The idea of solo travel evokes a massive range of feelings, from excited anticipation to boredom and terror. As we mentioned recently in Five New Year’s Resolutions for Travelers, experimenting with how and why you travel is good for the soul.
It might not be in your personality to travel alone. Maybe you’re scared. Maybe you need your own people. But both introverts and extraverts can successfully travel alone, and both can find the experience fulfilling. If you’ve never done it before, let solo travel be that new thing for you. Our guest blogger Jen Martinez wrote about how a solo trip changed her perspective. Solo travel is exciting. It’s invigorating. And it might seem scary. But don’t let a little fear keep you from doing something that might change your life.
We’re writing three installments on advice for solo travelers; these are tips based on our experiences traveling alone–advice that has helped make our solo travels fun, safe, and rewarding. Our first installment is three tips on how to make your solo travel fun.
1. Do the Stuff Your Friends Would Never Do with You
In northern Thailand, in a monastery on the outskirts of the town of Nan, there’s a little statue of a pig. With your pinky finger, you try to lift the pig by a hook attached to its back. First, make a wish. If the pig doesn’t budge the first time, try again. If you’re able to lift the pig the second time, then your wish will come true.
How many of you would make the trip to this monastery to take your chances with the wish-granting pig statue? Some of you would jump at the chance to do something so unusual. Unfortunately I can’t remember at which monastery I lifted the pig, but I can tell you that my wish came true shortly after I returned to the states.
The rest of you would never make the journey to northern Thailand (you really should; it’s beautiful) to lift a pig with your pinky finger. I get it. But when you travel alone you can choose to do those unusual things that your friends might roll their eyes at.
Maybe you’ve traveled with a friend who was much more of a daredevil than you. She wanted to rock climb in the Alps, hitchhike across Croatia, and join a haggis eating contest in Glasgow. Or maybe you’ve had a friend who cringed when his shirt got dirty and trembled in fear every time he got in a taxi.
Go to the opera in Vienna. Have dinner at a drag queen restaurant in Barcelona. Spend the entire day throwing coins over your shoulder into the Trevi fountain in Rome. Stand in line for hours to see Ho Chi Minh’s body at his mausoleum in Hanoi. Go UFO hunting in Roswell. There are things you’d love to do that your friends and travel partners would never, ever be interested in.
When you travel alone the world is your oyster. All yours. Make the most of it!
2. Meet People
This is where extraverts thrive when traveling alone. A lot of us want to stay in our comfort zone, even when we’re away from home. This is why we pack too much stuff, bring with us all our creature comforts, and stick close to our friends and family.
The great thing about traveling alone is that there always comes a moment when the loneliness gets to you. I’m actually a big advocate of loneliness. It opens mental doorways that are usually closed to us, and we will take chances to meet new people; we will form relationships we’d otherwise have no interest in.
There are several ways to meet new people when you’re traveling. One of the quickest ways is to connect with other travelers, which is especially easy to do when you stay at hostels. There’s almost always a common room where people from the hostel gather to talk, drink beer, watch TV, and otherwise connect with fellow travelers while they’re taking a break from sightseeing.
I have amazing memories of meeting travelers at hostels during my solo travels. I met travelers from Mexico and Brazil in a hostel in Seattle, where we talked late into the night. An Italian man, who played the flute beautifully, cooked dinner for me at a hostel in Granada. I shared a room in Moab, Utah with a woman who had been traveling the world by herself for two years.
But at this point in my life I’m kind of over hostels. Though I am grateful for every hostel experience I had in my late teens and twenties, they can be unpredictably grungy, loud, and aggravating. In some ways AirBnb has become the new hostel. You don’t meet as many travelers, but you might have the chance to get to know a local. As we mentioned in our New Year’s resolution post, this is an experience that all travelers should seek.
Some hotels, like the Kimpton chain, offer daily happy hours, where you can sit in the lobby and drink wine with other travelers staying at the hotel. High-end hotels around the world often have something like this for preferred guests (i.e. those who spend tons of money at the hotel). It’s typically much harder to connect with other travelers at a hotel, but if there’s a lobby you can sit in then you’re likely to meet someone else who’s looking to meet other people too.
Other opportunities to meet travelers: going on a cruise, staying on a live-aboard for a scuba trip, sharing a train car, booking a local tour, or just going to a bar or coffee shop and striking up a conversation.
3. Move at Your Own Pace
Let’s say you’re in Madrid with some friends. You want to wake up early, have some churros and cafe con leche, go for a walk, then get to the Prado by 10am so you have hours to explore the museum’s collections. And since one day isn’t really enough to see the Prado, you want to do it again the next day.
For me, this sounds like the perfect way to spend two days in Madrid, but I can hear some of you groaning. BORING, you’re thinking. You want to party all night in the sprawling plazas, sleep until noon, then catch the night train and sit in the bar car all night long on the way to Barcelona. You don’t have time for the Prado. You want to get moving!
Guess what. When you travel alone you can do either. You get to make your own agenda, move at your own pace, and you only have yourself to hold accountable. What’s wrong with sitting at a cafe to people-watch all day? Conversely, if you want to speed through India in a week, go for it. Nothing but your budget and time can stop you.
I’ve found that traveling alone has also been perfect when I’ve gotten sick. This might seem counterintuitive, but when you get sick you end up holding back everyone else in your group. They feel bad about leaving you behind, but slightly resentful that they can’t move on to the next thing. The first time I went to Japan I got sick with a really bad cold. I had a fever, a horrible sore throat, and I was sneezing and coughing nonstop; I felt terrible.
But being alone was great because I could move at my own pace without feeling guilty. For three days I left my room to walk around the city, then came back an hour or so later to lay on my Japanese futon and drink green tea. I got to see enough of the city that I didn’t regret being sick, but I got to relax enough that I was able to conquer my cold.
Back home we spend so much time moving at the pace of work, school, family obligations, etc. that we don’t realize what type of pace actually feels good to us. Solo traveling allows you to learn this about yourself.
Stay tuned for our upcoming installment Advice for Solo Travelers: Staying Safe. That will be the post your mom wants you to read. And you better listen to your mom.
