Traveling Alone is Overrated
In retrospect, I am not surprised that I sank into existential dread the minute after I boarded my RyanAir flight from Athens to Santorini. First, because it’s hard not to reevaluate your life on a RyanAir flight (as any who have taken one would know). Second, because in the week leading up to this trip I had 1. Lost the use of my laptop and 2. Lost the use of my Smartphone, an unenviable combination in any circumstance, but especially one in which you were 1. In a foreign country, 2. Very unable to afford a replacement for either, and also 3. Had a paper due, and 4. Didn’t remember the times of the ferries you booked from island to island to home.
By the time I came off the plane alone, at around midnight, I was already counting the days until I would get to go back to Athens, a truly terrible way to start the first three hours of my spring break. And that was before I spent too long finding the taxi stand, and then spent way too much money to sit for 45 minutes, exhausted and awkward, in a cab, searching out the window for a landscape too dark to make out on the way to my Airbnb.
And once I arrived, then the loneliness hit me hard.
The dread was setting in again as I waited for the bus the next morning. I’d spent an hour on the black sand beach in Perissa, across the street from where I was staying, reading through the only book I’d brought: The Odyssey, because I hadn’t read it in years and what other book was I supposed to bring on a solo Greek island adventure? I also bought sunscreen, because I forgot it at home, and lathered up my face because, even though this was April and way before the summer season’s heat, it was already starting to burn.
I checked back every few minutes. The bus was supposed to have been here fifteen minutes ago. Twenty minutes ago. Twenty-five minutes ago.
There was a bench in front of the bus stop, and at some point, a young woman had sat down there. She looked like she was 20, my age, or maybe a little older. I was relieved. Maybe she would know.
“Pou einai to leophorio?” I asked. Oh shit. Did “leophorio” mean bus or bus stop in Greek?
“What?” she said.
Oh thank God. “Do you know where the bus is?”
She shrugged. “It was supposed to be here half an hour ago.” She had an accent, French, I guessed.
I sat down on the bench beside her.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“America,” I replied. “You?”
“Quebec.”
“Have you been on Santorini long?”
“A few days.”
The bus was an hour and twenty minutes late when it finally arrived. I sat down with my bag. The young woman, though most of the seats on the bus were open, sat in the one next to me.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Akrotiri,” I said.
“Not Thira?” The main city.
“Eventually,” I said.
We talked a lot on the bus. She had been travelling through eastern and central Europe for six months at this point, alone for a lot of it, but with friends she’d made along the way for a lot as well. We swapped some stories, though hers were way, way better than mine.
“Here’s the people I was traveling with,” she said, showing me a picture on her phone of two guys our age holding up a sign at a protest: Le Capitalisme C’est 2015- Capitalism is so 2015. “They’re Swiss. It’s funny how I met them, actually. We were on a plane, leaving Switzerland after this protest, and I was showing my friend this picture and saying how much I loved the sign, and then behind us we heard them say, ‘Thanks!’ The four of us traveled together for two months.”
I laughed. “That’s the most insane coincidence I’ve ever heard.”
She laughed, too. “I know.”
I was dreading the end of the bus ride, when we’d separate and each go our way. I contemplated asking her to come with me, playing that game of watching body language, watching eyes, waiting for the right time to be rejected. Then when the bus was pulling into Thira, where we’d have to change to another, she looked me in the eyes. “Would you mind if I came with you to Akrotiri?”
And I said, “Sure.”
Akrotiri was the reason that I came to Santorini. Not for the beaches, not for the Insta-perfect town of Oia, but for the archaeological site at the far south of the island, the last stop on the bus.
It’s a city frozen in time, excavated from the ashes of one of the most cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in history. The eruption that cleaved the island in two, that caused the Minoan Empire to fall. In 1600 BC, Akrotiri died and took a lot of the Mediterranean with it, yet here it still is, buildings standing multiple stories in places, though they were rocked by earthquakes and coated in ash. An enduring mystery, an enigma. A city that was already empty at its destruction, unlike Pompeii, which more than a thousand years later came to the same end. This city was abandoned before it was destroyed, and no trace of its inhabitants has ever been found. They left their homes and all their possessions and disappeared. And nobody ever returned. Nobody came back to this city that still stands sprawling and lonely, and will never not be so.
We stayed together that whole day, the two of us, exploring more of the island before returning to Perissa at night. We cooked pasta at her hostel and we ate it under the stars with a bottle of the cheapest wine we could find.
I left her to walk back to my own place that night, suddenly craving solitude. What was I doing? Was this what was supposed to happen when you struck out alone? I thought I was supposed to “learn more about myself than I ever thought” or something, not spend all day on a beach talking with a total stranger, a stranger who wordlessly pooled all her resources before me, all her food in her bag, while I shared my own food, my towel, and my sunblock without a second thought.
We met up again the next day and went to Thira, walking through the winding levels of streets on the side of the mountainous island, looking over the edge to the remains of the great volcano, at the bright blue water so far below. We ate bread and jam and hard cheese and drank cheap wine on someone’s stoop, watching the donkeys walk up and down the steep steps to the beach far below the city. We watched the sunset this way, too, waiting for night to fall.
I had a 6 am ferry to catch the next morning and I hadn’t booked a place to stay because at the time I’d thought, “Fuck it. It’s a Saturday. I’ll stay out all night.” I had all my possessions with me, crammed into a backpack and a purse, and when I told her about my plan to not have a plan and to sleep on the beach of Naxos like Ariadne had in my favorite Greek myth, she shrugged and said, “Fuck it,” too, and that she had been wanting to go to Naxos in the next few days — so why not tomorrow? So we stashed our bags at the hostel in town and we bought a lot of booze.
We drank the beers from the periptero out on the street for a time, still talking, never running out of steam. She had been in Turkey for a month, she told me, couch surfing, making friends, hitch-hiking all over the countryside. She told me about the pastries she ate, how between Istanbul and her few weeks in Italy she must have gained 20 pounds. She told me about going to pop up concerts and shows and blasting Kurdish music on the radio, singing along to songs about freedom and rebellion. She told me about spray painting “fuck your patriarchy” on the building of the man in Istanbul that had assaulted her, and wished she had some spray paint now to do the same to the man on Santorini who she had been staying with up until the night before I met her. She played me her favorite party songs in Quebecois, and tried to teach me how to speak French the Canadian way rather than the way I’d learned in school.
It was dark when we’d finished our beers. I checked my watch. 8 hours until the first bus to the docks. So we talked some more, drank some more. I told her about my studies in Athens, about my studies in Boston. We both loved linguistics, trying to pick up all the languages of the places we visited. I told her about getting lost in Omonoia at 3 am, about all the places and archaeological sites she had to see when she got to Athens. I told her about my own explorations of Istanbul, including the night where a few friends and I stumbled into a bar where every person but us knew the words to the songs the live band played, and they called us out in Turkish in the middle of their set and had us dance with everyone, while they all made merry with us outsiders.
When round two of the street beers was over, to the bars we went. We tried to dance all night, we really did, but with two hours to go we went back to the hostel to collect our things, and ended up sharing her blankets and sleeping bag at the bus stop, where every bench was occupied by travelers like us with their frame backpacks and their hiking boots. The north wind ripped through the night and the wall-less bus stop and it was cold, freezing cold, a thing I had not expected in Greece, and had subsequently not packed for in my tiny backpack full of shorty shorts and hiking capris.
My friend thought that was hilarious. “And you wanted to sleep on the beach,” she said.
The ferry to Naxos was empty but for a few of us. We spread out sleeping on the floor, exhausted and hungover. Once we arrived, we climbed the small hill outside of town where there was a temple to Apollo and we napped for several hours in the shadow of the ancient ruins.
Later, we found a beach, and she teased me for not swimming, in the crystal water on the white sand, but after I tried, wading out to my knees, I gave up and said, “I’m cold.” I sat by our bags as she swam, huddled in my sweater, reading The Odyssey instead.
We slept on the beach that night because she accepted my, as it turned out, completely insane plan without questioning it. She had a tent so we shared it, huddled together because it really was cold. She lent me long layers, and I wore three sweaters, and the north wind shook the tent all night.
It was colder the next day. We took a bus to another beach, and then retreated indoors where I made her taste raquomelo, a Greek liquor mulled with honey served hot, and we were content.
That night we found a hostel rather than brave the beach again, and cooked ourselves some food with the only other person there, another man from Quebec in his late twenties. We hiked up to the temple to Apollo to watch one of the most beautiful sunsets that I have ever seen with beers from the supermarket, and then we retired to the hostel, where we stayed up till 3 am talking about protesting and Canadian politics, and I let them argue in French as I listened, drinking and learning, and occasionally interjecting a question.
I had to leave Naxos without her. She wanted to stay, to explore, and I had made plans to meet a friend on Mykonos for the rest of my break. And so, though I knew it would be brief, I was alone again.
Once I arrived on Mykonos, I found a gyro place where I could spend five Euros on French fries and water and wait for my friend. Wait an extra hour for him, because he hadn’t taken the water taxi that I had, but instead had walked. “Google maps is taking me on a literal goat path, I’ll be there in 20,” he texted me. “I have to fight a goat for dominance.”
I was nervous, being alone again, and antsy, as I waited. The fries, in truth, were more for stress-eating than for an excuse to sit. No internet, no safety net. Nothing to do but sit and maybe pull out my book.
When he finally found me, it was like I had returned from a long sojourn, like a lot of the stress and the melancholy left me. Because I had been stressed. I had been sleep-deprived, crashing on benches in bus stops and on archaeological sites and beaches. What would I have done had I not met that woman on Santorini — if I’d had to do that alone, if I’d braved through the tired nights solo.
I fell back into my habits again with my friend on Mykonos, and it happened because there’s something about sharing a bottle of bottom shelf tequila on a beach, about hopping fences to catch a bus, about wading through grass as tall as your waist on a dark, dark road while a chorus of dogs bark all around you, protecting these farms at night as dogs have protected these farms at night since the time of Homer, because your friend said “Hey, look. This route is one minute faster.” There’s a reason that people always talk about travel as a way to share experiences, to learn from other people, to be thrust outside your comfort zone out of bad luck and your own stupidity (even though nobody in their right mind brings long pants on vacation in Greece). There’s something about sharing, even if it’s just sharing experiences and bread with a complete stranger, that makes you whole in a way you never would expect. I think that’s the reason that I’ve only ever travelled alone for a grand total of eight hours at a time, the reason that travelling alone I think rather defeats the point.
