. What are the trends, politically and economically? Politically and economically. Well, that is a mixed bag all over the continent. I would say Argentina, which has gone through financial troubles for the last decades over and over again, is trying to fix those financial problems, but has sort of gone to a far-right government in an attempt to do that. You have countries like Chile, which is run by a 30... Well, he was 36 years old when he became president. So one of the youngest leaders in the world, quite liberal. You have other countries like Brazil that's run by Lula, who was the champion of the left 10, 15 years ago, and now he's back in power.

37:00Brazil's economy is roaring at the moment. And so the Brazilians are traveling around South America like they've never traveled before. So most of the people here are, you know, things are more stable than you might imagine, I would say. From somebody in the United States dreaming of traveling in South America, the question about stability and safety would come to mind. Sure. I do think that those things are a little bit overblown sometimes, though. You do have to be a smart traveler. You do have to be careful in certain, especially in cities in South America with, you know, not having a super expensive camera around your shoulders or, you know, having a very expensive jewelry on, which maybe you don't have to deal with as much in Europe or other parts of the world.

37:42But I think as soon as you get down to most rural areas, questions of safety, you know, you need to be aware, certainly, of your surroundings and check warnings and things like that. But I think most people come and go back home without having experienced any sort of issues like that. Some travelers fly from capital city to capital city to capital city, and other travelers go overland, across borders. You've been there 10 years. If you're candid, would you say it's generally flying from big city to big city, or do you cross many borders, actually? I would say because of the distances and because of the infrastructure here, it is oftentimes a flight between capital cities, if only to use them as a launch pad or a springboard to go off to more remote areas.

38:29You know, there's not this great train network like you might have in Europe. the highways work really well within certain countries but then crossing borders oftentimes means crossing the Andes which are the tallest mountains outside the Himalaya so that's not an easy feat for a casual tourist So what you really need to do is make a point if you're flying big city to big city don't get big city bias and when you're in a big city make a point to balance that by doing something to have an excursion Oh absolutely I mean I think that the encanto like the joy the wonder of South America is its natural treasures I mean, this is home to the Amazon.

39:04It's home to the Andes. It's home to Patagonia. You have glaciers. You have so many volcanoes. You know, get out into nature. I was visiting my son in Medellin, which is the most livable and wonderful city in Colombia. And the highlight was we spent a long day going out way into the countryside and doing a river rafting trip. And that's where we really got to be connecting with indigenous life and with nature and putting memories together. I would imagine there's a little bit of uniformity that goes with concrete urban scenes. But boy, when you get into the countryside, that's where you'll find more distinct cultural differences.

39:41Yeah, and you also get to know, as you say, you get to know the cultures and you get to realize that it's not a monolith. South America, the cultures of South America are incredibly different. A Colombian versus an Argentinian is a very different, it's a very different food. It's a very different personality. And so the more you travel around this region, the more you see that it's just, you know, it's so vastly different from one end to the other. Mark Johansson is a freelance journalist who makes South America his beat. He's joining us on Travel with Rick Steves from his home base in Santiago, Chile, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.

40:14Mark co-authors a dozen Lonely Planet guidebooks, and his website is markjohansson.com. He also posts on Instagram and X under Mark on the Map. Mark spoke with us previously about his discoveries in Chile's Atacama Desert, which he describes in his book Mars on Earth, Wanderings in the World's Triest Desert. You can hear that in the Travel with Rick Steves archives under program number 791 from May of 2025. So, Mark, you co-authored the Lonely Planet guidebooks to Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Mm-hmm. So those are countries that you would have a lot of experience because you're actually researching in those countries.

40:56How is the work different for you, the research in these three countries? Between the countries or between work and the other? How do you compare the three countries? What is distinct about the countries? Chile is a very different country than Peru or Bolivia. It's a much richer country, and so it has much better infrastructure for getting around. But that doesn't make it better or worse than the others. I think Peru and Bolivia have much better food scenes than Chile. You know, Lima is known around the world for its restaurants. It's used food as a way to build up its national identity in a way that few other countries have.

41:32And I think that Bolivia, especially La Paz, is just on its tails. It's a wonderful food city to visit. But yeah, you'll have a much more indigenous experience, certainly, in Bolivia or Peru, because that was the epicenter of the population centers here before European colonists arrived in the 1500s. You know, that is something that is really an important dimension of traveling anywhere in the Americas, is a recognition of the rich and diverse indigenous cultures. Of course, in South America, we have these pre-Columbian civilizations that have left us bits and pieces of their often underestimated societies and civilizations.

42:16Tell us a little bit about, first of all, the most important pre-Columbian sites beyond the obvious, the Machu Picchu's and so on, and then how the indigenous cultures survive today, really. So Machu Picchu is obviously the big allure to Peru, but I think a lot of people don't realize how many other sites are just in the greater Cusco area, which is the base for visiting Machu Picchu. You have Chociquitao, which is bigger than Machu Picchu. all throughout, you know, the Andean, certainly the Andean countries from Argentina and Chile up to Colombia, you have all sorts of different remains from different cultures, because the Incas were only around for 100 years.

42:57That's a thing a lot of people don't realize. So they were just kind of building on the work of many other indigenous cultures that came before them, including the Tiwanaku in Bolivia. You have groups in Colombia, in southern Colombia, that we're building these huge totems out of rock. It's almost like an Easter Island of the Andes that very few people go to visit. So you have all sorts of archaeological remains scattered throughout, not just the Andes countries, but certainly Brazil as well and the lowland countries. You know, I always think that we underestimate, because we are ethnocentric and we have a European kind of orientation, that we think that we were civilized in Europe and then we come to America and you find nothing but hunter-gatherers or whatever.

43:39And I think a statement that really humbles me is that when Columbus discovered America, discovered, quote, you know, possibly the biggest and most sophisticated city on Earth was what we think of as Mexico City today. I mean, the point is there was really well-developed civilizations existing in America when the conquistadors arrived. And a lot of those were in South America. Absolutely. Anywhere you travel, especially between Peru and Bolivia, you're going to see that there were incredible cultures living here long before any Europeans set foot. And then you fast forward and you get all the Hispanic, you know, invasions and incursions, and you have a society today that is racially either indigenous or mixed or white.

44:30I think I would add to that also, though, I think there's a conception that the Europeans that came over all came from Spain, but it's very different depending on the country. South of Chile is full of Croatians and Germans. Brazil is full of Japanese and Lebanese. So you have people from all over the world who've made South America home over the years for different reasons. And we have the tragic sort of reality of indigenous North Americans today that we're dealing with and trying to be fair about with our Indian population. In South America, are the indigenous people generally dispossessed and struggling and the downtrodden?

45:08Or are there countries where they are not at a disadvantage? I think that just because of historical disadvantages, there's still to this day lots of issues and lots of sort of hopes and aspirations that have maybe have not yet been met. But I think, especially in terms of conservation, a lot of conservation organizations around the world, which used to believe that the right way to conserve land was to kick everyone out of it, have changed their way and realized that the best way to conserve parts of the Amazon or parts of the charcoal forest is to empower the indigenous communities who live in these rural areas to be the guardians of their own land.

45:45So I think in terms of at least that aspect of the conversation, there is a new way of looking at and empowering certain communities, especially those that are rural and isolated and don't have much economic power otherwise. That's the new enlightened approach. But I think traditionally there's been a structural poverty where, for instance, if you're going to get an education, if parents want their kids to have an education, it'll have to be in Spanish. Absolutely. There's a movement in South America for plurinationalism now, which is basically acknowledging that the nation is made up of several nations.

46:19Bolivia is a plurinational nation because it recognizes the indigenous communities that are there and gives them a bit more... Bolivia and Guatemala, I suppose, would be the most indigenous society. of Latin America, wouldn't they? Perhaps statistically. Peru would be up there as well, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, so there is a recognition of that because I know it was just a brutal thing where if you want to be indigenous, you're not going to have an education and you're never going to get a job. And if you want to embrace the urban, Hispanic kind of thing, then you have to do that. I think that there's a bit more recognition now.

46:51It's still obviously a massive issue, but there's a bit more recognition in terms of the art world. There's a lot more appreciation of indigenous art. where certain ideas and concepts came from historically and giving recognition for that. So there is a bit of movement, but certainly there's a long way to go. Mark Johansson's bringing us a traveler's overview of South America right now on Travel with Rick Steves. He writes about South America for Lonely Planet and takes us with him to northern Chile's Atacama Desert in his book, Mars on Earth. It's kind of fascinating to me to think that happy as I am in this corner of the world, I might be missing something.

47:32You have found that yourself. Yeah, I think once you sort of wiggle your way into Latin American culture, once you become a part of a Latino family, you find that it's hard to wiggle your way out because it's such a lovely, close-knit society, you know, in ways that I think in North America, the family unit has been dispersed a little bit. It's not quite as tight-knit. Here, the family, you know, you're going to lunch every single Sunday. You have a family lunch, and it's going to be a long, hours-long lunch filled with, in Chile at least, bottles of wine and long conversations. And there's just a joy to life here.

48:13And as you said, a different tempo a lot of times that can become addictive over time. My son, who lives in Colombia part of the year, talks about, in the morning he loves the sound of the man that comes down the street selling fruit. Papaya, papaya, pina, pina. And it's just so deep in his heart. He just loves it. And he loves hanging out with his friends down there. And it's truly an escape from the intensity of the high-powered American world. It is a fascinating option that we all have in our lives. And that's one of the beautiful things about travel is you realize that there's more than one way to live.

48:50Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. The more you travel, the more you realize that, too. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Mark Johansson, and his book is Mars on Earth, Wanderings in the World's Dryest Desert. It's about the huge desert, the Atacama Desert in Chile. And, Mark, we're out of time, but I'd love for you just to kind of share with us one special moment you've had in Chile, where you live, that makes you happy that that's where you call home. Hmm. Hmm. I think one thing that makes me happy to be here in Chile is this, I feel a certain amount of pride in Chile after all this time.

49:26It is a country that for all of its challenges has gotten a lot of things right. It's a country that's adding national parks almost every single year. It's adding one or two new national parks. So for somebody like me who loves nature, who loves wild places, to be able to sit in my Santiago apartment and see the Andes, the snow-capped Andes right out my window and dream that I'm in nature is just one of the coolest things in the world. And anywhere you go in Chile, you're traveling either by the mountains or the beach. So what can be worse than that? Or what could be better than that? Do you have a man that rolls down his cart in the morning singing papaya, papaya, pineapple, pineapple?

50:04Unfortunately, no. But I do have my people at my local farmer's market that know me as their casero and that are expecting me every weekend. Very nice. Mark Johansson, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'd love to come down to Chile sometime and get turned on by the temple of life in the beautiful corner of the world that you call home. Please do, yes. We'll be waiting for you. Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington, by Tim Tatton, Kazmer Hall, and Donna Bardsley. Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff.

50:42Our theme music was written and performed by Jerry Frank. Special thanks to the BBC in London for studio help this week. 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. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. It's clear to me that if you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you will. That's why we offer a world of free content at ricksteves.com. All the TV shows we've ever produced, That's over 100 shows taking you from Turkey to Poland to Portugal. 50 hours of practical lectures, with talks ranging from packing smart and tech on the road to cruising and language lessons.

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