My solo travels started when I had this huge desire to hike and trek and found no one around me that enjoyed it so much. I have to admit that it was not easy to start traveling solo to begin with. So my first few hikes were joining with a group of people (who I did not know) in a pre-arranged hike. This gave me the chance to have the security of traveling in a group and the freedom of being who I am. I had the choice to remain incognito if I wanted to and make new friends if I did connect with someone!

With this one step, I moved on to other solo travels and since then I have done solo driving trips across India, the last one lasting 4 days of driving with pit stops to bid my friends and family goodbye as I was leaving the country for some time.

I seem to have become known among family and friends as someone who travels alone and this article comes out because of a suggestion from a dear one asking me to write about it.

Solo Travel Learnings

Solo travel has been a revelation of a kind for me. There are so many things that I have learnt about myself that tend to get drowned in the noise that we live in today. External interferences (albeit not all bad) are continuously invading private space and there is always so much to do in a day that time just flies by. Here are some of the things that I have learnt on my solo trips. I share these with you to give you a peek into what you may be missing out on.

Being Alone

The alone time I got on my solo travels has brought me so much closer to the ‘real me’. It has allowed me to shed a lot of the layers that had accumulated over my personality and to see the real person. I have learnt what I love doing, what I enjoy most and what my passions are. These revelations have allowed me to become a more genuine person who can then pursue real-me dreams even when I get back from my travels. During my travels, I have discovered the difference between being alone and being lonely!

Gaining Social Skills

I have often found myself among strangers in my travels and while the thought was not completely comfortable to begin with, it has been a great revelation to me about how easily and seamlessly I can connect with someone I have never met before. It might sound ironic to say this, but solo travels have actually helped me increase my social skills.

Losing Materialism

Most of those who know me are aware that I am on this path of reducing my already few possessions to fit into one 60L rucksack and one medium-sized suitcase in another 3 years. Solo travel has taught me that my car, television set, home, or favorite duvet is far lesser in value than the experiences I gather on my travels.

Understanding People

Even before I had started to travel alone, I had lived in about 6 cities in various parts of India (now I have taken this to foreign lands). My travels have taken me to various places where I have met different people. When you travel alone, you tend to engage with other people more easily because you are not really engaged with your family or the friends with whom you are traveling. That openness to other people brings in such rich and interesting conversations with strangers that it is a revelation in itself. The insight into other people, the way they think and process information and their lives is overwhelming.

Gaining Confidence

Dealing with new situations on each of these travels has given me a new confidence that makes me feel that I can handle my own circumstances no matter where I am. It has taught me to trust my intuition more than I have ever done before and I am so much more than ready to take put those intuitions into action and live out the consequences.

Learning that the World is (Mostly) Good

We live in a cynical world and often our experiences make us caustic. As I have interacted with more and more people around the world, I feel that people are generally good. Maybe I just had a smaller sample size that skewed the results towards the negative. This newfound positivity has allowed me to be so much calmer and rebuild my relationships with others around me.

All in all, traveling together has really allowed me to understand myself and life far better than I did before. It adds to my wisdom each day.

What Holds Us Back?

If all the positives I have mentioned above do not motivate you to actually get out there and book your first solo trip, try and understand what’s holding you back. This is of course for those who really do want to travel alone but find it difficult to take that first step. The only way you can get over that initial hesitation is to actually just get the courage to do it.

But here are some possible reasons why you may be holding back and tips to overcome it.

How will I manage to travel alone?

Traveling has become far easier than it was before the days of GPS, mobile phones, and internet bookings. You do not have to go on your first trip without any preparation. Book your flight, look through the places you will be staying in, book those in advance, plan your daily itinerary and calculate your budget. Make sure to have a buffer in case of need. Get your travel insurance and get ready to pack.

Remember if you have your phone, credit card and passport with you, there is pretty much nothing major that can go wrong. You can reach most places using Google Maps and your credit card can buy stuff that you may have forgotten to bring along.

How will people at home manage without me?

This is something that I have heard many mums say. It is quite normal for most of us to feel concerned about leaving our spouses and children behind for a few days to fend for themselves, especially since we are almost always a significant spoke in the wheel that runs the home.

A little preparation on that front can solve this problem too. You can decide whether you need to cook for a few days in advance and freeze the food, or arrange for pick up and drops for your children or ask your spouse for a little extra support during a few days in a year. That is all that it actually takes to make yourself dispensable for about 10 days in a year. Not much to ask for, is it? If you love yourself and feel that you are worth at least 10 days in a year that you can take out for only yourself, you will be able to do it.

What if there is a mishap while I am traveling alone?

If you are thinking about this kind of situation, maybe some statistics will clear things up. People have more accidents while commuting to work than people on vacation. An event such as this is highly unlikely and what it is clearly a case of thinking up of the worst-case scenario and loosing out on the 99.99999% of the pleasure that comes from solo travel.

How will friends and relatives judge me for dropping everything and traveling alone?

I am sure that one thing that you will learn from solo travel is that it does not matter. What you gain from solo travel is so much more valuable than petty gossip that some people may engage in. In fact, it does help you understand those people better. Don’t some people judge you all the time anyway? It is not something that you can control and some people will gossip irrespective of what you do. The question is whether you think you are worth the great experience of solo travel or not. So are you?

How will I deal with new situations alone?

You will. And like I said before, there is always the smartphone, the internet, your credit card and people who you can ask for help. You will be surprised to see how helpful people are and how resourceful you can be.

For all you people out there who want to travel alone and are still dilly-dallying, look up my next article on tips for your first travel!