4 Most Commonly Asked Questions For Women Traveling Solo

4 Most Commonly Asked Questions For Women Traveling Solo

Whenever I told people that I traveled alone I immediately got the following comments and questions.

1 E.T Phone Home
Aren’t you afraid of getting lost? Hmmm yes I do. In fact I always get lost. I am often lost in the same city I’ve been living for years. I’m miserably lost finding my way to a restaurant, a bar I had visited no less than ten times. I have no sense of direction, and I probably trust a tourist in helping me to take them to where they want to be in my territory. Getting lost is a fact of my life. What’s new?

There are maps you know? If I can read map, sure can you. Even if you don’t have a map, you can still ask. Nowadays with technology, you have GPS, Google maps, map-loaded smartphones to pinpoint wherever you are and tell you exactly where you want to go. Compass is also extremely useful in scenarios you don’t know to get to a specific address, but you want to be sure you’re on the right direction.

I recently bought a new smartphone which finally has a working GPS system. Have to say I get so excited putting in different addresses, landmarks to get the GPS show me how to get there. “Go straight 500 m. Turn left at the first sign of a person carrying a box of French Fries. Locate a red/yellow clown…Welcome to MacDonald.”

2 A Dangerous Liaison
I don’t think we care as much about getting lost as our perceived consequence of getting lost.

Let face it. The older we get, the sissier we become. We are no longer the child who dreamed to sail across the sea, to climb the highest mountain, to go places we’d never been before. Danger seems to lurk everywhere.

Danger is everywhere because today the media is everywhere. Most of the time when we read or see a piece of news about a foreign place, it involves robbery, murder, rape, gun, bomb, kidnap, disaster, revolution, war or something which immediately snap our brain out of its-a-wonderful-world to the-world-is-a-scary-place. Seriously, watching these kinds of news can probably scare the bejesus out of a person from Detroit (usually associated to the dangerous city in the US) from going to New Zealand (the safest country on earth). (And this has nothing to do with watching too many episodes of Lord of the Rings and gets scared by the like of My Precious.)

I wanted to go to Turkey, and a friend warned me about the possibility of getting my head chopped off. (At the time, it became popular in the news about Americans being kidnapped and killed by radical Muslims.)

I moved to the Balkan, and some friends thought I was going into a war zone.

I wanted to go to Georgia (the country not the US state), and my friend asked me to have a child and bring it up first before I went lest I wouldn’t return. Some even said I would be raped by monkey. (Think the civil-war and the war with Russia.)

I invited a friend to Prague, and she was afraid having her car tyres removed. (Ironically she lived in country where only recently people burned cars during riots.)

I planned a trip to Russia and couldn’t help getting so nervous about the prospect of getting beaten up by skinheads.

It took some convincing to some people that Communist Chinese probably wouldn’t do anything to tourists.

I met black American guy in Berlin whose mom kept worrying that her son would be beaten up by the Nazis.

Don’t go to any Muslim country because well…there are Muslims everywhere.

Don’t go to Australia, because it has many of the dangerous species on earth. You’ll be kicked by a Kangaroo, bitten by a spider, stung by a snake, eaten by a crocodile.

With this rate safe Singapore might not even be a safe place to go. Wait it’s true, one bag of cannabis left over from Amsterdam might land you the death penalty.

Didn’t I mention My Precious is running around New Zealand.

The world is really a ‘dangerous’ place.

3 Lost in Translation

“But what do you do if you don’t speak the language?”

In many situation I wish I could deliver my message to others, but most of the time it wasn’t a big deal to not speak the local language. You can fix this by learning simple phrases or commonly used vocabulary. If speaking doesn’t help, use your hands. You can bargain for a bed-and-breakfast with a private room, dinner and breakfast and sauna as freebie just by hands and limited Russians. But because the local only wants to give you the room for cheaper price, they won’t give you dinner or breakfast and of course no shower, you need to explain that this is silly, you need to shower because you smell, and you need to eat because you are extremely hungry. You don’t need lunch, dinner and breakfast will do. Yes entirely by hands and bad Russian.

If mouth and hands are useless, you can buy a pictionary, a picture book for four years old. Since four-year-olds don’t travel, this book is perfect for language-inept, dumber-than-a-four-year-old traveler like you and I. The book has pictures of train, car, spoon, plate, toilet, banana, chicken, cow, pig, etc..all kinds of things might be of fancy to travelers. Trust me, it worked. I wanted to impress my fellow German travellers with my ability to speak Mandarin. While I was flipping the Lonely Planet phrasebook and repeating myself “Hello! Where is the bus station?” “Say what?” I could tell from the expression of every Chinese I asked. They couldn’t understand my pronunciation. Mandarin is a tonal language, and I must have said some tone wrong. Couldn’t wait for my Mandarin to pick up, the German girl pulled out her pictionary and pointed at the bus. “Ah, BUS STATION!” The Chinese exclaimed and pointed us where to go.

If the local still are not able to understand anything coming out of your mouth, slow to decipher any hand gestures, and the situation is simply too complicated to rely on the point-and-ask pictionary system, you can draw. Trust me, it also worked. A sample scenario is a sunny morning at the Gobi desert . My group had some time to roam around and hiking to the sand dune. But we had to return at certain hour to do our one-hour camel riding. The camels were not there yet thus we couldn’t ride. We wanted to know when to be back for the camel riding. The local couldn’t speak any English even number. For the love of God, we could not utter a single word in Mongolian nor found anyone who does because well we were in the desert. Two-hands-10-fingers flapping in the air can be tiresome, so I resorted to drawing. I drew a freaking ugly animal with two big lumps on its back. Next to it, I drew a clock with a time (11:00) and a question mark (?). Then I pointed to the sand dune, then I pointed back to the ugly, lumpy animal on my notebook, and repeated the whole thing until the light bulb shone in his head. He corrected my time to 12.

4 Being Alone
“Do you feel lonely?” No this isn’t a pickup line in a bar. It is a legitimate question people asked me sometime, many times, all the time.

Don’t tell me you’re not just because you stay home. I admit many times I was bored to out of my mind and felt extremely lonely and sad, so I went straight to the supermarket and bought booze. Nah!

Traveling alone doesn’t mean you have to and will be alone. On the contrary, traveling alone forces you to find and connect with others. Traveling alone might bring you more company you wish to have and wish they leave you alone. If you stay in hostels, you’ll encounter so many different people, normal, weirdo, interesting and boring alike. If staying in hostel is not your style, join couchsurfing and request to stay or meet with people living where you go. I had far more interesting traveling experience with random people than with people I knew.

You find them on the bus, on the boat, heck you find them in an embassy.

If you want to find people, you will.

If you want to be alone and feel lonely, you surely will.

James Altucher wrote a post about how to cure loneliness.