Solo Travel

I’m surprised I haven’t written this post before. Years and years ago (five years ago!) I wrote a post detailing tips on travelling solo, and last year I wrote a post on the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my lifetime. I’ve also written other posts like this one – what travelling has taught me, and why travelling makes us happy – but nothing specifically on solo travel.

So why now? Why, after nearly ten years of solo travel, do I feel the need to reflect on what exactly I’ve learned from all of it?

When I received an email from a reader last week with the title “How did you choose?”, I knew instantly it was going to be about choosing travelling over a) a “steady” career b) an education or, most likely, c) a relationship. In her words:

“I have thought about the pros and cons for all of these. The main thing on my mind is, with the last two options, I would most likely become single. I would hate to not be able to travel just because my boyfriend wants to settle down, but I also worry about never finding someone if I keep moving around.” Turning 26 soon, Rebecca told me that many of her friends are in serious relationships or engaged/married. At the end of the email, she wrote, “And so, after all that, my question to you is… how has your choice to keep travelling affected the boyfriend/marriage path of life?”

By very definition the words traveller and tourist mean the same thing; it’s only the labels we’ve put upon these words that have the deeper meaning. As I’ve said before, however, I strongly maintain that I’m both. I’ve done the long, slow travel, hung out with the locals, lived places for a little while. I’ve also done my fair share of tours.

There’s a time in most adolescent lives when everything starts to change, when the things you did last week now seemed juvenile. We all become misfits for some brief, difficult years, lured by the different and the dangerous. We become obsessed with something with the zeal that only teenagers possess, purposefully ostracize ourselves from the adults in our lives. Some kids turn to music. Some kids turn to drugs and alcohol. My obsession became the world itself.

These past few days, I’ve thought a lot about trip-planning. I’ve flip-flopped between being totally nonchalant about it (“I’ve got loads of time! It always works out, no matter what!”) to totally stressed about it (“I’m flying to Zurich in two weeks and I have planned NOTHING! I need flights, hostels, hotels, trains, buses, AND I need to book a nice place for a Christmas dinner…”). This is actually quite unlike a lot of trips I’ve done, because it actually does require the booking of flights, hostels, hotels, trains, and buses – over the holiday season, there’s no way I’m leaving these things to chance. This isn’t like my recent trip to Berlin, where I booked the one hostel and the round trip flight from London a few days before, nor is it like my longer stints through Southeast Asia or South America, where I had nothing but a one-way ticket and an open mind. With a limited amount of time and with a fairly limited amount of money, I need to plan this. I need to plan this now.

So how am I doing it? How should you plan a trip that does, in fact, need to be planned?

Maybe I don’t think about a wedding very often, but the honeymoon? Oh, I’ve thought about the honeymoon. Some secluded little island where the water is turquoise and the sky so big, where there are as many stars as grains of sand. Somewhere where fish are plentiful, where the fruit drops out of trees, where we can spend our days underwater and our nights tangled up in each other. I don’t know where this island is. Bora Bora? Seychelles? I don’t know.

What I do know is, for someone who has spent the majority of life as a single woman, and definitely as a single traveller, I’ve been to a hell of a lot of honeymoon destinations already. Some of these places I’ve been to alone, some I’ve been to with family, and some I’ve been to with a friend. Despite the lack of a romantic partner, I’ve certainly had some very memorable experiences. In fact, one could say that these experiences were even romantic. Because who says that romance can’t be experienced solo, or that romance can’t be experienced between a human and a place?