Solo Travelling

The following article is incorporated from various sites on the web. As time goes by, this idea of solo travelling becomes more and more appealing to me. Of course I adore travelling with my friends as well as my nephews and nieces. However, I feel that, at least once a year, I should do it on my own, find myself along the way and savour every bit of the experience.


We are all surrounded by people most of the time. We work with them, we socialise with them daily. We also need a break from them and travelling solo seems to be a perfect way to know yourself better, leave your comfort zone and go into the wild, get to know other people, hike, dance, learn to cook, smile, talk to strangers, eat new food and see the sunrise on the beach.
Purposeful solitude can be one of the best ways to cultivate mindfulness, the targeted awareness of the present moment (and a scientifically-proven antidote to stress). Travelling alone is the perfect time to be mindful. Free from the distractions of daily life, you can focus your full attention on absorbing the present moment with all your senses. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Even if you're not actively meditating, you can still practise mindfulness in your travels just by taking care to be present and notice new things.

Not so long ago, the solo woman traveller was an oddity, sometimes encountering incomprehension, cultural prohibitions and inconvenience. While these challenges still exist in some places, the world is more open than ever to women travelling solo. There are even advantages to travelling as a single female.

Are you a solo traveller? Travelling alone can be scary, rewarding and fun in equal measures, and it can help you to grow as a person. Here are some of the advantages:

1. You Will Never Come Back The Same Person
Travelling the world alone normally means you will arrive home a better person; it will renew your spirit and make you feel energised. You become more self-aware and open with every trip, and you will have more confidence within yourself.
You are on your own. You start listening to your heart and you are finally able to achieve some level of internal equilibrium and focus of mind. You start to discover yourself once again – things you are capable of, things you are afraid or scared of. You face your fears and you defeat them.

2. You Are In Control Of Your Emotions
Solo travellers experience various levels of stress on a regular basis, from timing flight connections to misplaced hotel rooms. You quickly teach yourself not to get upset or angry easily, and you know how to remain calm even when you are feeling worried.

3. You Are A Great Negotiator
Any solo travel understands the importance of negotiation, as it is often necessary to negotiate when you need something or you are being taken advantage of.
Solo travellers can’t rely on their friends to back them up, so instead they teach themselves to become master negotiators – handy!

4. You Can Live In The Moment
Solo travellers know how to live in the moment – you are only in a set place for a limited amount of time, so you know how to seize the day. It doesn’t matter that there is a thunderstorm happening outside, you will make it to that outdoor wine festival!

5. You Will Learn Something From Every Place You Visit
Every location and culture is different to the next, and there is so much to see and learn. When you travel alone you get the chance to truly connect with your location, and you always end up learning something new about the world whenever you go.

6. You Understand The Importance Of Leaving Your Comfort Zone
If you can travel to an unknown country alone, you are probably pretty good at leaving your comfort zone. You are very happy to push yourself, because know the best experiences happen outside of your comfort zone.
The more you challenge yourself; the more you stretch yourself, the bigger your world becomes. You can learn how to navigate in a strange city, build a campfire, learn a language. Overcome one obstacle, and you meet the next more confidently. Now, when seeds of self-doubt spring up, remind yourself, Well, you’ve come this far, what’s the big deal?

7. You Don’t Have To Commit
One of the best parts of being a solo traveller is not having to commit; you can cancel and change plans without annoying anybody, you can change your destination on the spur of the moment, and if you love a place, you can stay as long as you’d like!

8. Your Perspective Is Always Changing
Being a solo traveller means you really get the chance to speak to strangers and connect with them. Every time you speak to others abroad you see the world through their eyes, and your perspective changes slightly, and can make you more open-minded.

9. You Know How To Ignore Fear
You have dealt with fear before; what if travelling alone is scary? What if I lose my passport while I am away? Despite these worries, you ignored the fear so you could experience travelling alone. Now you can often ignore the fear, because you know you are capable of dealing with anything.

10. You Are Aware Of Your Strength
You have travelled hundreds of miles alone, paid for out of your own bank account, following a plan that you made yourself. You have learned how to roll with the punches, and you are aware of your how strong and capable you can be.

Time for reflection and self-knowledge. The beauty of solo travel is time. Time to be alone; time to reflect; time to test yourself. Granted, sometimes that’s uncomfortable. Sometimes, you simply feel lonely and awkward, but recognising those feelings and learning to overcome them is all part of the process. You get to know yourself in a new way, test yourself in new situations. After weeks of camping in remote places, I felt steeped in peaceful silence. I felt refreshed. How often do we allow ourselves to really be alone?

11. You Trust Yourself
You have to trust yourself if you are planning on travelling solo; no-one else will book your flights and arrange hostels. You know you won’t let yourself down, and if anything bad happens you trust yourself to fix it.

12. You Know How Important Other People Are
As well as trusting yourself, you value others highly. Travelling alone means you have to rely on strangers all the time, from cab drivers to the customer service desk in the airport. You accept that you are not always in control, and you can rely on others to help and assist you.

13. You Know Yourself Well
Spending time alone is the perfect way to really get to know yourself. You love the people in your life, but you also love how travelling solo gives you the opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself.

14. You Can Fake Confidence
Often there are a few semi-disasters per trip, from losing your room key to getting lost on the way back to the hostel. Solo travellers have to fake confidence regularly to help solve problems, which often helps them to become genuinely confident people later in life.

15. You Want To Travel Solo Again
You’re happy to travel with friends or your partner, but you know at some point you will travel alone again. You get to truly connect with the country you’re visiting, you can do whatever you want and you get to spend some quality time with yourself – perfection.To sum up, we should not be scared to set off for a solo journey! For some people it might be a tough decision and a weird feeling for the first days of solo expedition, but at the end of the day you will not regret it as it’s much more adventurous and challenging, it shapes your personality and gives you enormous possibilities to test yourself.

Disadvantages of Solo Travelling

There are a few notable disadvantages of travelling alone to consider. The first being the fact that you won’t be able to split costs with someone else as often as you could if you had a permanent travel mate. This would be the case in those situations where there may be no cheap hostels in town and instead, you may only come across guesthouses or hotels which will cost you more. Another situation may be when you just have to pay for that cab or tuk tuk by yourself to get where you’re going or need to pay for something else that you could easily split if you had someone travelling with you.

The other most obvious disadvantage of travelling alone comes in the aspect of safety. With no one watching your back, you have a target on your back. This isn’t to say that you cannot have a safe trip while travelling alone; however, you may want to look into travel health insurance. Trip insurance can help with trip cancellations, injuries and illness, and if you get mugged or pick pocketed.

Furthermore, if you are alone, an injury or illness pretty much means your travels are over—a friend can get you around, the general public isn’t so accommodating.

Another disadvantage is not being able to share all your travel experiences with someone else. Sure, you’ll share most of them with fellow travellers you meet along the way but when you finally make it home, it can be nice to be able to look back on your trip with your travel partner and reflect on all the experiences you had together.

And lastly, for those rough travel days (and there will be some), when you’re tired or sick (or hung over) and you’ve got that map out and all you want to do is figure out which street to turn down or how to get from point A to B, etc. it can be nice to have that friend by your side to help navigate and to simply share in the experience. As mentioned, most often you’ll find yourself travelling with others from one place to the next but the most likely times you may find yourself solo are the times when you first enter into a country since those last friends you were travelling with may not have had the same travel route as you.