Boldly Go Solo

On the Web site "Travelers Notebook," Tim Patterson writes about "10 Travel Risks Worth Taking." Several of them don't interest me. (Decline anti-malaria medication. Brush your teeth with the tap water.) But one I particularly subscribe to: Trust in the kindness of strangers.

Patterson says that almost all the people he meets in his travels are "good-hearted, hospitable and sincere." I have found the same to be true. He says it's "tragic" when travelers' paranoia interferes with their chance to make connections with the locals.

People who shy away from strangers tend to be the ones who hang around in tourist zones, he adds. And those are home to the highest proportion of "scam artists, petty thieves and dodgy characters who prey on naive foreigners."

He makes a good point. I not only have trusted strangers in foreign lands, but often counted on them. For instance, as I've said before, I stayed in a Dutch hotel owner's home when he messed up my reservation and he couldn't find me another room in the city.

I let a French Moroccan airport worker drive me from the Paris airport to a hotel he knew of on the outskirts of the city. I was young. He got interested. I got nervous. But thankfully, he took "no" for an answer.

Whew. Close call. But then again, I never really felt in danger. Maybe because I was sure I could deck him if I had to! He was far from football player sized…

When I wiped out rollerblading near Lake Tahoe,
California, during a group trip, a woman who was walking by took me to
her home, where I showered off the blood. I just wished the towels
hadn't been white.

This is not an "alone" example, but when I hitchhiked
from Amsterdam to Norway with a friend one summer, we stayed in the
homes of at least five of the people who gave us rides. One family in Bodø, Norway, let us stay in the camper parked in their driveway for five days.

Also on that trip, we spent three days with a truck
driver who was delivering mink food to a mink farm. Yes, a place where
they raise minks. Presumably for coats. (PETA readers: This was no time
for protesting!) The driver let us sleep in the bunkbed of his truck
cab for two nights. He slept on the top bunk. We squeezed into the
bottom.

In Venezuela, my then-boyfriend and I were befriended
by "Crazy Rosita" as we called her. We met her when she told us that a
vendor had overcharged us for the cocoa and cookies we just bought at a
shop outside a cable car in the Andes.

We ended up staying overnight at her house in Merida,
listening to yowling cats and some other braying animal all night. In
the morning, her mother made us fresh arepas (a version of corn
tortillas) with eggs. And she took us on a tour of her area. It was a
great experience.

I've got more examples but I've already gone on too
long. You get the point. And it is: People are basically good. And time
spent with them is enriching. Still, you have to trust your gut and
your instincts, which are one and the same really.

I'm not necessarily recommending you stay at people's
homes. Obviously you have to feel comfortable doing that in the
situation you find yourself. I never seek this kind of experience nor
expect it. It just happens.

But I do try to stay open to new experiences. And try
to get out of tourist areas, with the hope I'll meet "real people" and
experience a place like a local, even if it's just briefly.

Photos: By Ellen Perlman

The Apple Inn Hotel in Amsterdam. Hotel owner Rick's house, and the too-short couch he slept on the night he lent me bedroom!