Solo Travel Makes You A Superhero!

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

Solo travel is awesome. Travelling alone is one of the best ways to see the world and have one hell of a grand adventure, but that doesn’t mean it is always easy. Solo travel will push you out of your comfort zone, test you in ways you never expected and occasionally throw you headfirst into situations where the only person you have to rely on is yourself. It can be scary, it can be hard and sometimes it can be a complete pain in the arse, but all of that experience will make you stronger, more adaptable, more independent and more capable than you ever thought you could be.

In other words, solo travel will turn you into a damn superhero!

And no, it isn’t just about increasing your overall level of awesomeness simply because you have travelled the world, although to some extent that is obviously a given. Your newly elevated superhero status doesn’t arrive simply because of all the incredible things you will see and do, the countries you will explore or the adventures you will have. You don’t get handed a cape at passport control after a certain number of stamps.

The real transformation comes from everything solo travel puts you through along the way. It comes from being forced to rely on yourself, from dealing with problems when things go wrong, from making mistakes and learning from them, from facing situations that scare or challenge you and discovering that you can handle them after all. It comes from learning to enjoy your own company, becoming comfortable with who you are and eventually reaching the point where you don’t need anyone else’s permission, reassurance or approval to live your life on your own terms.

None of that happens overnight. Superman had his home planet destroyed, Batman saw his parents killed and every superhero worth a damn has been knocked down, tested and pushed beyond what they thought they could endure before coming back stronger. Solo travellers have their own version of that journey. Your transformation into full on travel deity can only be achieved through a baptism of fire that only those who have been through it can truly attest to.

The cape is still optional.

Solo Travel Can Be Scary

The idea of solo travel can be scary, especially before that first trip. For most people, it isn’t the reality of travelling alone that frightens them, because they haven’t experienced that yet; it is everything they imagine might happen once they step into the unknown without someone familiar beside them. The reality is usually very different. Those enormous fears have a habit of shrinking remarkably quickly once you are actually on the road, but that initial uncertainty still matters. Every superhero needs an origin story, and for the solo traveller, this is theirs.

Most people experience at least some worry, apprehension or fear before their first solo trip, whether that is worrying about safety, loneliness, getting lost, dealing with unfamiliar cultures or simply wondering what the hell they are going to do if something goes wrong and there is nobody familiar standing beside them.

The reality is that solo travel is overwhelmingly safe for the vast majority of travellers, being alone is very different from being lonely, and many of the things people worry about most before leaving become completely ordinary remarkably quickly once they are actually on the road. That doesn’t make the nerves any less real, but it does mean they are usually a response to uncertainty rather than an accurate prediction of what the trip itself will be like.

For the first time, there may be no familiar person beside you to confirm that you are getting on the right train, help work out where the hostel is, decide what to do next or take over when something doesn’t go according to plan. You have stepped outside the routines, people and environments that normally make life predictable, and suddenly you are responsible for figuring everything out yourself.

Underneath all those individual worries sits one fundamental question:

What if I can’t cope?

That is the first hurdle in your origin story.

That nervous moment before leaving, the doubts, the people at home asking whether you are sure, the voice in the back of your mind wondering whether this was such a good idea after all. That is the first challenge to overcome. Not because fear itself is something shameful, but because doing something despite feeling uncertain is how you begin discovering what you are actually capable of.

Then you go.

And almost immediately, the enormous, terrifying concept of travelling the world alone starts breaking down into a succession of surprisingly ordinary things. You get through the airport. You find the bus. You check into the hostel. You go out for something to eat. You navigate an unfamiliar city. You talk to people you have never met before. You make decisions without asking anyone else’s opinion. Maybe you get something wrong, take the wrong train or wander in completely the wrong direction for half an hour. Then you correct it and carry on.

None of those individual things sounds particularly heroic, but that’s how the transformation starts.

The first time you eat alone may feel strange; soon you barely think about it. The first time you arrive somewhere unfamiliar with nobody waiting for you can feel intimidating; eventually arriving in a new country and figuring things out becomes second nature. The first problem can feel enormous because you have no idea whether you can deal with it. By the tenth, you already know that you probably can.

That is why the fear many people feel before their first solo trip is so important to this particular story. Not because solo travel needs to be frightening, and certainly not because anyone needs to manufacture danger or hardship to prove themselves, but because overcoming that initial uncertainty gives you your first taste of something that will become increasingly powerful the longer you travel: experience.

You begin with What if I can’t cope?

Then, somewhere along the way, you realise that you already are.

The Baptism Of Fire

Of course, getting on that plane and discovering that solo travel isn’t anywhere near as terrifying as you imagined is only the beginning of your transformation. Every superhero origin story needs a few trials along the way, and sooner or later travel will provide them.

Because things will go wrong.

That isn’t pessimism, it is simply the reality of travel. The longer you spend moving around the world, the more often plans will unravel, mistakes will be made and circumstances completely outside your control will force you to improvise. Sometimes it will be nothing more than an inconvenience that costs you an afternoon. Other times you will find yourself standing somewhere completely unfamiliar, the original plan in tatters, wondering what the hell you are supposed to do next. Sometimes it will be your fault. Sometimes it will be nobody’s fault. Sometimes the universe will simply decide that your plans for the day are irrelevant.

I’ve had more than my fair share over the last 25 years. I’ve been caught in sandstorms, got lost in jungles, travelled through countries during revolutions and political upheaval, dealt with illness and injury far from home and found myself in more than a few situations where Plan A was fucked, Plan B wasn’t looking particularly promising and improvisation was the only option left. I’ve also got on the wrong bus, missed connections, turned up at the wrong airport and once became so spectacularly jetlagged after too many work trips in too short a period that it took me three days to realise I was in Romania, not Moldova.

Everyone screws up occasionally.

And contrary to the mythology of the fearless, infallible traveller, experience doesn’t stop that from happening. I still make mistakes after more than 25 years of travel. What experience changes is your ability to deal with them.

The first time something goes badly wrong, it can feel enormous. You don’t have a catalogue of previous disasters to compare it with, you don’t necessarily know what your options are and there is no familiar person standing beside you to take over. So you work it out. You ask for help. You change the plan. You find another route, another option or another solution. You improvise, adapt and keep going.

Then the next problem comes along, and this time it isn’t your first.

That is where the baptism of fire really begins. Being put through the fire of the forge and the hammer of the anvil makes the weapon harder, stronger and less likely to break under pressure. The same is true for solo travellers.

Every problem you solve adds experience. Every mistake teaches you something. Every difficult situation you get through leaves you better prepared for the next one. Every problem is a hammer blow that makes you harder, more resilient, more adaptable.

Do that often enough and something fundamental begins to change. Problems stop feeling like catastrophes and start becoming situations that need solutions. Your first instinct shifts away from panic and towards figuring out what your options are. You become calmer when plans fall apart because you have learned that plans can be rebuilt. You become more adaptable because experience has taught you there is almost always another route, another option or another way forward.

Those hammer blows accumulate. The big ones, the small ones, the ridiculous ones and the ones that eventually become the stories you tell for decades afterwards. They forge resilience, adaptability and an increasingly formidable ability to keep your head when everything around you gets FUBAR’d.

Experience Is Your Superpower

And the more time you spend in that forge, the more powerful the effect becomes. Every problem dealt with, every mistake recovered from and every unfamiliar situation navigated adds to a growing reservoir of experience that you carry into whatever happens next.

That experience is your real superpower.

The next time something goes wrong, it isn’t your first time anymore. You may never have faced that exact problem, in that exact country, under those exact circumstances, but you have dealt with enough uncertainty to recognise the pattern. Something has gone wrong. Fine. What are the options? Who can help? What can be changed? What happens next?

That is where the almost infuriating calm of experienced solo travellers comes from. It isn’t fearlessness, and it certainly isn’t because we always know what we are doing. Half the time we’re making it up as we go along just like everyone else. The difference is that after enough years of figuring things out, you become extremely comfortable with the fact that you will figure things out.

And because you are travelling solo, there is nobody else automatically taking responsibility for doing that for you.

You can ask for advice, accept help and rely on other people when you need to — independence has never meant stubbornly refusing assistance — but the ultimate responsibility for your journey remains yours. You decide where you are going. You decide whether a situation feels right. You decide what to do when the original plan collapses. You make the call, live with it and, if it turns out to be the wrong one, work out what to do next.

Do that often enough and you stop constantly looking sideways for reassurance.

The question gradually changes from Can I handle this? to How am I going to handle this?

That may sound like a small distinction, but it is enormous. The first assumes that your capability is still in doubt. The second assumes that a solution exists and you are capable of finding it. You aren’t standing there wondering whether someone needs to rescue you; you’re already looking at the problem and working out which tool on your utility belt you’re going to use.

Sometimes that tool is experience. Sometimes it is patience, adaptability, judgement or the willingness to abandon a plan that clearly isn’t working. Sometimes it is simply having enough humility to ask somebody for help. The point isn’t that you become capable of doing absolutely everything alone. Even Batman had Alfred. The point is that you become confident enough in your own ability that needing help occasionally doesn’t threaten your independence.

That changes far more than the way you travel.

After navigating unfamiliar countries alone, making decisions without anyone else’s approval and dealing with whatever the road has thrown at you, everyday uncertainty loses a lot of its power. You have spent years practising adaptability without ever calling it practice. You have learned how to make decisions when you don’t have perfect information, how to change direction when circumstances change and how to keep functioning when the original plan has gone completely to shit.

Eventually that becomes part of you.

You aren’t confident because nothing can go wrong. You are confident because plenty already has.

You aren’t independent because you never need anyone. You are independent because you know you can stand on your own two feet.

And you aren’t calm because you have some superhuman ability to control the world around you. You are calm because experience has taught you that when the world inevitably refuses to cooperate, you can adapt.

You Become Your Own Fortress Of Solitude

And once you stop needing someone else beside you to reassure you that you can handle the world, something else begins to change. You become increasingly comfortable with the one person who has been there through every missed bus, every wrong turn, every triumph, every disaster and every ridiculous decision along the way.

Yourself.

Being alone for any significant length of time is unfamiliar to a lot of people. Modern life doesn’t give us many opportunities for genuine solitude, and when it does, there is always a screen, a message, a television or some other distraction waiting to fill the silence. Solo travel strips much of that away. There will be long journeys, meals, walks, quiet evenings and entire days when there is nobody you know around, and eventually you have to learn how to be comfortable with your own company.

That can be another challenge in itself. The freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want sounds fantastic — and it is — but suddenly there is nobody else deciding what the day looks like. Nobody else’s interests to accommodate, no group consensus to hide behind and no familiar social role to slip comfortably into. The question stops being what does everyone want to do? and becomes something much more personal: what do I actually want?

That is where solo travel starts stripping away some of the armour you arrived with, even as it builds a completely different kind around you.

At home we all inhabit roles. We are colleagues, partners, friends, sons, daughters, parents, professionals and countless other versions of ourselves shaped partly by the people around us. There is nothing false about those roles, but they come with expectations. Other people know who they think we are, what we normally do, what we like and how we are supposed to behave, and without even realising it we can spend an enormous amount of our lives conforming to those expectations.

Then you travel somewhere nobody knows you.

Nobody cares what your job title is. Nobody knows what you normally order, what your friends think is cool, whether your family approves of something or what version of yourself you have spent years presenting to everyone around you. For perhaps the first time in a very long while, your decisions can be based almost entirely on what you want.

That doesn’t reveal some mystical ‘true self’ that was hidden away waiting to be discovered on a beach in Thailand. You were always that person. Solo travel simply gives you the space, and eventually the permission, to live more completely as them.

You discover that you actually enjoy eating alone. You spend an entire afternoon in a museum everyone at home would find boring. You decide you don’t particularly care about the attraction everyone insists you have to see and spend the day doing something completely different instead. You talk to people you might never have approached at home, try things you would normally dismiss and gradually stop judging your own choices through the imagined reactions of everyone else.

And the more comfortable you become with your own company, the less frightening solitude becomes. Being alone stops feeling like an absence that needs to be filled and becomes something you can actively enjoy. You can seek out company when you want it, make friends easily on the road and share extraordinary experiences with other people, but you no longer need somebody beside you simply to feel comfortable existing.

Superman had his Fortress of Solitude. Batman had the Batcave.

The solo traveller learns to carry theirs with them.

Because once you are genuinely comfortable in your own company, you can walk into a restaurant alone, arrive in a new country alone, spend a day exploring alone or sit quietly somewhere on the other side of the world with nobody else around and feel completely at ease.

You aren’t waiting for somebody else to complete the experience.

You Stop Living By Everyone Else’s Expectations

And once you realise that you are enough to have those experiences on your own, it becomes increasingly difficult to go back to asking everyone else’s permission to have them.

That freedom is one of solo travel’s greatest superpowers. When the expectations and compromises of everyday life temporarily disappear, you get to be selfish. Not selfish in the sense of treating other people badly or believing your needs matter more than theirs, but selfish in the healthiest possible sense: for once, you get to concentrate entirely on yourself.

You decide where you go. You decide when you wake up, what you eat, what you see, how quickly you travel and whether you spend three hours exploring an ancient temple or decide you’ve had enough after ten minutes and go looking for lunch instead. Nobody else has to agree. Nobody has to be persuaded. Nobody is standing beside you bored because this was your choice rather than theirs, and you don’t have to spend half the day doing something you couldn’t care less about because somebody else desperately wanted to.

At first, that freedom is simply exhilarating.

Then it starts teaching you something much more important.

You begin paying attention to what actually makes you happy.

That sounds obvious, but in ordinary life it is remarkably easy to lose sight of. Decisions are constantly filtered through responsibilities, relationships, careers, social expectations and what other people think we should be doing. Compromise is a necessary part of living alongside other human beings, of course, but compromise can become such an automatic habit that people stop asking themselves what they would choose if nobody else’s opinion mattered.

Solo travel asks that question every single day.

And after answering it often enough, you become much less willing to hand responsibility for your happiness back to everyone else.

You stop waiting for somebody to want the same things before allowing yourself to do them. You stop assuming that an interest needs somebody else’s approval before it is worth pursuing. You stop worrying quite so much about whether your choices look strange from the outside. If you want to spend your afternoon wandering around a museum, you do. If you want to sit on a beach doing absolutely nothing, you do. If everyone else is heading in one direction and something in the opposite direction interests you more, you turn around and go your own way.

That independence begins with tiny decisions about what to do with a Tuesday afternoon somewhere on the other side of the world, but it doesn’t necessarily stay there.

Because once you have spent months or years building a life on the road around your own decisions, it becomes much harder to accept the idea that you should live the rest of your life according to somebody else’s expectations. You become more willing to question the things you are supposed to want, the milestones you are supposed to reach and the version of yourself other people are most comfortable with.

That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibilities, relationships or compromise. It means understanding that your own wants belong in the equation too.

And there is something enormously powerful about reaching the point where you can say: this is what I want, this is what makes me happy and I don’t need anybody else’s permission to pursue it.

By now the nervous first-time traveller wondering whether they could cope alone is becoming increasingly difficult to recognise. You’ve been through the forge. You’ve built experience. You’ve learned to rely on yourself, become comfortable in your own company and stopped allowing other people’s expectations to define what your life should look like.

You Don’t Become Fearless. You Become A Badass

And this is where the transformation really comes together.

Solo travel doesn’t make you fearless. It doesn’t make you invincible, guarantee that you will always make the right decision or grant you some mystical ability to stride through every problem without breaking a sweat. You will still screw up. You will still encounter situations you aren’t prepared for, make decisions that turn out to be spectacularly wrong and occasionally find yourself staring at the unfolding chaos thinking, well, this is fucked.

But you won’t be the same person standing there.

After enough time travelling alone, fear and uncertainty lose much of their power over you. Not because they disappear, but because you have stopped treating them as instructions. You have been uncertain before and gone anyway. You have been lost and found your way again. You have made mistakes and fixed them, watched carefully made plans disintegrate and built new ones from whatever was left. Somewhere among all those experiences, you stopped needing the world to be predictable before believing you could handle it.

That is a formidable thing to learn about yourself.

You become calmer because you have experience. You become adaptable because rigid plans don’t survive very long on the road. You become independent because thousands of decisions have been yours alone to make, and self-confident because you have spent years discovering the limits of what you can do and then pushing beyond them. You become comfortable in your own company without becoming dependent on solitude, and comfortable meeting complete strangers because you have done it in hostels, cafés, buses, trains and countless other places around the world. You learn when to trust your judgement, when to ask for help, when to change the plan, when to stand your ground and when being a badass means having enough sense to walk away.

That is what all those years on the road have been building towards.

The person who once wondered What if I can’t cope? now knows they can. Not because nothing difficult will ever happen again, but because difficult things already have happened and they dealt with them. Not because they know exactly what the future will throw at them, but because experience has taught them they don’t need to know in advance. Whatever comes next, they will assess it, adapt to it and figure out what to do.

That kind of self-confidence is hard earned. It comes from all those tiny decisions nobody else ever sees, the problems solved, the mistakes made, the fears overcome and the thousands of times you simply had to work something out because there was nobody else there to do it for you. The sandstorms and revolutions make better stories, but so do some of the spectacular fuck-ups, and the transformation happens through all of it.

And once you have built that level of self-reliance, it doesn’t disappear when the trip ends. You bring it home with you. The problems change, the scenery becomes more familiar and the backpack gets shoved into a cupboard until the next adventure, but you are still the person who learned to handle yourself on the other side of the world. That capability becomes part of the way you approach everything else life throws at you.

That is why experienced solo travellers are some of the most self-confident, adaptable and capable badasses you will ever meet. They weren’t born that way. They built those qualities one journey, one decision, one challenge, one mistake and one adventure at a time.

They faced the fear at the beginning and went anyway. They went through the baptism of fire and took the hammer blows. They accumulated the scars, the stories and the experience. Somewhere along the way, the nervous first-time traveller disappeared and someone considerably harder to knock down walked out the other side.

So no, solo travel won’t give you super strength. You won’t develop X-ray vision, suddenly discover you can fly or wake up one morning capable of shooting lasers out of your eyes.

But it can make you stronger. More resilient. More adaptable. More independent. More comfortable in your own skin and infinitely more certain of your ability to take whatever life throws at you and find a way through.

You started with a backpack, a plane ticket and no idea what the hell was waiting for you.

Look at you now.

You are a damn superhero.