819 Swiss Riviera; How to Plan a Safari; Take a Hike in Europe

0:00After enjoying the jazz festival in Montreux, American singer Tony Lewis decided he'd like to live there, in the Lake Geneva area of Switzerland. He says a boat ride can make you fall in love with the Swiss Riviera. Have a glass of our beautiful Chasselot wine while you're on these 120-year-old paddle wheelers. While researching a book about elephants, journalist Sophie Roberts went on a wildlife viewing safari that had moments she'll never forget. I saw a chimpanzee approach on its hind legs, and that was profound. because a chimp on their hind legs reminds us where we all come from. She recommends what you can look for on a safari adventure.

0:41For Neil Lapping, a well-placed hiking vacation is his favorite way to enjoy the scenery of Europe. The beauty of in-to-in or hut-to-hut trails is they're self-limiting. You can't get big crowds down them. It's all ahead on today's Travel with Rick Steves.

1:00Overcrowding at Europe's most popular sites can be a problem these days, but it's not an issue on the historic long-distance hiking trails that crisscross the continent. To get close to some incredible landscapes and the people who live there, I've been enjoying organized do-it-yourself hikes lately. Coming up, a tour operator in Scotland helps with planning hiking vacations in Europe. While reporting on conservation issues in East Africa, travel journalist Sophie Roberts has tried out a variety of locally offered wildlife viewing safaris, ones that deliver on adventure without all the colonial-era cliches and put money into the local communities.

1:39In just a bit, Sophie lays out options for us. Let's start the hour looking at the picturesque area along the north shore of Lake Geneva that we like to call the Swiss Riviera. Lake Geneva, in the far south of Switzerland and sharing a shoreline with France, is surrounded by Alps and vineyards, mixing refined pleasures like music festivals, gourmet dining, and quiet lakefront strolls. It's an underrated slice of Switzerland. The culture blends Swiss orderliness and French elegance with a cosmopolitan flair. And to take a quick visit, we're joined by Tony Lewis, an American tour guide who's lived all over the world and has chosen to settle right there on Lac Le Mans, as the locals call Lake Geneva.

2:23Tony, thanks for joining us. Hey, my pleasure. Thank you, Rick. You know, a lot of us are unfamiliar with Lake Geneva. It's a big lake in Switzerland, and we're always focused on the mountains and the Alps. But there's so many other dimensions of Switzerland, and, of course, the French part of Switzerland is all about lakes. What's unique and what's appealing about Lake Geneva in terms of landscape and culture? Well, I arrived in Switzerland in 91. I lived the first seven years in the German part of Switzerland, actually around the Zurich area on both sides of Zurich. And that's one kind of mentality, one kind of lifestyle.

3:01And I actually came to Montreux, which is a town where I live now on the Lake of Geneva, Lac Le Mans, to the jazz festival. And I thought, this place is so beautiful. Is it actually legal to live in a place this gorgeous? and it took me about a year and a half to liquidate everything in the German part and I moved here and I think it's one of the greatest decisions I ever made. I just love this place. It's a totally different mindset than in the German part. People let other people, you know, it's live and that live a little bit more than in the German part where they tend to kind of look and control your neighbor and see what everyone is doing.

3:41When I first arrived in the 70s, 80s, they said Switzerland doesn't need policemen. You'd never see any policemen anywhere. You don't need policemen because we have already six million of them. But when I moved here to the French part, it's much more Latin, but it's an organized Latin feeling. Yeah, that's the feeling I get in Ticino also. You're talking about the French-speaking part of Switzerland. And in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, you get that punctuality and that work ethic and that orderliness of the Germanic part of Switzerland. but she also makes in that romance of Mediterranean cultures, don't you?

4:20Yes, absolutely. And it's most evident in the way people just enjoy their lives. In other words, they get off of work and they leave work. And they meet with friends. They'll have an apéro. They'll have a nice glass of our beautiful chasla or something like that. And people take time for their families and their friends here and really to have a high quality of life, which is not only dependent on work. Let's talk about this lake a little bit from a sightseeing point of view. We've got a couple of great towns from a tourism point of view. Lausanne is built on hills. It's kind of a two-part city, right?

4:56And it's right there on the lake. I remember the cathedral there, stripped, cleaned by the Protestant iconoclasts, reminding me of the Calvinism that's part of Swiss culture. And the beautiful waterfront right there where you can hop on a boat. What's your impression of Lausanne? Lausanne is the capital of our canton. We don't have provinces or states. We have cantons. And it's the canton of Vaux, where I'm at, which is a large part of the territory of Lake Geneva. The other side from where I am is actually France. And then there's a little bit, which is the canton of Valais. And at the far end, you have Geneva.

5:37So Lausanne is a beautiful town. It's not a very large town. It's only 140 ,000 people. Towns here tend to be a lot smaller. Our largest city in Switzerland is 423 ,000 people, which is Zürich. So, you know, it's small. You know, we did a TV show once just on the cities of Switzerland, and I just had a little vendetta here. I wanted people to realize Switzerland, if it had not a single mountain, would still be worth visiting for its cities and its lakes. When we go to Lausanne, we've got this lakefront, idyllic sort of place you'd dream about retiring, perhaps. And you've also got some important sites.

6:14You've got the Olympics Museum and you've got the Art Brut Museum. Can you tell us about those sites? Well, especially about the Olympic Museum. The Olympic Museum finds itself in Lausanne because the International Olympic Committee has its headquarters in Lausanne. And the museum is definitely worth a visit. And besides that, just the city itself is quite beautiful the way, as you mentioned, is built up on hills and has the old historic rivers, which have been filled in, and they evened out these valleys where the old rivers were, and then they started to build the town already in the 1500s. Now, you live in Montreux, and we know Montreux because of the jazz festival.

7:02But you're there all year long, with or without the jazz festival. What's the city like? Well, the city of Montreux is part of what we call the Swiss Riviera. And the Swiss Riviera includes a couple of towns here, one of them being Vevey, which is actually about the same size. Both towns are 25 ,000 people approximately. And Vevey is much more an old medieval town, which is actually the headquarters of Nestle International, one of the largest food conglomerates in the world. But Vevey is full of festivals and has lots of things to see. Now, going back to Montreux, Montreux is a town which exists since the 1st of January 1962.

7:44There was no Montreux before 1962. It was a grouping of 14 little villages, hamlets and villages, and they decided that they would fusion together and make a town, a real city, which is Montreux. And you've got Chateau Chillon nearby, don't you? Yes, I see Chateau Chillon. If I just get up from the chair where I'm sitting, I can actually see it out my window. And that is the most dramatic and romantic castle situation, among the most, that I can ever recall. with its beautiful history with Lord Byron imprisoned there and so on. And it's so welcoming to visitors right there on the lake. Right there on the lake.

8:24They invented castles a thousand years ago. There was no castles older than a thousand years. And this castle of Chillon is a thousand years old. So this is actually built during the first wave of feudalism and castle building. And it's just an amazing place. What I always say is to say how wonderful it is that we even get French visitors coming to our Swiss castle, leaving and saying, that's a wonderful castle. So if French people say that about a Swiss castle, that must mean something. There you go. This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we're joined by tour guide Tony Lewis for a look at his adopted home, Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

9:01Tony is a certified guide at the Laveau Vineyard Terraces, and he lives in Montreux. You can learn more about him and his work at his website. That's TonyLewis.ch. TonyLewis.ch. Tony, we've got a couple minutes left, and I would like to talk about things to do if you're home basing on Lake Geneva because you've got cheese, you've got chocolate, and you've got cruising the lake, and you've got local wine. There we go. I was hoping you would mention that. You're a guide at the Laveau Vineyards. Tell us about the Swiss wine because my understanding is they produce so little, and the Swiss people love it so much that very little of it is exported.

9:44So you don't really experience Swiss wine unless you go to Switzerland. That's right. Most people arrive in Switzerland. Maybe they arrive at the airport in Geneva. They get on a train to go skiing in the mountains or to go to the jazz festival. And for an hour and a half, they're looking out the left side of the train. And finally, they say, do you guys actually make wine here? Because that's all you see are vineyards the whole way. And so, yes, we do make wine. We make some extremely, extremely fine wine, especially the whites of this region. I love the Swiss white wine. although I don't like the Swiss being so stingy they serve it in one deciliter glasses in Germany it's a fiertel ein quarter of a liter in Switzerland it's a deciliter it's a tenth of a liter that's because it's such a treasure Rick that's because it's so expensive to pay Swiss people to pick the grapes that's the other part so Tony we got some time let's say we got a day for side trips from Lake Geneva and we're all excited about chocolate and cheese because that's on our list for Switzerland.

10:47Where would we go to see a good chocolate factory and where would we go to see the cheese being made? You wouldn't even have to go very far. You just head a little bit up into the mountains from Montreveve and you're going to be able to visit the Cahier Factory in Broc, B-R-O-C. And it's not only a factory, it's also the museum and you can stuff yourself so full of chocolate that you probably won't want to eat chocolate for another two months afterwards. By the way, that museum was really good, and the tour of the factory I enjoyed, and of course you see the chocolate being made, and then it is fun to enjoy a sample.

11:23And what about cheese? The cheese is not even far from there in the town of Gruyère, just outside of Gruyère, the little village, hilltop village. There you can go to the cheese. It's like an exposition cheese factory where you can go, and they'll have all the explanations, and, of course, tastings. And this is designed for tour buses, so you just can park the bus, park your car, go in there, and you'll see the big vat, and you'll learn all about how they make the cheese. And, of course, there's always a chance to sample the beautiful Gruyere cheese from Switzerland. Okay, well, hey, let's just finish with this idea that I love.

12:02To me, Lake Geneva is kind of like the Swiss Riviera. It has a hint of a whiff of the Mediterranean. You've got this languid air, you've got palm trees, sort of this hazy, but you're surrounded by glorious mountains. And you've got these historic paddle boats, these steamers on the lake. Let's say you're staying in Lausanne or Montreux. What do you advise for a little cruise on the lake? You can leave, for instance, the Castle of Chillon in the summertime. I think it's at 12 o 'clock and 2 o 'clock. You can do two-hour tours of this end of the lake, which will take you to a couple of beautiful little villages.

12:41You can even order a bottle of wine and have a glass of our beautiful Chasselot wine while you're on these old 120-year-old paddle wheelers. Very nice. Tony Lewis, thank you so much for shining a tour guide's light on an underappreciated corner of Switzerland, Lake Geneva. Happy travels, Tony. Thank you so much, Rick. We'll get advice for planning a hiking adventure in Europe in a bit. But first, the author of A Training School for Elephants, Sophie Roberts, is back with us to help sort through the options for a safari vacation in East Africa, the kind that delivers adventure and wildlife viewing and a degree of comfort without turning into a colonial-era cliché.

13:25That's next on Travel with Rick Steves. Everybody loves elephants. The chance to view them in person, along with lions and rhinos and wildebeests in their natural habitat promises to be the trip of a lifetime. While researching conservation stories in East Africa, journalist Sophie Roberts has gotten acquainted with local tour operators and the types of wildlife safaris they provide. She wrote a helpful article for the Wall Street Journal on how to choose a safari from among the many options offered. Sophie's back with us today on Travel with Rick Steves to lay out the options she's found for planning a safari vacation, one that delivers on adventure without falling into colonial era clichés.

14:09Sophie, welcome back. Thank you, Rick. So safaris are a big industry and they're quite popular. Can you just give us a little general introduction to, in Africa, which countries are the best opportunities for enjoying nature on a safari and how are they different and what's your experience been with safaris? Sure. So my very first safari was in Tanzania. That's where I fell in love with elephants. And Tanzania is a big country with a lot of variety. You can do a chimp safari on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where, of course, Jane Goodall did all her amazing work with chimpanzees. You can do wonderful elephant safaris in parks like the Serengeti.

14:53And that great migration that is so famous and justly so, when 1.3 million wildebeest sweep through the Serengeti, they also sweep into Kenya, over the border, into the Maasai Mara. It's a contiguous ecosystem. The Maasai Mara, Kenya, iconic, utterly iconic because of that movie, largely, Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford. The Maasai Mara is a big five country. And that means you're seeing the kind of iconic animals. Now, that's not the only way to do safari, though, because you can also go for a single species. So mountain gorillas. I've gone on safari with mountain gorillas in Rwanda. It's the most expensive place to do it.

15:40Uganda, which is a little bit cheaper. And the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is at the moment, unfortunately, in a state of chaos. But there are moments where peace prevails and it's a very special place. So there are so many different iterations of safari. Zimbabwe is very exciting. Hwangi National Park, which has actually got a population problem with elephants. It's got too many elephants. The last place I did safari was last month in South Sudan, a very different story, where there is one elephant left in the southern reaches of South Sudan that is wandering so lonely is wandering with a herd of giraffe.

16:23Well, I didn't realize that safaris oftentimes focus on a particular animal. So you'd have chimp safari or elephant safari. Does that mean you've got a guide and you go out in the bush or whatever and you track this particular species or is it a free-for-all and it just has a lot of chimps? The really popular safari areas tend to have a lot of species. So as we were talking about this big five, the lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino. So the first time tends to want to see that five. Okay, do the five again. What are those again? I'm just trying to image these. The big five are lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino.

17:07And only a few places have the big five because some of them unfortunately have lost their rhino. What about giraffes? I thought giraffes would make it. No, it's not on the Big Five. The Big Five is originally derived from the time of hunting, and they were the hardest to shoot. And then you've got this, there's certain spectacles, like you go to Iceland in order to see the Aurora Borealis, and you go to Africa on a safari to see the Great Migration. Tell us a little bit about how we might see that and what we would see. Well, that great migration, 1.3 million wildebeest moving. Wildebeest are an animal that are preyed upon by the lion and the other big predators.

17:48So where the wildebeest move, you have these other species moving with them. They're moving on an annual 370 mile long cycle through one contiguous ecosystem, the Serengeti and the Masai Mara. And this is a community of a million of these wildebeest? More than. More than a million moving together. Yeah. And then how do you, as a person on a safari, are you in a jeep in the middle of that? Or are you in an airplane over it? Or how do you actually experience the great migration? Mostly done in a jeep. National parks, they don't tend to allow, although country by country varies, they don't tend to allow for walking safaris.

18:26So it's mostly in jeeps. But you can do smaller migrations where you can move differently. There's another migration called the loiter, which runs through the hills, which has got less wildebeest. It's also in Kenya, but that has different rules of engagement. Safari vehicle, the Jeep, is the most popular way of doing safari. But my preference, maybe for a second timer or a third timer, is walking. Because a walking safari, you get to see things up close. You get to understand the life cycle of a butterfly, which is equally magnificent as the two mating lion. So it's a very different folks for different strokes.

19:08But I also love night safaris because nocturnal animals come out. I love a night walk in a tropical zone or in a faraway place. There's so many nocturnal creatures. And if you have a good guide and a headlamp, you've got lifelong memories. And in Africa, you tend to do it as a night drive because of the predator problem. But not always. You know, there are places where the predators are not there. Yes, you can be safe. So you can walk, you can look at insects, you can go at night, you can do one focused on birds. There's lots of alternatives to the cliched chasing around for lions on a Jeep. My greatest safari was a bone safari.

19:49I took my little boys, I've got two young sons, and I took my little boys on a bone safari. A bone safari, what's that? We were looking for the bones, you know. We were looking for the, I don't know, it might have been the femur of an elephant or it might have been the skull of a leopard. But these are wild places where death happens and you see these bones lying on the ground of a plane. It's an amazing thing and the children love it. It means that they can, you know, I'm not putting them in a space where they're in danger of becoming prey, but they are getting a sense of life and death and jeopardy and looking for bones.

20:27So that's really wonderful. This is Travel with Rick Steves. we're talking with travel writer Sophie Roberts right now. Her latest book follows a forgotten 19th-century expedition through Africa at the height of colonial cruelty and folly. It's called A Training School for Elephants, Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa. Sophie's travel articles appear in such publications as the Financial Times and in Condé Nast. To learn more about her work, her website is sophieroberts.com. Sophie, it is so fascinating to be thinking about these opportunities to appreciate the natural wonders of Africa.

21:06I would imagine, like when you're talking about taking a child on a bone safari, the quality of the guide is critical. How does the quality of the guide matter, and how do you make sure you have a good guide? Because I would think that would be fundamental to a good experience on a safari. It is for me, because I'm a storyteller, so I appreciate storytellers. And I spend time before I commit to working with or taking a safari with someone, I spend time on a Zoom call or WhatsApp just chatting to see where their storytelling falls, you know, and where their knowledge falls and where they're from.

21:44because I would be a very good guide to my valley in West Dorset, England, where I live. I'd be a shocking guide if I stepped over the border into Devon and tried to tell you about a part of another valley I do not know. So it's that indigenous, local knowledge that's everything. So the best advice I give people booking a safari is get your guide on the phone and talk to them. Now, I want to talk about a few nitty-gritty sort of bits on safaris. First of all, is there a season? Is there an off-season and a peak season? What are the pros and cons of going during the crowded time or the less crowded time?

22:21Is it more expensive or cheaper or, you know, that kind of thing? Well, the cost is hugely different. And I don't see the point of going in high season because in high season, Serengeti, wildebeest migration, there's too many vehicles, in my opinion. What is high season? When is that? It varies in which because it's moving in this cycle, but sort of on the river, everybody wants a river crossing because that's when you see the wildebeest crossing through a narrow part of a river and they get the crocodiles are taking the wildebeest down and it's all blood and gore. And, you know, people like looking at that.

22:56I don't particularly need to see that. I certainly don't need to see 30 vehicles. I'm not on a safari to see other folk from my valley in Dorset. But I mean, like in the Greek islands, there's a peak season when it's comfortable weather and everything's open and there's a closed season when the ferries are turned off and nobody wants to go there. Well, July and August is really busy in that bit of East Africa. And then you get, you know, it's classic school holidays. You get very busy in December and January as well. But it's safaris go year round. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would always go off season.

23:33And green months of November and December, I think, are particularly spectacular in East Africa. Sophie, is there a do-it-yourself alternative? I would imagine safaris can be expensive. Can you just rent a vehicle and hire a private guide? I do that and have done it a lot over the last few years. Well, I've been researching my book at Training School for Elephants because I needed to keep my costs rock bottom. So I would find local drivers and I would work with them for a few days in an area they knew. It was rare that I'd work with a driver out of an area they knew, and I found some remarkable folk.

24:09I would love it if you could talk about the ethics of a safari and how we can take a safari without the colonial cliches and how we can take a safari and come home with that beautiful, beautiful souvenir of a better appreciation of both the fragility and the majesty of nature in Africa and also the hard story of the people and how wonderful the people who you meet are. Go to the Edgelands. So go to your national park, but for every day you spend in a very organized and touristic environment, match that time on the Edgeland. So ask your guide if they can take you into their village community and have a meal.

24:49You will find things happen and the stories open up and the connections are made. ask all the questions you can about that person that is sharing their time and passion with you because that's where things light up. That's where it lights up. Sophie, that is the greatest piece of advice. Travel writer Sophie Roberts lives in West Dorset in England and you might see her byline in the Financial Times. She wrote The Lost Pianos of Siberia as a way to uncover stories of how people survived political oppression in the Russian Far East. Her most recent work centers on tracing the historical record of a colonial-era scheme by Belgium's infamous King Leopold II and the legacy it left behind in India and East Africa.

25:36It's called A Training School for Elephants. Sophie hosts a travel writing podcast series called Gone to Timbuktu. She's also scheduled to tutor a week-long non-fiction writing retreat at an estate in the Shropshire Hills this May. We have web links for that and Sophie's earlier visits with us in the notes for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. How can you do justice to this notion that we need to give the people of Africa names and we need to understand the colonial reality of Africa and our part in that? It's hard because safari has grown out of a Western tradition. so the the way that safari is commoditized and sold to us tends to be through the people that have access to the market so it's not representative of everyday people on the ground who want access to the market because they don't know how to get to an american or a european They're not the bridge.

26:45So you have to work much, much harder as a consumer to ask questions of your travel agent, of your tour operator and of yourself when you are going online to find the safari that you want to make in the place you want to make it. And you have to ask tough questions. Who is my guide? Where are they from? What's their knowledge of that area? Is it indigenous? Or is it somebody that's flying in and flying all over selling kind of some white version of the safari, some white romance, some white mischief, some Happy Valley narrative, some khaki fever, which is the kind of Anglo-American imagination that's been created by Hollywood.