Travelling carries a thrill that rarely anything else can compare with, the excitement of getting lost in a town, where you don’t know anybody, when that hits you, all sense of the mundane gets lost. When you travel with company, you let yourself get lost in the feat at hand, and get the most out of it, because, worst comes to worst, you have people who are there for you.
Solo travelling, however, is entirely different, for obvious reasons. It carries a greater thrill, at least for me, to travel with no ties whatsoever, and wander the place I am in with whatever comes my way. There are more friendships to be made as you meet new people, and take a chance to open up to them, some of these friendships last a lifetime, but on the other hand, there’s also more solitude to reflect upon what you as an individual can and can’t do, which sometimes is an eye opener. Not to forget how tedious it can become when you carry the burden of doing everything alone.
And that burden of doing everything alone, can sometimes be overwhelming, when you have to think about everything such as your health, safety, your belongings, accommodation, and among all this, the burden of loneliness.
I have had trips where I had to carry a heavy 15 kg backpack which I had packed for a two week trip, exaggerating what I would need, and walked kilometers to find my destination, tired and on lonely roads, when I realized that I have still much more to walk.
Recently I had the pleasure of falling sick at an altitude of 3900 meters in the Pangboche village in Nepal, where it’s a huge feat to even get a thermometer to check if I have a fever or not, that buying medicines or going to the doctor was out of the question. With a complete loss of appetite at high altitude, and no one to talk during your meals, it becomes dreadful even gulping down your meals all alone.
As a solo backpacker, there’s no better home than staying in hostels, but when you carry your entire life with you in one backpack, it’s difficult to not carry everything with you all the time, for the risk of theft is real. Always having an exhausting thought at the back of my mind, if my locker room is safe, or if my stuff has been stolen.
When you meet new people, and it’s hard to tell if they are fellow travellers, and you have to be in a vulnerable situation, the anxiety gets too real sometimes thinking about safety.
And the list might go on forever, but amongst all the fear, the risks, the loneliness, the tediousness, there is something far more precious and rewarding that you get from solo travelling, which is finding yourself…you learn so much about so many places and so many different people, that you eventually end up finding yourself, and what you’re capable of.