The Case for Travelling Alone

I had been collecting reasons not to do it for years. The safety question, which is real and worth thinking about but not the insurmountable problem it is sometimes presented as. The loneliness question, which turned out to be entirely backwards. The table for one question, which I will address directly: eating alone at a restaurant is one of the best things you can do with an evening, and anyone who disagrees has not done it properly.

My first solo trip was to Lisbon, six days, a small hotel in Alfama that charged eighty euros a night and had the best shower pressure I have ever experienced. I had no itinerary. I had one restaurant reservation and one museum I wanted to see and no plan after that. By day three I understood something about myself that five years of couples travel had never shown me.

What solo travel actually is

When you travel with other people, you are constantly managing — preferences, energy levels, the pace at which different people move through a museum. It is a negotiation, and mostly a pleasant one, but it is a negotiation. You see the place through a filter of relationship dynamics as much as through your own eyes.

Alone, you move at your exact speed. You turn down streets on instinct. You sit at a café table for two hours because you are deep in a book and the coffee is good and no one needs anything from you. You eat at six thirty when you are hungry rather than at nine because someone read a review. These are small adjustments that add up, over a week, to something that feels astonishingly like yourself.

Solo travel does not make you lonely. It makes you fluent in your own company, which is a skill almost no one teaches you.

On safety

The safety question is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Women do face specific risks when travelling alone that men do not. Acknowledging this is not alarmism. But the answer is preparation, not abstention. Share your itinerary. Choose accommodation in well-lit, well-reviewed areas. Trust your instincts immediately — not after rationalising. Book the slightly more expensive option when the choice is between safe and uncomfortable.

The table for one

Book in advance and ask for a table, not the bar. Sit with your back to a wall, facing the room. Order the thing you would not order if someone else was paying. Eat slowly. Bring a book if you want one, but try at least one dinner without it. Watch the room. A restaurant is a social theatre that you see better from the outside — which is, paradoxically, where being alone places you.

I had the best meal of my Lisbon trip alone on the fourth night, at a table by the window in a restaurant I had walked past three times before going in. I ate bacalhau with potatoes and olives and a glass of Alentejo white that cost seven euros. The couple at the next table were having a difficult conversation. The man at the corner table was working through a mound of paperwork with absolute concentration. The room was alive in the specific way that rooms are alive when no one is performing for you. That is what you get, when you travel alone. The actual world, unmediated.

The confidence that accumulates

There is a specific confidence that solo travel builds and that no other experience reliably produces. It is the confidence of having solved a problem without anyone to consult, of having navigated a confusion in a language you do not speak, of having made a decision with incomplete information and had it go well — and of having found, repeatedly, that your instincts are more reliable than you believed them to be when they had not been tested.

The first solo trip is the hardest because the evidence for these instincts has not yet accumulated. The anxiety before the first solo flight, the first solo hotel check-in, the first solo dinner in a restaurant where the other tables are all couples and families — this anxiety is real and is not diminished by being told it will pass. It passes when it passes, and when it does, what remains is the specific pleasure of having done something that felt impossible from the outside and turned out, from the inside, to be simply experience accumulating in real time.

By the third solo trip, the confidence is functional. By the fifth, it has generalised — you find yourself making decisions with more certainty not just while travelling but in the rest of your life, because you have evidence that your judgment works when it is the only judgment available. This is the unexpected return on the investment of solo travel: not just the trips themselves, but the relationship to your own competence that the trips produce.

The communities you find

Solo travel is frequently associated with solitude, and it does produce solitude in the forms that solitude is most valuable — the long afternoon with a book, the dinner at a table where you answer only to yourself. But it also produces a specific kind of sociability that accompanied travel does not. The solo traveller is more approachable to strangers than the person who is clearly part of a pair. The conversation at the hostel common room, the acquaintance made on a guided walk, the table of other solo travellers at a restaurant that has been recommended to everyone staying alone in this city this week — these are the social textures of solo travel, and they are different from the social textures of travelling with people you already know.

The friendships made while travelling alone have a specific character: they are formed quickly, in conditions of mutual openness, by people who have in common the decision to be somewhere alone. They are often short and complete in themselves — meaningful for two days and then kept as the particular warmth of a memory that has no continuation. Sometimes they extend into correspondence, into meeting in other cities, into the specific kind of friendship that exists between people whose initial connection was the freedom of being somewhere alone together. Both kinds are good. Neither is available to the traveller who is never alone.

Plan the first solo trip to somewhere that feels safe and manageable rather than challenging or adventurous. The challenge is the aloneness itself — the destination does not need to add difficulty. A familiar language, a city with good public transport, a neighbourhood with visible street life: these reduce the variables to the one variable that matters, which is the experience of navigating the world on your own terms. The adventurous destinations come later, when the baseline confidence has been established. Begin where you can be curious rather than anxious. The anxiety resolves faster when it is not accompanied by genuine logistical challenge.

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