Eighty percent of success is showing up.
And that includes showing up to my own travels. You see, I find it easy to get excited and worked up over traveling but when it comes to facing the fact a part of me always wants to cave in and revert to being a homebody. What about if I just stay in bed? Not show up to the airport? Cancel my flights? Rebook? Throw a sickie? The effects of it is magnified at being a solo female traveller.
Getting lost
Part of traveling is to get lost. But then, you start developing a sense of your direction in your new surrounds. You start extrapolating certain points into a desired destination, and then recognise your tomfoolery at the thought that this particular storefront could possibly be the only marker for the right direction! But that’s OK. You use more and more of your senses and you are forced to take more consideration in where you are headed. A welcome change to mindlessly walking to the market with headphones on.
Being by yourself, being your self
When you travel you can be stripped bare of certain ‘comforts’ whether that is in tangible materials or intangibles such as the feeling of familiarity. You are just one person in a sea of money. When things hit the fan, you are really only armed with your wits and helped a bit by cash, a passport, a flight ticket home. One of the things that I am terrified of is the possibility of losing everything and having my anchor taken away from me. That’s the world for you, I guess, before you are tied to the safety of wi-fi, cash, maps, documents. It’s something that is in my mind, “what would we be like without certain things anchored to us?”. Another thing that I do is to put myself in the shoes of a local and think “What would they do?”.
The unwanted and the uncertain
One of the things that irritate me in certain countries is the unwanted attention given to female travelers. It can be verbal or even edge on to the physical. I deal with it by being deliberately rude and ignorant of these advances. The uncertain is also quiet certain as well. But, that’s life for you. That’s the world. And you can only be prepared to take whatever it is that you can anticipate.