I travel alone, a lot. It’s kind of my thing, to be a middle-aged female-presenting human meandering around random places. The last year alone — my run up to turning 60 — has included doing the W trek in Patagonia, riding my bike alone from Vienna to Budapest, riding alone in Montenegro, Albania and Transylvania, and riding from Warsaw to Gdansk. And a few solo jaunts to British Columbia.
Over the past ten years, I’ve been to more countries than my climate impact shame will let me fully admit, most of them on my own. Across six continents. A lot of them have been bike trips, some with a small group, but many more either solo or semi-supported.
Some of the semi-supported ones — like Montenegro and Romania — have been challenging enough because of heat and hills and distance, even when someone is transporting my bags for me to my next night’s stay. But the true challenges are the ones that are stubborn inventions out of my own head, like the ride in Poland, which involved first fetching a bike in Lithuania, and, at one point, getting fished off a highway by exasperated but kind police officers when I accidentally bumbled onto a “no bikes allowed” autoroute. (The rest was uneventful and quite zen, except for the moments where I had to take the loaded bike up and down sets of stairs, in train stations and to cross busy roadways).
When I talk about traveling alone, I often get comments from people to the effect that they could never do that, or that it feels too scary or intimidating for them. Women from patriarchal cultures ask me how I get my father to let me do it. And I’ve met solo travelers — especially men, oddly — who still seem uneasy, well into their trips, never fully relaxing into the unexpected, the continual potential for the variable splendours and misery and joy and discovery and boredom and loneliness that any travel day might bring.
But for me –despite the complexities — bikes on stairs, or getting lost, or not being able to find a gate when a flight is being called, or bonking in the heat and feeling like I truly can’t pedal another metre — always, I have a core sensation that whatever happens, I will be okay.
In 2013, I traveled alone to Myanmar, and hired a guide for the first two days to take me to a specific attraction on top of a mountain I wanted to see, and to orient me to traveling alone in a country that doesn’t see a ton of western travelers. The guide couldn’t explain to me why she sat with me while I ate but wouldn’t eat with me, and neither could I draw her out on anything political. But she did say something that became a core principle for my life, when I asked how to manage when I was confused: “people want to help: just ask them.“
That belief — people want to help, just ask them — is the root of my sense of okay-ness, even in moments like having to ask reluctant strangers to fill my water bottle, or getting lost in the dark in Mandalay with a monk, when no one recognized the name of my weird hotel. In Lithuania, I ended up on the wrong side of a channel with a boat to catch, and within 10 minutes, a nice man with a small boat transported me and my bike to the dock with time enough for a coke and potato chips. In Chile, my bags were lost in the airport and I could barely walk because of an infected toe from incessant downhill pounding; I left the airport without the bags, and 10 minutes later, a baggage handler I’d chatted with called me on whatsapp, bringing my luggage outside the terminal and giving me a smokey hug.
When I got picked up by the Polish police and put in their van like a kid out after curfew, I didn’t feel anxious. I had been anxious on the road as cars whipped past me on a narrow shoulder, but as soon as they put me into the van, I just trusted it would be okay. And sure enough, five minutes later, they deposited me at my hotel with a shake of their heads.
But. Two things happened during my most recent trip — one to me and one to my community at home — that put a little frost in my solo travel zen.
After my bike trip in Poland, I flew to Bulgaria to spend a few days with one of my best friends, who lives on the Black Sea. I’d always taken the train before, but the train is ancient, hot, crowded and painfully slow. So I decided to drive. And less than an hour after leaving Sofia, I had the first experience in all of my travels where I was truly frightened. When I stopped to fuel up in a remote place, I was relentlessly and upsettingly harassed by a police officer who accused me of having an invalid license. (I wrote about this in detail here). This wasn’t a mistake or something that could float its way to a natural resolution. He was actively harassing me as a foreign woman alone. And he didn’t let up until I phoned my Bulgarian (male) friend.
The other thing that happened was more removed from me, but it shook me. Longtime readers of the blog will know that Sam is an avid participant in the Friends for Life Bike Rally, a five day fundraising tour from Toronto to Montreal, and many of us have also done it once or twice. This year, a long-time rally leader and participant, a deeply beloved member of the community, suffered a heart attack while riding and died. He was two years older than I am.
Even though I only knew Jeff distantly, this really shook me. I kept thinking about the empty rural roads in Poland where I didn’t see anyone for kilometres at a time, the remote hills in Montenegro where I had near heat stroke and had to push a bike uphill the final two kilometres, the remote road in Bulgaria where I was completely done and out of water but had no choice but to push on for another 20 kilometres, each turn of the wheel painfully difficult. Between the malevolent cop and the sudden, visceral awareness of the vulnerability of an aging, overheated, lonely cyclist — I might be rethinking my cavalier attitude to solo traveling, just a little bit.
I don’t know what that means in practice — there’s nothing on my current roster that I’m rethinking. But I’m aware that I was grateful to be on the train back from Burgas to Sofia, instead of in a car, even though it was overheated, endless and gave me covid. I’m also finding myself looking more closely at some of the photos of times I’ve hiked in mountains or cycled with friends or small groups and thinking, yeah, it was pretty nice to be there with them. There might be a few more of those choices going forward.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who lives in Tkaranto and is less than six months away from being 60.
Love the idea that “people want to help: just ask them” and I know it’s often been true for me too. Mostly people just want to help me. But I also know that’s very much not true for more obviously queer friends and family and definitely not true for racialized friends. It’s like when everyone says, people in province X are so nice, and I know they’re nice to me, but I’m not so sure they’d be nice to lots of my friends. It’s hard to balance the sense that people are basically nice and I can trust them with the knowledge that people are also terrible. Nothing new in my comment. I know you’ve thought through all this. Just commiserating. I’m sorry about the awful police officer.
On sudden death on a bike. Yes, it’s a risk. But so is sudden death at home in bed. Enjoy the ride.
The thing that is haunting me about sudden death on a bike is not the fact of death, it’s the aloneness on the side of the road. Possibly because of my visceral memory of how important it was for my mother not to be alone in her last hours ❤️
I was imagining speedy, unexpected, sudden death. Then I don’t care where it occurs. But yes, otherwise, not alone please.
I have long admired your solo travel adventures. And it’s amazing that you’ve gone so long without anything happening to give you a single moment of pause until so recently. That incident with the police officer sounded especially scary. Thank goodness that you had a way out of it.
I have this same thought (“what if something happens to me? Who would know?”) about so many things I do alone, like climbing a ladder to change a light-bulb in my condo. Though this probably wouldn’t save you on a bike trip if you, like Jeff, had a heart attack alone on the road, do you have a check-in system with someone whenever you embark on the day, such that if you have not checked in again in X number of hours they know to alert someone? I adopted this approach in my everyday life alone during the pandemic, when I started to wonder how long it would take for someone to realize something had happened if I died or became incapacitated. Hence the enlisting of a daily contact buddy who, through that deepened daily connection that continued long after lockdowns and mask-wearing ended, is now my spouse (but I digress!). But it was also recommended when I was a sailor — whenever we left a port it was recommended that we make sure someone knew where we were headed and around what time we were expected (we were not very vigilant about that). I hope you find a balance that keeps you doing what you so obviously love!
And the privilege inherent in my statement is of course something I see — and the “asking” part is also key. People rarely volunteer to help — you have to ask — and for the ones that say yes, there are dozens who say no. In many non-English speaking countries problem will actively evade engaging because they don’t want to have to navigate the language difference, even if I’m wielding a Google translate app. Getting someone to even give me a menu is often impossible. And I fully recognize the privilege of unthreatening white grandmother space I occupy now. But at heart, I have almost always with persistence found helpers lol.
You’re delightfully stubborn.
LOL. Persistence is my superpower.