What are the benefits of solo travelling? Why do people do it?

Answered by Harsh Snehanshu, travelled solo across India for 1.2 years

Solo travelling is enriching. It teaches you how to transform your loneliness into solitude.

As a solo traveller, you get to know a person whom you have hardly talked to all the while - yourself. It breaks you free from the fear of unknown, since you are travelling alone, you HAVE to reach out to unknown people around to interact and discover things, thus make new friends. I carry just a basic phone when I travel, not even a camera. This way it helps me spend a lot of time paying heed to my senses - listening to different sounds around, smelling different odours, tasting different foods, seeing variety of scenes - some moving, some picturesque, some repugnant - and coming face to face with a variety of feelings, such as that of encountering an illiterate beggar singing Rabindranath’s Nobel Prize winning poems at Kolkata locals.

After around 9 months of travel, I realise that my senses have deeply evolved. Now I can identify a place with its smell, identify which state the folk music belongs to with its tune and I can tell if there is a sea around or not even when I’m blindfolded at a new place.

Moreover, I got so many business ideas, novel ideas, and social ideas while travelling. It made me more tolerant and compassionate towards every living and even nonliving beings around, for I could connect with things.

As a solo traveller, you realise that even non-living beauty can touch you, make you cry. Interestingly, I got to understand most of the religions from various points of views. And ultimately, I saw travel taking me away from religions and bringing me closer to humanity,

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