THIS LIFE: BY BREDA JOY
I’M SITTING ON MY OWN in a café on a railway platform in New Zealand when I hear vigorous rapping at the window to my left. When I turn my head, I’m looking directly into the hostile eyes of a bearded man who’s banging the glass with his fist.
I look away. The banging continues, and I look back. He still glares at me but, in addition, draws his finger across his throat, miming a slicing action. It’s not the cheeriest of sights.
No one approaches me. I move to a table where an Alfred Prufrock lookalike is sitting and explain my predicament. He expresses no great concern.
The banging has stopped but I’m still afraid. When I steel myself to turn around, the disturbed man is gone. Still, I’m nervous when I leave to catch my train.
This is a cameo from my late 20s. Undaunted, I went on to hitch around the South Island.
One day I took a lift from a man. When I glanced into the back of the car, there was a rifle lying across the floor. He explained that shooting was his hobby.
It takes a certain nerve to travel on your own, even on well-beaten tourist trails. I never had the courage of Ireland’s singular travel writers, Dervla Murphy and Mary Russell, who choose the roads and the deserts less travelled.
‘If you’re a writer, there’s only one way to travel and that’s solo,’ Mary Russell wrote. ‘Travel with a companion and you come complete with an invisible wall around you.’
In my days of solo roving, there were more positives than negatives. I remember approaching a bank teller in Los Angeles to cash a money order that I had brought from home for emergencies. The teller’s position understandably was ‘no can do’. A woman in the next queue came over and went guarantor for me. She said that if her daughter was in the same predicament, she’d like to think someone would do the same for her.
When you’re in your late 20s, you’re fearless. I woke up in the northern Italian town of Courmayeur once and took off up the mountain trail into Gran Paradiso National Park, congratulating myself as I overtook sturdy Germans. That night I sat down to dinner with strangers in a mountain refuge. A Dutch couple befriended me. We walked into the next valley together the following day. Later, they visited me in Kerry and we climbed Carrauntoohil together.
Of all my time travelling solo, eating on my own in the evenings was the most difficult. Shirley Valentine re-visited.
I remember dining al fresco in a pavement café with a view of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, my only company being the street cats I dropped anchovies to under the table.
A friend, who had endured one too many dinners on her own, once got up, introduced herself to a man at another table and relished the conversation.
Having a tendency to mislay keys, passports, money, airline tickets – anything of vital importance really – renders me ill-equipped to be left off without supervision. Usually, my travelling companion is appointed ‘caretaker’.
I flew from Dublin to Vietnam on my own this July with practically a label on myself. Mind you, my son was waiting in the city of Hoi An to accept responsibility for me.
In Hong Kong, the two-hour interval between transfers evaporated to 40 minutes. I hared through the airport at a pace that would have left Usain Bolt panting. It would have been nice to have shared the panic with someone.
Travelling on your own can open the way to meeting more people. In the queue for visas at Da Nang Airport in Vietnam, I met a friendly Hong Kong couple with their five-year-old son, Ernest. The husband went to hold a place in the passport control queue marked ‘Foreigners’.
When I joined this second queue, the wife found me. ‘Come with us,’ she said, conveying me up the line to her husband. The kindness of strangers.
In a ‘small world’ coincidence, I bumped into a former Killarney neighbour with two Cork friends in Hoi An. Their fourth travelling companion, a young Cork woman, was by herself when she heard them speaking as Gaeilge on a bus. So she joined their party.
She confided that she had found it very difficult to break into people’s company on her Vietnam trip. With her experience in mind, I later befriended a young guy from Barcelona on a tour of Marble Mountain in Da Nang. He was also travelling solo and finding the going tough. The success of travelling on your own depends as much on serendipity as it does on your personality.
By the way, I returned from Vietnam having lost nothing bar a cherished straw hat with a red polka dot ribbon. I hope it’s travelling on in good company.