SoLo part I

Every woman should travel alone. At some point in her life, she should embrace the insanity of purchasing a ticket to a random dot on the map. Revel in the agony of packing her bags, crying, panicking, imagining the worse, boarding her flight and watching the familiarity below become engulfed in clouds as her heart out roars twin turbine engines…

Bangkok April 2016: Climbing 300 plus stairs to the top of Wat Saket

Every women should get lost. Hopelessly lost in the dirt and grime and filthy strangeness of a foreign city that defies the rules of logic and normality by which she has lived. Every fire born Goddesses should postpone a well deserved meltdown over meager accommodations that are far below what she’d suffer even the likes of a furry friend to endure.

Cambodia October 2015: Angkor Wat

Every well-rounded, self-respecting, educated, politically correct, socially conscious woman should experience the grueling discomfort of extreme culture shock that shoves a mirror of self-reflection in the face of her pride and forces her to confront her own bias, however progressive it may be. Every woman should know the freedom of a dusty road winding to nowhere and a blank itinerary. Every daughter of Eve should know the joy of  smiling devilishly in the face of her own fear with pride that says “I fucking did that shit”.

Honduras 2014: Break breaking Bum

Every Queen should experience this cruel and unpredictable world rife with mounting conflict and political instability, as not so dangerous after all because, yes she survived and came back home in one shining transformed piece…otherwise unmolested. Every women should taste the curried spice of the world. Taste the bitter. Taste the sweet and sour that makes you sweat and pucker and ironically yearn for more.

Traveling alone is dangerous. Especially for women. Especially for women alone. Especially for women alone in certain places. But every women should tempt the danger of a notion that says safety is a commodity exclusive to the geographic region to which she is native. Every women should say “Fuck That” to ideals and socially imposed limitations that cage her Goddess wings and suggests that she is incomplete for having failed to fulfill domestic or professional obligations at the expense of pursuing opportunities to be free, feral and fabulous.

Belize 2014: Taking in the Xunantunich ruins

Every women should travel alone, because when she embraces the solitude. The silence. The turmoil of an upside down, ass backwards world in which everyone else is a foreigner and she is victim of ‘their’ lack of civility, she changes. Slowly, from the inside out. She opens to an immense space in which she is free To Be, free to question herself and the thirty-four thousand voices she’s learned to accept as her own. In that space questions lead to further questioning and questioning to feverish digging, to upheaval and rebirth. A rebirth that baptizes her travel-worn soul in transformation and reconciliation with Oneness. I am that woman traveling alone. 

What are your thoughts, feelings, experiences on/re solo female travel?