There’s something unusually lonely about travelling solo, that you don’t often crave reaching the destination, as much as you would when travelling with someone else. Sometimes the comfort of a moving bus, train or a flight, along with the abundance of fellow travellers, can give you that temporary relief of not being alone, of being taken care of, something you would not feel once you reach your destination.
You find yourself mostly clinging to a conversation with that stranger because it gives you some sense of being understood, and maybe even accompanied through your journey. However, more often than not, when you reach the destination, you’re all alone, and have to find your accommodation, find your food, find everything all by yourself. Being all out there in the uncertainty, you’re almost desperate to find yourself an accommodation, something you could call home for a few days, because as humans, we are hardwired to dwell in the safety of some place we can call “home”.
And if so, we still wander from place to place in search of meaning, or to find new places where we can belong, but someplace far from home. Because although we cling to our homes, we also, at the same time despise it and want to go and wander into the outdoors, maybe to get lost, or perhaps to be found, I guess to each his own.
But in the end, we don’t realize that it’s not the safety of the home that we want to run from, or the thrill of the outdoors that we seek, it’s mostly the insecurities hiding deep within, that we want to run away from, and we feel maybe it’s the constant moving around that will make these insecurities fade away with time.
And although, I myself, am a solo traveler who often tends to run away from these insecurities, to an unknown place which I could call “home” for a few days, finding a new place every time where I could belong, I forget that it’s more often not a place, it’s the company of those people who you know from what feels like forever, the ones that treasure you, it’s those people, when you’re with them, whether it’s in the comfort of your own home, or in a far off place in the outdoors, you don’t feel that unusual loneliness, and none of those insecurities, it’s only euphoric, and then you realize, that true happiness lies in travelling with those people you cherish.