Making And Breaking Friendships When You Travel The World

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.

Travelling the world brings an extraordinary number of people into your life. Some will be locals you meet by chance, others fellow travellers following roughly the same route, and a rare few will become genuine friends who remain part of your life long after the journey itself has ended. But travel also means becoming very familiar with saying goodbye. People arrive, friendships form remarkably quickly, routes separate and sometimes someone who has been an important part of your life for days, weeks or even months simply heads in a different direction.

After more than 25 years of travelling, predominantly solo, I have experienced every version of that. I have shared extraordinary adventures with people whose surnames I never knew, formed intense friendships with travellers I never saw again after we parted ways, stayed in touch with others for years and made a small handful of genuine lifelong friends. I’ve also watched some friendships from home gradually change as our lives moved in different directions. As I travelled and they inevitably got pulled away by their own lives and families. It is one of the strange realities of long-term travel: you become very good at meeting people, but you also become very accustomed to losing them. And over time it teaches you something important about friendship itself. Not every friendship has to last forever to have mattered.

A Range Of Friendships

Over all those years I have met countless people on the road. Some were locals who invited me briefly into their lives, others were fellow travellers whose paths happened to cross mine for a few hours, days or weeks. A great many of them I can barely remember now, if at all. There are faces that have faded with time, names I have completely forgotten and people who survive only in an old analogue photograph tucked away in a box somewhere, forever attached to a particular place, experience or moment.

Then there are the friendships that travel seems uniquely capable of creating: short, intense and completely genuine. You are thrown together by circumstance, perhaps sharing a hostel dorm, a twelve-hour bus journey, a jungle trek or simply discovering that you are heading in the same direction. Within a remarkably short space of time you can find yourselves sharing meals, travelling together, solving problems, looking out for each other and experiencing the kind of things that might take months, if not years, of ordinary friendship to accumulate at home.

Travel has a strange way of compressing relationships like that. When you are spending entire days together, constantly experiencing new things and dealing with whatever the road throws at you, there isn’t much room for the gradual process of getting to know someone that happens in everyday life. You can meet a complete stranger on Monday and by Friday feel as if you have known them for years. Then one of you gets on a bus, catches a flight or turns left when the other turns right, and suddenly it is over.

But brief doesn’t mean superficial. Some of the people I have known for only a few days are woven into experiences I still remember decades later. I may not know where they are now, or even remember all of their names, but I remember what we did together, the conversations we had and the part they played in that particular chapter of my travels. For that moment in our lives, our paths crossed at exactly the right time, and the fact that they eventually separated doesn’t make what came before any less real.

A much smaller number stayed. These are the rare friendships that somehow survived different countries, different lives and years in which seeing each other regularly simply wasn’t possible. People I originally met because we happened to be in the same place on the other side of the world became part of my life long after the journey that brought us together had finished. Some friendships I made travelling have now lasted for decades, which still seems remarkable when I think about how completely accidental those first meetings were.

And then there are the friendships from home. Long-term travel doesn’t automatically destroy old friendships, but life changes them. While I was travelling, friends were building careers, settling down, having families and being pulled in entirely understandable directions by their own lives. I was changing too, shaped by very different experiences and following a very different path. Some friendships were strong enough to absorb all of that distance and change. Others gradually became occasional messages, then acquaintances, and then, finally, a fond memory.

There was never really a definitive last time, there was no argument, betrayal or dramatic ending. Sometimes two lives simply stop running alongside each other and you never really know when it will happen. Travel makes you particularly aware of that because you experience the entire spectrum so often: the stranger who matters for an afternoon, the person who becomes your closest friend for three extraordinary weeks, the old friend who slowly drifts away and the chance encounter on the other side of the world that somehow becomes a friendship lasting decades.

After enough hellos and goodbyes, you stop measuring the importance of a friendship purely by how long it lasts. Some people remain in your life. Others belong completely to a particular time and place. Both can matter enormously.

The Inevitability Of Goodbye

If meeting people is one of the great joys of travel, saying goodbye to them is the inevitable price that comes with it. Backpacking in particular has its own strange rhythm of constant arrivals and departures. You meet someone in a hostel, on a bus or halfway through an excursion, spend a few days becoming part of each other’s lives and then, almost as quickly as the friendship formed, one of you has a ticket somewhere else.

At first that can be surprisingly difficult. There is something slightly absurd about feeling genuinely sad to say goodbye to someone you didn’t even know a week earlier, but travel has a habit of accelerating intimacy. When you spend whole days together, share unfamiliar places, solve problems, get lost, eat together, laugh at the same disasters and experience things that are completely outside ordinary life, friendships can develop with an intensity that has very little to do with the amount of time you have actually known each other. The goodbye can therefore feel disproportionately significant because, in a way, the friendship itself has been disproportionately concentrated.

And then you do it again. And again. 

Over a long trip there can be an almost continuous cycle of meeting people and parting from them. Someone arrives just as somebody else leaves. A traveller you have spent the last week with heads south while you are going north. A group that formed almost accidentally breaks apart one by one as flights, visas, budgets and completely different itineraries pull everyone onwards. Sometimes you know exactly when the goodbye is coming; sometimes you casually say that you will catch up later and only afterwards realise that was the last time you would ever see each other.

That constant change can sound lonely from the outside, especially to anyone already worried about travelling solo and being alone. In reality, the problem is often almost the opposite. Solo travel creates so many opportunities to meet people that the difficult part isn’t necessarily finding companionship; it is accepting that much of that companionship is temporary.

There will still be periods when you are alone, of course. There may be evenings when you eat by yourself, moments when you feel lonely or times when homesickness catches you unexpectedly. That is normal, whether you are travelling or sitting at home. But those moments sit alongside an enormous number of encounters, conversations and temporary friendships that make the idea of the permanently isolated solo traveller largely unrecognisable from the reality of most backpacking trips.

Often it still begins with nothing more complicated than saying hello. That hello might lead to a conversation over breakfast, twelve hours talking on a night bus, a few days exploring somewhere together or months of travelling in roughly the same direction. There is no way of knowing at the beginning which it will be, and perhaps that uncertainty is part of what makes those encounters so valuable.

Eventually, though, most travelling friendships reach the same point. Someone has somewhere else to be. Plans diverge, the next bus leaves, another country calls, and you say goodbye knowing there is every chance you may never occupy the same physical space again.

The instinct can be to see that as something sad, as though a friendship that ends or fades has somehow failed. After enough years on the road, I came to see it differently. The ending does not cancel everything that came before it. A friendship can have been completely real, important and valuable even if it belonged only to one journey, one country or one extraordinary week of your life. Sometimes the reason a person remains so closely associated with a particular memory is precisely because that is where your lives intersected, and where that friendship was meant to exist.

Travel doesn’t make saying goodbye easy, but it does make you better at accepting that people can move in and out of your life without either the meeting or the leaving needing to be regretted. Every goodbye creates an absence, but it also means there was somebody worth saying goodbye to in the first place.

Goodbye Doesn’t Mean What It Used To

Of course, saying goodbye while travelling means something very different now than it did when I first started backpacking more than 25 years ago. Back then hardly anyone I met carried a mobile phone, smartphones were still the stuff of science fiction and social media simply didn’t exist. Facebook was years away and even MySpace hadn’t yet given everyone Tom as their first online friend. Keeping in touch with someone you met on the road required considerably more effort than tapping a screen.

You swapped email addresses, if you both had one, wrote down phone numbers that would probably change within a year or scribbled home addresses into notebooks with genuine promises to write. Sometimes you did. Sometimes a few emails went backwards and forwards before gradually becoming less frequent. And sometimes you said goodbye to someone you had just spent an extraordinary few days or weeks with knowing, even if neither of you said it aloud, that there was a very real possibility you would never hear from each other again.

There was a finality to those goodbyes that has largely disappeared from modern travel.

Today it is almost impossible to lose someone completely unless one of you actively chooses to disappear. Within seconds of meeting, travellers can exchange contact details, message each other from opposite sides of the world and remain connected indefinitely. Someone you spent three days with in Thailand can still be sitting somewhere in your digital periphery fifteen years later. You may know where they live, what they are doing, who they married and what their three children and new home in Australia look like without having spoken to them properly in years.

In one sense, that is wonderful. I have been able to stay in touch with people I would almost certainly have lost completely in an earlier era of travel, and friendships that might once have been defeated by geography have had the opportunity to survive it. Distance is no longer the barrier it once was.

But staying connected is not the same thing as staying friends.

Technology has made it easier than ever to know that somebody is still out there, but it hasn’t changed the way relationships naturally evolve. A person can remain on a contact list for twenty years while gradually becoming a stranger. You can occasionally exchange a birthday message, react to an update or see fragments of each other’s lives without really being part of those lives anymore. The connection remains technically intact even when the friendship itself has quietly faded.

In some ways that makes the ending less obvious. In the past, a goodbye often had a clean edge to it. You walked away and, unless both of you made a deliberate effort, that might genuinely be the end. Now friendships can remain suspended in a strange half-life for years, neither completely present nor entirely gone. There may never be a moment when you can say the friendship ended; there is simply a point where you realise you haven’t actually spoken for a very long time.

Yet I don’t think that changes what those friendships meant when they were real and immediate. If anything, seeing the occasional glimpse of someone I once travelled with can bring an entire period of my life back with remarkable clarity. For a moment they are not simply a name on a screen; they are the person who shared that ridiculous bus journey, that trek, that night out, the bar brawl both promised never to speak about, that border crossing or those few extraordinary weeks somewhere on the other side of the world.

Modern technology has changed the mechanics of goodbye. It has made losing contact far less inevitable and maintaining genuine long-distance friendships infinitely easier. What it hasn’t done is remove the fundamental truth behind all those old backpacker farewells: people still grow, lives still change and paths still move apart.

We are better than ever at staying in touch. Staying part of each other’s lives is something else entirely.

The Effect Of Constant Change

After enough years of meeting people, forming friendships and saying goodbye, all of that constant change inevitably leaves its mark. Not in the sense that you become detached or stop caring because another goodbye is probably coming, but almost the opposite. You learn to appreciate people for the place they occupy in your life while they are actually there, rather than judging the value of the relationship by whether it survives indefinitely.

Every person you genuinely connect with leaves something behind. Sometimes it is significant: a different way of looking at the world, an introduction to a culture you knew little about, a friendship that changes the direction of a journey or an experience that becomes part of who you are. Sometimes it is much smaller: a conversation that makes you reconsider an assumption, a recommendation that sends you somewhere unexpected, a helping hand when you need one or simply good company at precisely the right moment. Most of those influences are impossible to measure, and many probably go unnoticed at the time, but accumulated over years they become part of the person you eventually turn into.

That is particularly true of long-term travel because you are constantly meeting people whose lives may bear very little resemblance to your own. Different nationalities, cultures, beliefs, careers, backgrounds and experiences are thrown together in hostels, on trains, halfway up mountains and around tables in places none of you call home. You don’t have to agree with everyone you meet or form some profound connection with every stranger, but being repeatedly exposed to people outside your normal social circle inevitably broadens your understanding of how differently other people can live and think.

Some people affect you simply because they appear at the right moment. They might help when something has gone wrong, persuade you to take a chance on somewhere you hadn’t planned to visit, share an experience that would have felt completely different alone or give you companionship during a period when you needed it. They may never know the significance they had in your life because, to them, it may have been nothing more than another ordinary day on the road.

And then they leave.

That is the part travel forces you to become comfortable with. Not every relationship needs to be preserved indefinitely to justify the time invested in it. Not every friendship that fades represents something lost or broken. Some people are enormously important for a short period and then disappear because your lives were only ever moving alongside each other temporarily. Trying to judge those relationships solely by whether you are still speaking ten or twenty years later misses the value of what they were when they existed.

The friendships that do endure become special for a different reason. Against all the geographical distance, changing lives, careers, relationships, families and years spent apart, somehow the connection survives. You may not speak every week or see each other for years at a time, but when you do, the friendship is still there. Those people are rare, and after a lifetime of watching others naturally drift in and out of your life, you appreciate just how rare they are.

But I don’t think those lasting friendships make the temporary ones less meaningful. They are simply different kinds of relationships. One becomes part of the continuing story of your life; another belongs completely to one particular chapter. Both can change you. Both can leave memories that last far longer than the relationship itself.

Perhaps that is what all those years of hellos and goodbyes have taught me more than anything else. We have a tendency to think permanence is proof of value, that a successful friendship is one that lasts forever and one that ends must somehow have failed. Travel strips away that assumption. It teaches you that people can matter deeply without remaining permanently, and that losing touch with someone does not erase the friendship you once had.

I can look back now at more than 25 years of travelling and see an extraordinary collection of people woven through it. Some are still among my closest friends. Some exist at the edges of my life, occasionally appearing in a message or update. Some I haven’t spoken to for years. Others I will never see or hear from again, and there are undoubtedly people whose names I have forgotten completely even though I can still remember exactly where we were and what we experienced together.

Every one of those relationships belonged to a different moment, lasted for a different length of time and left something different behind. I wouldn’t want to measure their value by which ones survived.

So to everyone I have met along the way: the strangers at transit stops, the temporary travel companions, the people who shared the adventures and misadventures, the friendships that faded and the rare few that somehow lasted through everything, thank you. You were part of the journey, and whether our paths crossed for an hour, a month or decades, I’m just glad they crossed at all.