All posts tagged: solo travel

A Story of Syncronicity: The Horrors of Solo-Travel

“Aren’t you afraid to travel alone?” I often get asked this question for traversing Latin America. A woman in bandit-land that is Mexico.  I must be out of my mind. Rather than a land of delicious food, great museums and beautiful towns filled with the kindest of people, in most people’s imagination Mexico conjures horror stories of kidnappings and drug-gang murders. “It’s quite safe as long as you don’t go around doing stupid shit,” I reply with a shrug. But I must confess. This is no off-hand reply. It’s crafted with precision to mask my luck in having managed to stay safe, despite doing stupid shit. Like wondering the streets of Mexico City alone at 2 AM with five shots of mescal in your belly. Don’t do that. After all, it would be naïve to say that Mexico is Denmark. The story I’d like to tell today begins in San Miguel de Allende, my beloved town of crazies and artists. But I will start this tale toward its tail end, which happened in Tel Aviv: my …

Who is this creature called the “backpacker”?

Yesterday a Frenchman accused me of being a fake backpacker at a Cuban bar in Lisbon. His allegation came after I revealed that I was staying at an AirBnB rather than a hostel. We had a lot to chat about–he had recently returned back to his nine to five IT job in Paris after a seven-month “backpacking” trip in Australia and Asia. “I bet you don’t even have a backpack,” he said with a smirk. “I’m not a backpacker!” I said in protest. “And I certainly don’t carry a backpack on my sensitive shoulders.” Our discussion made me realize once again why I decided not to stay in hostels and why I defied the categorical “backpacker” label. Though I indeed was once a “fake backpacker” and it was while I slept in hostels in Colombia. Thankfully my fraudulence only lasted five weeks. Before arriving in Colombia I read various blogs on traveling alone—all posts instructed staying in dorms for a fulfilling social life on the move. So who was I, a novice solo-traveler, to stray from the path? While staying …

A Taste of Colombian Medical Care with a splash of Vallenato

It happens to the best of us. Even someone with an iron stomach as myself who prides herself on having the ability to eat everything and anything, gallantly sampling all the delicacies street vendors have to offer will eventually get food poisoning or whatever it was that had me check in at a Colombian clinic in Valledupar. It wasn’t pretty. I had arrived in Valledupar for the famous Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata. A type of Colombian folk music, Vallenato is this country’s pride and joy. I met Bogotans who had travelled on 18-hour busses to attend the festival over the weekend. All hotels and hostels were filled to the brim and the town’s streets filled with Colombians in sombreros vueltiaos dancing to never-ending tunes usually played with a trio of accordion, guacharaca, and caja vallenata players. The birthplace of Vallenato, Valledupar is not much of a destination for foreigners. During my three-day stay there I frequently felt as though the few foreigners that I shared a dorm room with in Provincia Hostel were the …

Why Colombia? 

The hospitality I received in Barichara was not unique to this quaint little town.  All the articles from travel blogs I had devoured before arriving in Colombia were not exaggerating: not only was Colombia safe but its people golden. From my hosts in Bogotá who made me feel at home to strangers on the street, Colombian hospitality rivaled that of Turks and that’s not something I say often. I can tell you about the poet we met on a local bus from Aracataca (hometown of Gabriel García Márquez) to Valledupar, who gifted us a copy of his recent book of poetry, treated us to a bottle of aloe vera water, and waited with us under the rain until we got a cab to our hostel. Or the staff at the hostel in Valledupar, who went out of their way to help me as a serious case of food poisoning got me in a very unpleasant state I won’t detail here for your benefit. Well, maybe I will but in another post:) Meanwhile, there is one question …

Traveling Alone in Distant Lands. Afraid?

I can think up many a reasons for packing up my apartment and traveling to the other side of the world by myself. I want to learn new languages, understand other nations, see the rainforest, and climb strange mountains… But the real motivation for leaving home is to learn one thing: to be alone. I’ve always had this romantic notion that to be a true artist—whatever that truly means—one must have a personality that thrives on solitude. I imagine a painter locked up in a basement for days, weeks, months, working on her masterpiece. Or picture Virginia Wolf shooing away servers in her country retreat in Sussex, in self-imposed imprisonment, to think, to write, to be alone. After John Steinbeck finished college he was broke and needed to find a way to support himself that afforded him the time to write. The 24-year old aspiring writer accepted a job at a large estate in Lake Tahoe as its sole caretaker. “It required that I be snowed in for eight months every year. My nearest neighbor was four …