I took my first solo trip when I was 21. To say it changed my life would be an understatement.
It ignited in me a profound desire to travel more — I admit, I was (still am, though perhaps less so or differently so) an experience junkie. I wanted to experience everything the world has to offer outside the comfortable and cozy confines of my safe bubble in Singapore.
So at 24, I bought a one-way ticket for me, myself, and I. This despite the dire warnings and cautionary tales from everyone and their mom.
I’ve never looked back.
Solo travel as a woman has been a gift I have given to myself. Even though I had no idea what I was doing at the time, deciding to travel solo as a young woman was the best choice I have ever made.
This is what I’ve gotten out of over 10 years of solo travel as a woman.
1. Experience
No surprises there, but 10 years of solo travel as a woman have given me hundreds, if not thousands, of incredible experiences.
Cruising down the Amazon River for 4 days in a cargo barge.
Skiing for the first time in Turkey.
Being barred from crossing the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Riding a bicycle through rice fields in a village in Thailand at sunset (and being attacked by millions of bugs, and then a pack of wild dogs).
Sailing alongside pods of dolphins and swimming with turtles in the Caribbean.
Camping with random strangers in freezing temperatures at sacred archeological ruins on the Bolivian Altiplano to welcome the Aymara New Year.
Making a public appeal for my passport on national television in the Dominican Republic.
Swimming in a freezing lake in Canada.
Learning about nudibranchs while diving in Borneo (and spotting them while diving in the Philippines, years later).
Finding (creating) community in Mexico.
And so many more.
When you travel alone, I think you get to experience so much more than you would traveling with friends, family, or as a part of a group.
Not all of them will be good — but hey, that’s life in general, isn’t it?
And the not-so-great things give you a very special gift too.
2. Confidence
We all deal with all kinds of shit in life. That’s a given.
But dealing with shit while traveling? That’s a whole other ball game.
And when you travel alone and have to deal with shit? Now, that imbues you with a kind of confidence that is almost impossible to replicate, and definitely impossible to take away from you.
When I was in Brazil, I jumped off a 12m waterfall. It was exhilarating, but my technique was shit, so my knees slammed into my chest when I landed in the water. I was left with a feeling of breathlessness and an intense pain in my ribs whenever I breathed in too deep or laughed. Not fun. I had to navigate the Brazilian healthcare system (in Portuguese, which I didn’t/don’t speak very well) by myself, and thankfully it wasn’t anything more serious than a couple of bruised ribs (perhaps a hairline fracture, I’m not entirely sure what my diagnosis was) but I walked away from the experience feeling grateful for socialized healthcare and confident that I could deal with shit.
A year later, I had my passport stolen in the Dominican Republic and spent an agonizing 10 days not knowing what would become of me. Note: Try not to have your passport stolen on an island-country that doesn’t have an embassy for your country. It was an absolutely shit experience that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone, but I came out on the other side with my passport and an unshakeable confidence in myself and my ability to handle anything that life throws at me.
Talk about silver linings.
3. Trust
Being confident in yourself is vital for the independent solo female traveler. But no (wo)man is an island.
On the flip side of building up your confidence in yourself, is the trust and faith you end up putting in others.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of solo travel as a woman, it’s that you have to learn to trust people.
It’s okay to trust people.
Yes, keep your guard up and be aware of people who may want to take advantage of you but by and large, this is what I’ve learned: Most people are good people.
If you spend too much time reading the news or scrolling on social media, it can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that everyone is out to get you, that nobody gives a shit, that everyone (and everything) is fucked.
This is not true.
Time and time again, travel has restored my faith in humanity.
The kindness of complete strangers, the openness of people you barely know, the love you receive from people you cross paths with — everything I’ve encountered on my travels has given me this amazing gift — that I trust people. And I put my faith in them when things seem bleak.
4. Intuition
Of course, knowing who to trust is key.
We’re not aiming to trust just anybody who says “trust me”. That would be naive and misguided. But where traveling alone has really been a gift to me is in honing my intuition.
As women especially, we’re taught to defer to the opinions and expectations of others from a young age. We’re told to listen to our parents, our elders, the men in our lives — sometimes against the wisdom of our own inner voices.
We suppress our intuition, our gut instincts, over and over again until it fades to barely a whisper, preferring to listen to everyone else over ourselves.
The thing is, when you travel alone — there’s literally nobody else to listen to, nobody else who knows you like you do.
So you start having to tune in to your intuition again. You start listening to your inner voice, you start reading the signs in your body.
And trust me when I say that your intuition is such a gift.
Every time things have gone horribly wrong for me (re: getting robbed in the DR, being stalked in Malaysia), it was always because my intuition told me something was wrong, and I didn’t listen.
If you’ve been wanting to start tuning in to your intuition more, there’s nothing quite like traveling alone to kick that into gear.
5. Joy
Travel is the gift that keeps giving. This morning, I was chatting with a friend about my first skiing experience, about how playing in the snow makes us feel like children again, and produces such delight.
In recounting that experience to my friend, I had the pleasure of reliving the sheer joy that I encountered in that moment.
The butterflies in my stomach of doing something for the very first time, the anticipation of falling in the snow, the adrenaline of making it down my first slope on skis, the burn of my calves trying to stay upright, the shock of the cold snow on my face, the pure joy and excitement of the whole experience.
When you travel, you not only encounter the joy of new experiences but also the repeated joy of reliving those moments over and over and over again in the future.
And the joy of travel comes not just from the big experiences like learning to ski for the first time.
It also comes from the minutia of existing, of being alive, where it feels like all your senses are overwhelmed from every direction and it is just about all you can do to focus in on one small thing and experience it to the fullest, whether that’s taking a bite of food in a busy market in Morocco or reveling in the splendor of the Grand Canyon.
I remember being overtaken by such profound joy simply strolling through the streets of Guanajuato, being drenched by monsoon rains in Vientiane, floating in the turquoise waters of the Turks & Caicos, eating the most incredible biryani squashed in a row of 12 people in Goa, and so many ordinary moments that were made extraordinary simply by tuning in to the joy available to me in that moment.
Sometimes I think that travel makes us feel like children again, where everything is so completely new and amazing and incredible that we can’t help but stop and delight in the wonder of it all.
And what a gift it is, to be a child, filled with joy and love again.
<More gifts of travel to be continued in part 2>
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