Nick Anderson had gone through a breakup just six months before getting on a plane for an extended trip to Taiwan. Alone.
“I wanted to explore my independence and see what that experience is like, being on my own,” says Anderson, who is a Mandarin language and cultural consultant based in Minnesota and Los Angeles. “I had a general openness to what it would be like, but it wasn’t easy. I experienced a lot of personal challenges and it was putting me into extremes of emotions. I was really enjoying the moments in Taipei and being in Taiwan, connecting with new people. But there were really a lot of moments where I felt that being a foreigner, being on my own, was a kind of isolation.”
Solo travel is a mixed blessing. There are fewer compromises, fewer locked-in commitments. Because people are usually more hesitant to approach a couple or group, solo travellers are more approachable, making it easier for them to meet new friends. Yet solo travellers must also be “on” more of the time, watching out for their own safety and making all their own arrangements. They have no trusted companion to guard their luggage or share costs. And if they’re feeling low-energy or shy, they’re going to be all by themselves until they’re in a more outgoing frame of mind.
“I have a motto. I always say to myself that you create your own opportunities because you will get nothing served to,” says Alba Åhlander, an out lesbian from Stockholm, Sweden, who has been travelling solo internationally since she was 18. “If it’s your first night going to a gay bar and you just sit there, you’re going to wait forever if you expect someone to come up and talk to you. You have to go up and talk to them. And if you want to travel abroad, you can’t just wait for someone to buy a plane ticket for you. You have to do that for yourself.”
Åhlander grew up in a poor family, but her parents would take her to a food market where they could see and taste food from other countries. “I knew the world was so much bigger than what my parents could afford to show me. So once I started to make my own money, I saved up as much as I could to buy plane tickets, train tickets,” she says.
Visiting 17 countries in the last five years or so, Åhlander has developed her own strategies for exploring new places and meeting new people. Before she goes anywhere, she joins Facebook LGBTQ+ groups based in her destination, especially those focused on hiking and the outdoors. Then she’ll announce her visit to group members: What should I do? What should I see? Where should I go for my first drink? Is anyone going on a hike while I’m there? Members will often give her suggestions of what to see and do, even offering to meet her and show her around. Locals will also see TikToks she’s made while visiting their area and reach out to meet her or give her recommendations.
When meeting these new digital friends in real life for the first time, Åhlander will pick a rendezvous point in a busy public place. “I really feel that I can trust my community when I’m travelling,” she says. “But you do have to have a kind of sixth sense, in a way, to feel out the situation to see if you can trust that person or not.”
Every place Åhlander goes for the first time, she’ll spend her first evening at the local gay bar—or lesbian bar, anything queer will do. If she hasn’t arranged any meet-ups ahead of time, she’ll make the effort to introduce herself in person to fellow patrons. It often works beautifully. “On my first night, I wanted to meet anyone who’s from there. It doesn’t matter if they’re men, women, non-binary. I just want to talk to someone who knows the local queer culture,” she says. Through people she’s casually met on the road, she’s found not only guides and activity partners, but girlfriends and free accommodations for extended stays.
Åhlander acknowledges there are risks to putting herself out there, but rarely from within the queer and trans community. On one occasion, in Turkey, she stopped for a tea in an empty café and slowly realized that men were gathering around her and paying her too much attention. As she drank her tea, she started to feel woozy. Suspecting she had been drugged, she left the place immediately for somewhere more public, so she could make a fuss if she was followed, then back to her accommodation.
“As a queer person you’re always in a position where you will never really be 100 percent safe. But I don’t think that happened because I’m a lesbian. I think it happened because I was young and a female. You really have to trust your own guts. If something is feeling a bit off, even two percent, yes, two percent feeling it’s not safe, you just have to get out of there.”
A New York City native who has recently returned to the city after living in Phoenix, Arizona, Monalisa Rodriguez caught the solo travel bug when she went to Thailand for an escape from the rut she felt she had fallen into. “When I came back, I was like a wild-eyed puppy in a store thinking of all the places I wanted to go,” she says.
On that first Thailand trip, Rodriguez stayed at hotels and ate at restaurants that catered to Westerners, not meeting many people at all. Then she met someone who told her it was easier to meet people at hostels and by eating at more local-oriented places. Though she quickly fell in love with the backpacking scene, she was, on those early trips, not travelling as her authentic self. She started transitioning during the pandemic and made her first trip presenting as a woman in 2022. She went to Spain.
“It was easier for me because I can speak the language, so I could definitely go outside and do things. But the Catholic religion is really big in Spain. So it was 50/50 where I felt fine. It was still early in my transition,” she says. “I stayed in my room a lot and definitely I didn’t stay at a hostel because I didn’t want to be in a mixed dorm. I had a lot of dysphoria on that trip. Discovering that about myself meant there was a positive side to it.”
Subsequent trips to Thailand, a country known for its acceptance of trans women, were more affirming. Rodriguez was able to meet a lot of trans people there. In fact, at this stage in her life, she has much less interest in going to gay bars and hanging with queer people, which used to be a staple of her travels. “The way I dress and the way I present myself, people are always intrigued by me and come up to me. It usually happens every time,” she says. “But I feel like, as a trans woman, everyone automatically assumes gay bars are safe spaces for me, but it’s not my preferred place. I want to be treated not as a drag queen but as a woman, and I prefer being around other women, cis or trans.”
Rodriguez admits she doesn’t plan many of her trips in advance and doesn’t do much research on accommodations—she goes by her gut. What she will do is book her accommodation for one night first, then see how the place feels before continuing her stay. The most important part of solo travel for her is getting to know herself. “I always say that travelling by yourself is like carrying a mirror and staring at what’s in front of you, just like when you’re travelling with someone else, you see who they really are.”
Anderson, who has, since that first trip to Taiwan, travelled extensively around Asia on his own, found he gradually got used to sightseeing and eating alone. And his loneliness persuaded him to be bolder. He’d hit the nightclub dancefloor by himself and strike up conversations with the people he was dancing next to. Though he had always scoffed at hook-up apps, he found that, when he was in a new place, they helped make him feel like he had instant access to the local community. Through apps like Tinder and Grindr, he was able to meet guys he eventually became friends with.
“I really pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone, meeting as many people as possible and going out on dates and going to the bar by myself and trying to meet people at the bar, even if it’s just hanging out and having a cigarette with,” he says. “I’ve met so many people like that.”
One of the ironies of solo travel is that, if done right, a visitor gets to know some locals well enough that they don’t have to be alone when they return to that place.
