Solo travel: What it’s like

My biggest surprise about solo traveling is how much time I spend alone. Which sounds stupid, but the last time I traveled solo, I was never alone. Or almost never alone. Possibly because I was incapable of being alone with my thoughts and would seek out interaction at all costs at any given opportunity. Or perhaps it is only my romanticization of the time that I traveled. I remember it as a constant party when in reality, many days were filled with boredom.

But now I’m okay with being alone. Don’t get me wrong, I still spend a lot of my time with other people. But a fair amount of time is spent by myself.

“How was your trip?” I imagine someone might ask.

“Well, I learned a lot. Like, the Colombian version of youtube is basically identical to my youtube, and they change the little letters right by the logo to CO.”

Traveling solo, you spend most of your time in hostels that vary in their socialness, from places more like a hotel to places more like a home. There are common areas where you can eat or just chill. You have rooms that you generally share with 3-7 other people. Sometimes private dorms are available, but I prefer to avoid such wealth and luxury.

If you have been to college, it is a lot like the first week before classes, where everyone is super open to meeting new people. That first week I met so many new people. And didn’t really like any of them. I was tired after that, so I took some time off from socializing.

When I was ready to put myself back out there, the groups had already crystallized. They had history together, filled with inside jokes that weren’t funny.

But while you are traveling, groups don’t crystalize. Because everyone is traveling to different places at different times. So many people you only meet for an afternoon. Which makes these relationships fleeting but intense. It’s odd to have such an intense connection with someone you’ll probably never see again.

But it leaves you with these beautiful moments crystalized in time where people that never have met before share in laughter for a night. And those people remain frozen. Beautiful ice sculptures that never melt in your mind.

Like I was drawing in the kitchen, a girl came in and decided to draw everyone there. And her drawings were really fun and cute.

So I decided to try to draw everyone.

“Show us,” somebody piped up.

“She’s not nearly that ugly!” We all laughed. Me a little less. Though it’s nice to know that I’m funny even when I’m not trying.

And then all of us went our separate ways the next day. And these groups form and unform repeatedly in endless permutations. In regular day-to-day life, these sorts of transformations take months or years and might never happen at all. Perhaps there is something romanticized about only meeting people for this amount of time in that it is hard to make a bad impression. There isn’t enough time to find someone’s quirks annoying.