My First Solo Travelling Experience
Recently I went on a one week solo trip to Uttrakhand. The idea came to me during my final exams, I didn’t plan too much just packed a bag and booked a ticket to Delhi. People think that solo travel will be boring, no fun and weird. But Solo travelling turned out to be very alluring for me. Here’s why :
1. You never have to adjust. You make your own timetable. You get ready at your own pace and leave for the day. You learn about the world since you’re alone. No one is there to help you, not your parents, or brother, or friends. It makes you independent, adventurous, self-introspective, and you learn an extra thing or two about a place.
2. You can breathe in the serenity of the places alone without any chit-chats. You can be anyone on the planet. No one knows you, and you probably won’t be in the same place or meet the same people ever again. There is no identity, no social/personal norms to hold on to, it’s just you out there, somewhere, in the world.
3. You control the stride of your journey, stop where you feel like, sit for hours at places you fall in love with, without having to worry about constraints of your fellow travelers.
4. You’ll learn how to be alone without being lonely as you’ll be forced to interact with people from different backgrounds and cultures and share stories and interesting information about where they come from. This way you’ll learn much much more than you’d by just visiting a certain place with your known ones.
5. You’ll be much more sensitive to your surrounding and your own senses:- listening to different sounds, tasting different foods and most importantly paying attention to minute details like how the expressions of different people evolve according to different stimuli, how a particular building is designed, the contrasting scenes and much more, all thanks to the freedom from the distraction caused by fellow travellers. You will just FEEL more.
6. Lastly, you get to meet yourself in a whole new light which I’m sure we seldom get an opportunity to. You’ll undergo an inner journey in itself which is the most rewarding part of solo travel.
I visited Jaipur, Delhi, Rishikesh, Roorkee, Dehradun, Haridwar and Mussoorie, without carrying much gadgets (only a music player & a phone that too got lost on the 2nd day of my journey). I didn’t click any photos, no chatting on WhatAapp, no check-in’s on facebook, no adding photos on Instagram. I had no contact with my friends and family, was complete disconnected from the world for that week. (just called my parents once a day)
I travelled by buses, trains, boats, ferries, bikes, cars and on horseback. I walked, climbed and limped across marshes and rocks, hills and cities in streets and alleys, highways and bridges. I slept in hotels and hostels, and also in common dormitories with strangers. I shared table at dinner with millionaires and a salt shaker with a sweeper while eating chhole bhature on the roadside. I visited museums and colleges (IIT Roorkee), temples and caves, hill stations, stood in line for tickets and took lifts from strangers. Many strangers turned into friends. We sat, we talked, we flirted, we laughed, and we shared our lives, we climbed to the highest point at a place and looked down on the world trying to imagine if a god would see the same from his high heaven, trying to make profoundly philosophical conversation with our grunts, snorts and mumbles. Then we went our ways, ALONE.
Moreover, I got so many business ideas, novel ideas, and social ideas while travelling. It made me more tolerant and compassionate towards every living and even non-living beings around, for I could connect with things. I cried while looking at the sheer beauty of snow capped Himalayan ranges and got goosebumps all over when my body first touched the mildly cold water of the holy river Ganges. I got to understand all religions from all points of views. And ultimately, I saw travel taking me away from religions and bringing me closer to humanity, which is the truest of all religions.
I would suggest everyone at least once in your life to try it, and I don’t mean for 7 or 10 days. At times I felt lonely, so I began writing. It’s sometimes a little scary or uncomfortable or depressing but it is also really an incredible way to see someplace you’ve never been before. Go. Do it. And then come home and hug all your friends and your boyfriend/girlfriend and your family and tell them how much you fucking missed them.
