Europe's Best and Worst — With No Apologies
By Rick Steves
Good travel writers should make hard choices and give the reader solid opinions. Just so nobody will accuse me of gutlessness, I've assembled a pile of spunky opinions. Chances are that you have too many stops on your trip wish list and not enough time. To make your planning a little easier, heed these warnings. These are just my personal feelings after more than 100 months of European travel. And if you disagree with any of them, you obviously haven't been there.
Let's start with the dullest corner of the British Isles, south Scotland. It's so boring the Romans decided to block it off with Hadrian's Wall.
Hadrian's Wall, near the town of Haltwhistle, is far more intriguing than the area beyond it. Like Venice's St. Mark's Square at midnight and Napoleon's tomb in Paris, this sight covers history buffs with goose bumps.
London, York, Bath, and Edinburgh are the most interesting cities in Britain. Belfast, Liverpool, and Glasgow are quirky enough to be called interesting. Oxford pales next to Cambridge, and Stratford-upon-Avon is little more than Shakespeare's house — and that's as dead as he is.
The west coast of Ireland (the Dingle Peninsula), Snowdonia National Park, and the Windermere Lakes District are the most beautiful natural regions of the British Isles. The York Moors disappoint most creatures great and small.
Germany's Berchtesgaden, Ireland's Blarney Stone (slobbered on by countless tourists to get the "gift of gab"), Spain's Costa del Sol, and the French Riviera in July and August are Europe's top tourist traps. The tackiest souvenirs are found next to Pisa's tower and in Lourdes.
Extra caution is merited in southwest England, a minefield of tourist traps. The British are masters at milking every conceivable tourist attraction for all it's worth. Here are some booby traps: the Devil's Toenail (a rock that looks just like...a toenail), Land's End (pay, pay, pay), and cloying Clovelly (a one-street town lined with knickknack shops selling the same goodies — like "clotted cream that you can mail home"). While Tintagel's castle, famous as the legendary birthplace of King Arthur, offers thrilling windswept and wave-beaten ruins, the town of Tintagel does everything in its little power to exploit the profitable Arthurian legend. There's even a pub in town called the Excali Bar.
Sognefjord is Norway's most spectacular fjord. The Geiranger fjord, while famous as a cruise-ship stop, is a disappointment. The most boring countryside is Sweden's (I am Norwegian), although Scandinavia's best medieval castle is in the Swedish town of Kalmar.
Zürich and Geneva, two of Switzerland's largest and most sterile cities, share the "nice place to live but I wouldn't want to visit" award. Both are pleasantly situated on a lake — like Buffalo and Cleveland. And both are famous, but name familiarity is a rotten reason to go somewhere. If you want a Swiss city, see Bern or Luzern. But it's almost criminal to spend a sunny Swiss day anywhere but high in the Alps.
Bordeaux must mean "boredom" in some ancient language. If I were offered a free trip to that town, I'd stay home and clean the fridge. Connoisseurs visit for the wine, but Bordeaux wine country and Bordeaux city are as different as night and night soil. There's a wine-tourism information bureau in Bordeaux that, for a price, will bus you out of town into the more interesting wine country nearby.
Andorra, a small country in the Pyrénées between France and Spain, is as scenic as any other chunk of those mountains. People from all over Europe flock to Andorra to take advantage of its famous duty-free shopping. As far as Americans are concerned, Andorra is just a big Spanish-speaking Radio Shack. There are no bargains here that you can't get at home. Enjoy the Pyrénées with less traffic elsewhere.
Germany's famous Black Forest disappoints more people than it excites. If that's all Germany offered, it would be worth seeing. For Europeans, any large forest is a popular attraction. But I'd say the average American visitor who's seen more than three trees in one place would prefer Germany's Romantic Road and Bavaria to the east, the Rhine and Mosel country to the north, the Swiss Alps to the south, and France's Alsace region to the west — all high points that cut the Black Forest down to stumps.
Norway's Stavanger, famous for nearby fjords and its status as an oil boomtown, is a large port that's about as exciting as...well, put it this way: Emigrants left it in droves to move to the wilds of Minnesota. Time in western Norway is better spent in and around Bergen.
Kraków (Poland) and Budapest (Hungary) are, after Prague, Eastern Europe's best destinations. Conveniently located Bratislava — the capital of Slovakia, on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest — has not-quite-charming streets filled with dull cafés, mildly interesting museums, and tourists wishing they'd spent more time elsewhere. Likewise, Bucharest, Romania's capital, has little to offer. Its top-selling postcard is of the InterContinental Hotel. If you're heading from Eastern Europe to Greece, skip Thessaloníki, which deserves its place in the Bible but doesn't belong in travel guidebooks.
Europe's most scenic train ride is across southern Switzerland from Chur to Martigny. The most scenic boat ride is from Stockholm to Helsinki — countless islands and blondes. Europe's most underrated sight is Rome's ancient seaport Ostia Antica, and its most misunderstood wine is Portugal's vinho verde (green wine).
The best French château is Versailles, near Paris. The best look at Gothic is the Sainte-Chapelle church in Paris. The top two castles are Germany's Burg Eltz on the Mosel River and Italy's Reifenstein near the Brenner Pass. Lisbon, Oslo, Stockholm, and Brussels are the most underrated big cities. For romance, Varenna on Italy's Lake Como murmurs "honeymoon."
The biggest mistakes that tourists make: packing too heavily, relying on outdated guidebooks, not wearing a money belt, and taking other people's opinions too seriously. Happy travels!
Updated for 2008. For lots more tips, check out our best-selling Europe Through the Back Door travel skills guidebook.