Say you’re traveling alone, watch the room go quiet.
Years ago I ran into my cousin at the airport in Oslo. She was on her way to some exciting trip, hand luggage in tow.
“Who are you traveling with?” I asked.
“Myself,” she said. Then awkward silence. I didn’t know what to say.
Should she be embarrassed, heading off alone? She wasn’t. She seemed completely at ease with it. She was going to Slovenia. I was embarrassed instead at my own embarrassment. More power to her.
And still, I’ve never been to Slovenia.
Once I went out traveling on my own for a month. I overcame my fear of not finding any friends on my trip. I spent the days before leaving wondering if I could manage a month on the road without talking to anyone, like a prisoner in an isolation cell being towed by a bus.
I was twenty-five, nearly broke, impatient and a little brave. With nothing else on offer, I bought an Interrail month pass to find out whether solo travel was even possible. I had no plan beyond trains, hostels and myself. Would that be enough?
The first night suggested it would. I slept on the deck of the car ferry from Oslo to Hirtshals. Back then nobody stopped you from rolling out a sleeping mat and crawling into your sleeping bag under open sky, with engine noise and diesel fumes for company. The next evening I was in Amsterdam. OK, it wasn’t glamorous, but I survived.
An offer I couldn’t refuse
The hostel was cheap, the laundry habits questionable, the bunk sagging in the springs. It suited me fine. Back then, when we were outrageously young, we gave ourselves some slack on that front. I saw Amsterdam, went to the Van Gogh museum of course, crisscrossed canals and didn’t talk much. Two days had passed without a real conversation, and at that point even introverts start scanning the room for someone to talk to. At breakfast I met Cathy from Hackney: dreads, tattoos. After a few minutes of small talk she asked, completely casually:
“Want to come to the sex museum with me today?”
I laughed and said yes. That’s how my career as a solo traveler began. Cathy and I wandered for hours through exhibits both funny and titillating, then worked through the rest of the tourist circuit, the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank house included. That was Amsterdam done, now off to Paris.
I don’t remember where Cathy went next. Home to Hackney, maybe. Or Berlin. We swapped addresses and never wrote.
Talkers
Over the following weeks I found company everywhere. Americans who wanted to see the Mona Lisa. A gregarious Greek guy who showed me the Acropolis. In Prague I was offered a job as a photographer at a Czech newspaper. Connecting with people seemed to be easy, all of a sudden. What had I ever been so scared of? Solo travel suited me perfectly.
Five years later I was a student in Winchester. Our teacher for “the creative process,” a poet with wild white hair and a taste for strange assignments, handed out old postcards from a flea market and told us to write something from the image. Mine was a black-and-white photo of a weathered stone cross at a crossroads. “Stapleford Cross,” said the caption. A few hours later I was on a train north to Nottingham, with a 2-star hotel booked by the station.
The next day I walked out to the edge of town and found Stapleford. The monument stood there just as in the picture. I had a cider at the nearest pub, pulled out the postcard and showed it to the locals, who passed it around like buried treasure.
Back in Winchester, my teacher and classmates were thrown. “You actually went there?”
Of course I had.
Now, many years later, I’ve picked up a bad habit: I plan too much. I want to change that. The woman with the sleeping mat and the postcard was pretty cool. Worth talking to. Maybe she’s still in here somewhere.
