This second part of this series focuses on books written by solo female travelers. While their adventures are sure to inspire wanderlust, they also share the joys and trials that come with being a woman traveling alone. Stories about the people they meet, the adventures they enjoy, the safety concerns they have, and the feelings they experience throughout it all mesh together to provide tales of strong women branching out and trying life a little differently.
Millions of women are hitting the road each year, taking everything from a solo weekend trip to a solo year, learning about the world and themselves in the process. Take note from the women below, and let me know if you’ve had any similar experiences while traveling solo.
This is the story of a 26-year-old girl who left her old life with a steady job and boyfriend behind in order to travel through Southeast Asia completely on her own. Over the course of the next year and thousands of miles, hundreds of new beginnings and new friendships, she found that more than traveling the world outside, she traveled the world within. This book is a collection of excerpts from her diary and blog during that time in which she found that traveling alone made all the difference in the world.
- I spent a good chunk of this month in a damp existence covered in sweat, seawater, or some mixture of the two. The best part is I couldn’t care less. I’ve gladly traded all of the comforts of Western life for this Cambodian lifestyle and I don’t miss them at all. I look at my makeup bag and laugh now. There’s no way that’s going on my face. I’m kind of shocked at how little I really need to be happy. Is this what traveling does to people? I think so. Every day here is like a new intense high. I wake up and pinch myself, completely understanding how some travelers come here planning on a few weeks and end up staying for months, or even years. I’ll wear this place like a thumbprint on my heart forever. It has changed me for the better.
- I keep turning over something in my mind that a fellow traveler with years of experience under her belt told me a month prior: “Enjoy the beginning, because nothing will ever be this amazing and wonderful ever again.”
- So what is it that we’re running from? Obligations? Mortgages? The American (or English, or Australian, or German, or hell, Uruguayan) dream of settling down with a white picket fence, porch swing for two, 2.5 children, a dog named Fido and a cat named Fluffy? Or if we’re running towards something, is it a better understanding of ourselves, the world around us, or a set of photos we can point to one day and proudly say, “I went there, I did that!”? When the travel does eventually end, as it will for all of us, what will we be left with? This question terrifies me every time I try to confront it.
In our increasingly frantic daily lives, many people are genuinely fearful of the prospect of solitude, but time alone can be both rich and restorative, especially when travelling. Through on-the-ground reporting and recounting the experiences of artists, writers, and innovators who cherished solitude, Stephanie Rosenbloom considers how being alone as a traveller–and even in one’s own city–is conducive to becoming acutely aware of the sensual details of the world–patterns, textures, colors, tastes, sounds–in ways that are difficult to do in the company of others.
Alone Time is divided into four parts, each set in a different city, in a different season, in a single year. The destinations–Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York–are all pedestrian-friendly, allowing travelers to slow down and appreciate casual pleasures instead of hurtling through museums and posting photos to Instagram. Each section spotlights a different theme associated with the joys and benefits of time alone and how it can enable people to enrich their lives–facilitating creativity, learning, self-reliance, as well as the ability to experiment and change. Rosenbloom incorporates insights from psychologists and sociologists who have studied solitude and happiness, and explores such topics as dining alone, learning to savor, discovering interests and passions, and finding or creating silent spaces. Her engaging and elegant prose makes Alone Time as warmly intimate an account as the details of a trip shared by a beloved friend–and will have its many readers eager to set off on their own solo adventures.
- Alone time is an invitation, a chance to do the things you’ve longed to do. You can read, code, paint, meditate, practice a language, or go for a stroll. Alone, you can pick through sidewalk crates of used books without worrying you’re hijacking your companion’s afternoon or being judged for your lousy idea of a good time. You need not carry on polite conversation. You can go to a park. You can go to Paris.
- To sit outside a Paris café at breakfast is to observe the city as it wipes the sleep from its eyes: the soft clink of a cup and saucer, the turning of newspaper pages, the passerby with a cigarette who asks for a light, and me at my little round table, nibbling a speculoos, sipping my café crème.
- The more I surrendered to myself, to the self that would not be limited and narrowly defined, the more glorious a time I had with me and with life. I stayed open, ready, breathless even, for adventure.
- I reached for the shutters. The bit of effort required to swing them open and closed marked the beginning and end of each day with casual ceremony. It was far more satisfying than brushing aside a curtain or tugging a cord. To throw open the shutters was to invite in the morning. To close them with a soft thud was to acknowledge the passing of another day.
The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost
Rachel Friedman has always been the consummate good girl who does well in school and plays it safe, so the college grad surprises no one more than herself when, on a whim (and in an effort to escape impending life decisions), she buys a ticket to Ireland, a place she has never visited. There she forms an unlikely bond with a free-spirited Australian girl, a born adventurer who spurs Rachel on to a yearlong odyssey that takes her to three continents, fills her life with newfound friends, and gives birth to a previously unrealized passion for adventure.
As her journey takes her to Australia and South America, Rachel discovers and embraces her love of travel and unlocks more truths about herself than she ever realized she was seeking. Along the way, the erstwhile good girl finally learns to do something she’s never done before: simply live for the moment.
- Watching the sun set behind the Andes has no quantifiable value, like my friends’ burgeoning careers, but I know that I am gaining something that is as important. I don’t know how to define this period of my life, but I don’t know how to define myself at the moment, either. I’m no longer a student. I’m nobody’s employee or girlfriend. Thankfully, I still have my parents, but I’m no longer defined in relationship to them, either. I’m in a space that defies these traditional categories, one I have carved out that is just for me.
- That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you.
Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos. Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won’t let that stop her.
Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All Over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother’s functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called “being Italian.” She learned what it’s like to travel the world with someone you already know and love–how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be–even if you aren’t quite sure where you are.
- There are very few moments in our lives when we get to embrace sucking at something. When we get to fail miserably and still find value in it. Travel is one of those things.
Have you read any of the above? Do you have travel favorites I forgot to include? Feel free to shoot me an email with any travel book related feedback or suggestions!
**Descriptions pulled from Amazon**
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