The Art of Slow Solo Travel: Going Alone Without Being Lonely
Solo travel and loneliness are not the same thing. In fact, travelling alone slowly is one of the most reliably enriching things most people will never try.
Solo travel has a logistics problem and a perception problem. The logistics problem — doubling of accommodation costs, no one to watch the bag while you use the bathroom, the occasional evening when you'd genuinely rather have company — is real but manageable. The perception problem is more interesting: the assumption that being alone while travelling is the less-than version of being with someone.
Solo travellers, consistently, in survey after survey, report higher satisfaction with their trips than group travellers. The reasons are structural: you go where you want, stop when you want, spend what you choose, change plans without negotiation.
The Slow Travel Advantage for Solo Travellers
The loneliness objection to solo travel dissolves almost entirely when you slow down. A solo traveller moving through a city in three days is isolated by speed — there isn't time to become a regular anywhere, to have a conversation develop over multiple encounters, to accept or generate an invitation. A solo traveller staying in one place for two to three weeks is not lonely. They are a local.
On Finding Connection
Connection when travelling alone arrives through a few reliable channels: the accommodation (a small guesthouse or apartment near a local market rather than a chain hotel), a commitment to eating at the bar rather than at a table (in places where bar eating is normal — Spain, Italy, parts of France), and the willingness to say yes to things that feel slightly uncomfortable: the hostel dinner, the invitation from someone you've talked to twice, the class, tour, or activity that puts you in proximity to people for several hours.
The conversations that happen when you are alone and open to them are qualitatively different from the conversations that happen when you are in a group. People approach you differently. You approach them differently. The depth comes faster because the social scaffolding of groups — which is also a barrier — is absent.
Travelling alone does not mean experiencing a place alone. It means being free to experience it with whoever you find there.
