Traveling Solo
By Jeff Booth

This is the joy of traveling alone: I walk down the cobbled alleys of Yangshuo in the late afternoon and see a blind man sitting on the stones, leaning against a wall, playing the Chinese erhu, cat-gut string and snake-skin drum and the music of centuries. I stop, sit to his side, and every now and them give him a few more jiao to keep playing. I listen for two hours.

This is the challenge of being alone on the road. It is eleven at night and the equatorial heat drains me. I have no place to sleep yet, I can't understand the bus system, and the few people on the street avoid me like the plague. More than anything in this world, I need a friend to turn to, not because Singapore is so difficult to maneuver around, but because I had no one to share with. No one to understand either the trouble, or the excitement.

Traveling solo is simply the most intense experience you can have. It's essence is isolation, with all its benefits and drawbacks, and it is much more complex than simply "being alone". The process of solo travel is both a test and discovery of self.

March is the rainy season in Sumatra, and like clockwork, there is a terrific thunderstorm every afternoon. I would sit under a canopy and listen to the sound of hard rain on the thick foliage, how the birds and jungle noises did not seem to mind the deluge, and write in my journal waiting for the sky to clear again, which it always did. Sometimes I wrote for several hours, ordering strong sweet Sumatran coffees and filling page after page. Other times the rain lasted only a few minutes and I barely finished one cup of coffee. That time though, that quiet time to reflect and write and listen in the glory of isolation. There are no distractions without a friend or tour group to invade personal space. Silence doe not equal loneliness. I enjoyed letting my voice get rusty, spending time to listening to the sounds of high heels on cobblestone and the way the medieval alleys reverberate with the businesswoman's rushing steps. Spending time, without the pressure of another person rushing me, watching a boy trying to scalp tickets outside a train station. Hous by the Mekong, or the Seine, or the Yangtze, or Tiber at sunset, watching boats and swimmers and lovers and fishermen lit by reflections off the water, becoming blackened silhouettes, and still not feeling the need to move on.

Photography, as well as writing, filled the space normally reserved for conversations with a travel partner. Instead of talking with a friend about how the fall of the Berlin Wall affected the city, I walked through Berlin on my own, with my camera, in the late afternoon light, shooting photos of the construction in Potsdamer Platz, of the forgotten cemetery where Mendellsohn is buried, and the markets behind the Pergammon museum. I replaced conversation with the silent language of a journal and sightseeing with the filterless, careful observations of the lens.

Not everyone will find writing and photography cathartic when alone. Neither did I at first. After a wonderful month traveling with a friend from China to Singapore, he left, and I stumbled through Singapore trying to find my bearing. It took time for me to fill the vacuum of his companionship with my own comfort in solitude. I spent a lot of time in curry houses, watching well-appointed executives hurrying past, tired of walking through different pastel neighborhoods. I took a boat one afternoon to the Indonesia island of Batam just off the coast, thinking that maybe it was Singapore that had me down (instead of simply my own personal weakness). On the boat, a young man spotted (large full beard, long curling hair, sandals and a decidedly vagrant look) and became convinced that I was Jesus Christ. He began prostrating before me, praying to me, and tried to kiss my feet, despite all my protests that I, certainly, was not the man he was looking for. Thankfully, a Dutch traveler came to my rescue, and the two of us jumped onto another boat at the last second, leaving my poor worshiper rather confused.

I do not even remember this name. The Dutchman and I took a boat up a Conradian river for 24 hours into the heart of Sumatra. We parted a few days later, but I was rejuvenated. I had realized that the greatest fallacy of solo travel is that one need be lonely. There is something inviting, or pitiful, about a lone traveler that acts a magnet for conversation. Being alone is the best way to meet people. I found that if my words scrawled in the journal were tired, or the separation of a camera's view created too much of a wall, I would simply meet new people, instead of missing an old friend. Phillipe and I climbed a volcano together, Revital showed me a Tibetan lamasery in the highland, Sandra taught me to roll French crepes in Montpellier. Like a calling card, a map is often the perfect introduction tool. Just hold it upside down for a moment and study it with knit brows, and you will have someone pointing your way and recommending their favorite little cafe before you can say guten tag, maybe even pulling you along to join them.

I spent much more time alone, later, but the differences was that it was by choice. I had discovered my own personal rhythm, the balance I needed between being alone and meeting new people, between learning about myself and learning about others.

The first trip abroad that I took was to Europe, with a friend. It was wonderful. Yet now, after traveling alone on three continents, it has dramatically changed my life. It is that difference between "wonderful" and "life changing" that separates solo travel from everything else. It is freedom, silence, patience, comfort with self. Four more continents await.