Always the adventure: Going through the trials and tribulations of solo travel abroad
Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.
With one term of Oxford down, I began the second big aspect of my adventures abroad: travel. In mid March, I flew from London to Madrid, where I met with my mother for the first time in over six months. For three weeks, we ate, drank, and laughed our way across southern Europe, a fact I am sure never to take for granted since not many mothers would be willing to go backpacking, hostels and all, with their crazy wayward daughters.
By the time we found ourselves in Italy, it was already time for my mother to go home. We said a tearful goodbye in Pisa’s lonely airport and I was suddenly on my own.
That following week was a huge adjustment, and I went through an emotional low spurred not only by missing my mother, but by the fact that I was leaving western Europe into the vastly different world of former Yugoslavia. Ornate cathedrals were replaced by bleak concrete slabs riddled in bullet holes, scars of the not too distant wars past. Familiar romance languages turned into harsh garbles of speech that made it so I could never tell whether someone was talking about their pet poodle Mimsy or how to take out the guy who dented their car. It was as if a tornado had picked me up and deposited me in some unknown land. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Montana anymore. It was devastating at first, but once I adjusted to everything, I was able to look past the ugly and see the beauty, just as I was able to look past loneliness and see it as independence. I fell in love with solo travel and the introspective way it forced me confront myself, raw and unapologetic, at my best and worst. As social creatures, we are so focused on other people that we forget to get to know ourselves. Many people questioned my liking of solo travel. Over the three months in total I spent doing it, I cannot count how many times I heard, “Don’t you get lonely?”
Yes, I did. I felt the weight of loneliness when I awkwardly held out my chunky DSLR camera to take a shameless selfie just so I could get occasional photos of myself. I felt it in unfriendly hostels whose only other residents were old shirtless Russian men who thought conversation meant yelling the word, “Minnesota!” at me repeatedly. On the whole, however, those instances were few and far between and being alone does not always mean being lonely.
The type of travel one prefers is ultimately a personal thing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. An advantage of partner travel, for instance, is that you always have someone with you. On the other hand, you always have someone with you, which tends to isolate you from the world around you. It is easy to fall into the familiarity of who you know and miss meeting those you don’t. Traveling with my mom, we rarely ever reached out and befriended strangers, but by myself, I had no choice.
If I wanted to stay sane, I needed to experience occasional human interaction and the only way I could do that was by putting myself out there. Hearing English became magnetic and without a second thought, I would approach people and say, “Hi, my name is Amber! Where are you from?”
The friendships you form from such encounters are unlike any other. Five minutes into the conversation with a fellow traveler and you are suddenly telling a total stranger your life story. Why? Because travelers understand each other better than anyone else in the world, even our closest friends. On the road, we are all in the exact same and unique metaphorical boat, despite how diverse our stories and backgrounds are.
One of the many strange ironies of travel is that being alone is in fact the best way to make lifelong friends from all around the world.