Boldly Go Solo

How to set out solo, but not travel alone: Trips, tips and ideas for the active traveler.

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  • Juan and the Bean Store: A vacation parable

    Window_in_barco_de_avilaellen_perlmI've been reading lately about a trend called "slow travel." The gist of it is that instead of the "If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium" style of frenetic travel, people are encouraged to slow down. Spend a week in one place. Live like a local, instead
    of a tourist. Don't try to see absolutely every monument and museum. Relax.

    At first, I didn't think this would be a great idea for a solo traveler. It seemed as though living in a rental house alone for too long could get lonely. I'm changing my mind.

    Say you're in a small village and go to the same cafe for breakfast every morning, or restaurant for dinner. Soon you're friendly with a shopkeeper or barista. Maybe you get invited to someone's home. Locals see you around long enough, they get curious, right?Juan_manning_the_storeellen_perlman

    When I was Barco de Avila, Spain, for a week, it didn't take long to get to know the bartender/Internet-meister in one establishment, and to nearly get fixed up with the proprietor of another.

    That week, I was at Vaughantown, an English-language program for Spaniards, just outside the village. I ambled into town to use the Internet, but in strolling around, I didn't spot any Internet cafes, surprise, surprise. So I walked into a bar/cafe and asked. Someone told me to go farther up the street.

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  • Going solo to Kalaallit Nunaat, the world’s largest island

    Girl_in_midnight_sun_upernavik_20_2
    Want to kayak where the kayak was invented? How about go dogsledding, snowmobiling or on a musk ox or whale safari? Then Kalaallit Nunaat     is the place for you. Also known as Greenland. A place where you can view icebergs from a hotel terrace. A place where dog sleds have the right of way. Seriously. 

    I haven't been to Greenland, a nation of 56,000 people.  But the other day, in Washington, D.C., I had a chance to meet Aleqa Hammond, the country's minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs.

    The United States wants to work more closely with Greenland. In 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Power, in the shepherds' village of Igaliku, signed an agreement, along with Denmark and Greenland (which is part of the Danish realm) to expand cooperation and deepen ties with Greenland. That's why Hammond was in D.C. last week. Uunartoq_qeqertoq_2006
     

    As for tourism in the land of Erik the Red, there is bittersweet excitement over a new natural phenomenon. Due to climate change, the seas around the island have turned into something astoundingly different than what anyone can remember.

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  • A good little village for drinking beer, listening to a whistler and making friends with other solo travelers

    Flowers_of_saddleworthellen_perlmanI met Marilyn the same day I met the World’s Top Whistler. She’s American. He’s English. We all converged in Saddleworth, in the north of England. A bit of a drive from Manchester.

    Surely you’ve heard of Saddleworth? And the villages of Bleak Hey Nook, Brook Bottom, Crompton Fold, Delph, Diggle and Dobcross.Saddleworth_bank_and_the_whistlerel
    No?

    Well, suffice it to say it’s a pretty little village with old stone houses, flowers everywhere and a local pub called The Swan. I got there by tour bus with about 35 other people attending the Society of American Travel Writers annual convention. I didn’t know anyone on my day tour when the day started.

    I sat in the back of the bus, ate the huge beef and cheese sandwich our hosts provided and enjoyed a boat ride along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal during one stop.

    In Saddleworth, we stopped for a pint at the pub and a look around. I ordered the Cocker Hoop Golden Bitter. On tap.The_whistler_in_actionellen_perlman

    While milling about, somehow Marilyn and I started to chat. She was standing on one side of a picnic table in the pub’s courtyard, debating what to drink. When she told me her role in the travel business is promoting properties, I figured  that as a marketer of sorts, she’d be a good person to run some ideas past for naming my blog. This blog.

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  • A blowgun, a banana and a Quechua family in Ecuador’s rain forest

    Img_7187
    Who knew how hard it could be to hit a banana hanging from a tree with a blowgun's dart? From 20 feet away.

    Take my word, it's tough.

    I can only imagine the challenge of using that blowgun, loaded with darts coated with curare, to target a monkey swinging from branch to branch. Or a tapir or a toucan, for that matter.

    This is how some Quechua Indians in Ecuador still hunt for food.

    I thought about this indigenous culture I'd visited after receiving a press release about new "insider trips" promoted by Backroads. The company says they offer a deeper look into a destination.

    Quechua_house
    I don't know what that means on a luxury trip with stays at top hotels. I even had my doubts in deepest Ecuador about how "insider" a tour group could get.

    If guests of Sacha Lodge in the Amazon rain forest constantly were visiting an "authentic" home of native Quechua Indians wouldn't that family be jaded and changed, and in some way, be performing?

    Surely it would be a manufactured experience. We'd sit down to dinner with a family, as visitors before us had done, and hear some tired talk about how they lived.

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  • Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, and the Northern Ireland connection

    Mary, Mary, quite contrary, is alive and well and living in a neo-classical house in Northern Ireland. I couldn’t believe it either. There really is a Mary! Actually, there’s a Mairi. As in Mairi, Mairi, quite contrary.Gardens_at_mount_stewartellen_per_2

    And her garden still grows. It’s landscaped and huge and filled with silver bells (campanulas) and Pretty Maids (saxifraga) all in a row. On a property called Mount Stewart House & Garden, near the Irish Sea, just outside Belfast.

    I learned that Mairi was more than just a nursery rhyme, while on a group tour that I joined as a solo traveler. We were a bus load of about 20 people. I wandered off alone to see the gardens and explore a fresh foods market set up in a tent that day. And to watch Irish dancing demonstrations.Belfast_baked_goodsellen_perlman

    The house is the ancestral home of Robert Stewart, also known as Lord Castlereagh, also known as the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry. Mairi’s a descendant of a bunch of marquesses.
    During a tour, our guide told us that Mairi still lives there, in the house we were wandering through. She’s not that mobile anymore, but she has been known, over the years, to walk among the visitors and have a chat.

    It was exciting, don’t ask me why, just to be in Mairi, Mairi, quite contrary’s house. What girl growing up didn’t know that nursery rhyme? Next thing you know I’ll be running into Mother Goose somewhere. And be just as darned excited.

    Photo: Ellen Perlman. Garden at Mount Stewart.

    Baked goods from a Belfast bakery

  • Loving travel, despite the pre-trip anxiety

    Waterfallellen_perlman
    If you love to travel and do it a lot, it should be as easy to get on a plane as venturing out for a quart of milk, right?

    Wrong. A few months ago, I wrote about the difficulty many travel writers have before every trip. They poured their hearts out on a thread on a travel-writer’s Web site. These people love travel enough to do it for a living, yet still struggle beforehand. Some more of these "inner thoughts:"

    "Jeeze, I thought I was the only one. I, too, have been all over, from China to Istanbul and in between…it never fails. I get irritable and very nervous before leaving. The night prior to a trip I am a bear not to be approached with little or no caution." –Vazandri

    "The evening before the day I head off on a trip is hell for me. I always say, ‘I wish I wasn’t going.’  Many’s the time I’ve even picked up the phone to cancel before I think better of it." –Petra

    I know this dread well. But, after arriving, poof. Gone. The Big A, anxiety, is replaced by other Big A’s: adrenaline, adventure, ‘appiness, axcitement. (Okay, I ran out of pertinent "a’s.")

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  • Journeywoman: a maze of travel tips and info

    I landed the other day on the "largest collection of women-centered travel classifieds on the Internet." I know this only because the site told me so. A site called Journeywoman.

    I’d been meaning to write about Journeywoman for the longest time. It’s just that I find it difficult to describe exactly what it is. What it isn’t, is a typical Web site. This site is busy. When you sit down with it, you need some time. And patience. There sure is a lot of stuff. Some of it intriguing. Some of it odd.

    For instance, under the classified section, I clicked on a box for "Active Holidays" and found a "remote coastal wilderness tent camp." And a company that runs equestrian vacations. Along with ads for skirts good for traveling in and a remedy for Montezuma’s revenge. Can you say "eclectic?"

    Under "go-alone travel tips" I learned that Bounce dryer sheets repel mosquitos and also keep luggage from getting musty. And that there’s great veggie dim sum in San Francisco.

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  • Assorted tips for choosing a vacation destination and getting out the door solo

    Lord_of_the_rings_star_by_ellen_per
    "The Girlo Travel Survival Kit" is a 255-page volume of encouragement and advice for teens and young women with wanderlust. I didn’t know anything about the "girlosophy" books until I was sent a free copy of the latest one.

    I have to admit, I found the look of the book odd. It’s written in a typeface straight out of manual typewriter days. Maybe that blunt style pleases young women. It took me a little getting used to.

    The Washington Post called it a book only a teenage girl could love, but hey, if that’s the audience it’s aimed at, well…

    I’ve been making my way through early chapters, finding some useful suggestions and ideas for solo travelers:

    1. Don’t really know where you want to travel? Go to the movies for flashes of inspiration. (I admit it. I went to Iceland in my 20’s after seeing a full-page magazine ad. That’s all it took in those days of "itchy feet" and hair-trigger decision making.)

    On the movie inspiration thing, think of all the people who visited New Zealand once they found out that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed there. That’s not why I went, but while on the South Island, in the "rings" region, I went horseback riding and learned lots of fun facts about how they "auditioned" the horses for the movie.

    They wanted to cast a chestnut horse for a starring role. The horse had to be able to run at the cameras and stop on a dime. And it couldn’t startle easily at loud noises. At the time, another film company was scouting the area for a movie on Hercules. That film also needed horses, our trail guide explained. Cool.

    New Zealand saw a tourism boom after the LOTR movies were filmed there, and people saw the beautiful country on screen. Maybe some also expected to see Frodo and the gang once they got there. Who knows?

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  • Husband mans the fort while wife flits around European metropolis

    Eggs_barcelonaby_sheara
    So how did Sheara do, leaving her husband behind and
    traveling on her own in Barcelona     for a couple of days?
    In case you’ve forgotten who Sheara is, she’s my friend from Massachusetts who I offered 10 1/2 tips to, back in early March. She wondered what to do in the evenings, alone in a big, foreign city.

    Sheara has returned from her Big Adventure. And she gives it a huge thumbs up. She admits she
    was feeling some apprehension when she was winging her way over to Spain. She doesn’t usually travel alone.

    But the minute she stepped off the plane, the edginess vanished. Completely. There she
    was, in a bustling city. It wasn’t the vague, unknown foreign place that she
    couldn’t quite see in her mind. The reality was motion and color and
    conversation and bustle. People and buildings. She looked around and said,
    “Wow, here I am.”

    Gaudi_by_sheara
    It was a little frustrating not being able to talk to the
    cab driver, who spoke only Spanish, or maybe Catalan, mainly because
    Sheara’s so nice and she felt a little rude not being able to say, “So, how’s
    it going?”

    He couldn’t understand her at all. She had to show him the written name of Hotel Jazz. But that worked. She arrived
    with no problem.

    And then it was time to walk. And walk and walk. And here’s
    the glorious part about being on her own. When Sheara traveled with her
    daughter and niece, they didn’t want to walk and explore quite as much as she did. 

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  • Traveling Solo Does Not Have to be Lonely

    A former flight attendant offers suggestions on how to be a good solo traveler in a story in the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper.

    Suggestions include: know your interests and limitations; sign up for local classes; and, when traveling to a foreign country, learn a little of the language before you go. Nothing new or radical. But the story offers a reaffirmation of the potential joy of vacationing alone.