Give travelling solo a go
MORE AND MORE OF US ARE CHOOSING TO TRAVEL ON OUR OWN, INCLUDING BEST-SELLING AUTHOR LUCY FOLEY, WHO EXPLAINS WHY SHE REGULARLY LEAVES HER HUSBAND AND CHILDREN AT HOME
the first time I travelled abroad alone I was 18. I was going to live in Florence for a month in the spare room of an elderly lady who spoke no English. The night before, I worried into the small hours, wondering why I’d thought this trip was a good idea. I was heading on my own, and friendless, to a city I didn’t know with very little money and only a couple of choice phrases in the language, along the lines of: ‘One raspberry gelato, please,’ and ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak any Italian.’ It would, I was sure, be an unmitigated disaster. And yet I made friends for life, found a job, started a lifelong love affair with Italy and its people, food and culture, and ended up staying for eight weeks longer than I had planned – only returning when I ran out of money.
Ever since that first trip, I’ve been addicted to the thrills of solo travel and try to go away on my own three or four times a year, sometimes for writing research, sometimes for the fun of it. I’m now married, have an established friendship group, a mortgage, a job I love. And yet this is exactly why I sometimes feel the need to shake things up a little, to remove myself from all that security. It’s not always easy. If anything goes wrong – stolen luggage, a dented hire car, a dodgy Airbnb – there’s no one to help me pick up the pieces. If you don’t know the place well, or speak little of the language, you can feel awkward, too visible, as though you’ve had a layer of skin removed. It can be lonely, disorientating, occasionally even frightening – I once found myself being followed down a dark alleyway in Essaouira (only to realise I’d dropped my bank card and the guy was trying to give it back...).
Yet I keep going back for more. A holiday with loved ones is about pure relaxation. A trip on one’s own, I’ve learned, can also be about the challenge, the expansion of your own horizons, within as well as without.
When travelling solo, unless I want to spend my entire trip eating supermarket meals in my rental, I am forced to go out and eat alone. It sounds easy. I’ve learned, however, that eating a Pret sandwich while you page through your phone at a plastic counter is one thing; sitting at a candlelit table in a square in Mallorca surrounded by loud, loving families and date-night couples on a Sunday evening is quite another. I have had to learn to be content with my own company, sitting and taking in the sights or reading my book. To stop worrying that people are looking, or judging. To be unashamed by my aloneness.
I still find speaking to strangers in an unfamiliar language difficult. As a rule, we Brits hate risking embarrassing ourselves and I spend much of my working life holed away writing at home not talking to anyone. And yet it builds my confidence. Both in my linguistic skills (I speak conversational Italian, French and Spanish, with a sprinkling of Japanese and Greek) and also in that deeper reserve of confidence I have within myself, in my ability to engage with others. It has helped me in my professional life, too: in my ease with public speaking, or chatting with readers after events.
It has also led to friendships being forged abroad: the Swedish couple I went for drinks with in Stockholm after chatting to them on the plane there. Or the party in the Puglian countryside I was invited to by some locals, where we danced into the small hours in a garden under fairy-lights and a starlit sky: a night that still doesn’t seem quite real. These experiences don’t really happen when you’re travelling with other people. You’re a contained unit as a couple or group and plan your days according to consensus. Alone, you can be more flexible, more impulsive and more selfish about how you choose to spend your time.
As a writer, experiences that take you out of the ordinary, that introduce you to people you’d never have met in normal life, are essential for creativity. But I think they’re essential for me as a person, too: a kind of self-love. At the risk of going into tired clichés about ‘finding yourself ’, every time I go abroad alone I learn about my own reserves of resilience, of self-confidence. This is why I will continue to seek opportunities to travel alone. To step outside my comfort zone and remind myself what a colourful, contradictory place the world is and who I am, away from the security and comfort of daily life. And then, afterwards, to come back with a greater appreciation for the people and place I call home.
‘The Guest List’ by Lucy Foley (£12.99 , Harpercollins) is out now