‘I was weeping into a pile of underwear’: The dark side of solo travel

Are you #goingsolo and LYBL (living your best life)? These are the questions you could be asking yourself if, like a growing number of travellers, you have caught the solo travel bug.

According, that is, to peppy posts in the solo travel social media space, where travelling alone is commonly depicted as an Eat, Pray, Love bacchanalia of self discovery and freedom.

Google searches for “solo travel” have increased by 223 per cent in the past decade, with women representing the majority of solo travellers.

This comes as the number of older, solvent singles is on the rise. Specialist solo travel companies such as Just You and One Traveller have been quick to capitalise on the trend.

However, like aged Gorgonzola and abseiling down the Empire State Building, solo travel isn’t for everyone, and can often fail to live up to the liberatory hype.

I was an early-adopting digital nomad. The effort of striking up fair-weather friendships and handwashing my clothes in hotel sinks led to a breakdown that saw me, aged 30, returning to live with my mum.

My personal solo travel nadir came in a hotel in San Francisco when I found myself, exhausted and alone, weeping into a pile of damp undies.

These days I raise an eyebrow when friends, many of them liberated empty nesters, trumpet the joys of taking to the road with their laptops in tow.

It’s a picture that’s recognised by Alice Wilkinson, 33, author of How to Stay Sane in a House Share.

In her mid-20s, having missed out on a gap year before university, Wilkinson decided to travel alone through Scandinavia. “The route was lovely,” she recalls, “Bergen to Oslo on a very beautiful seven-hour train ride, then to Stockholm on the train, and then the bus to Copenhagen.”

Psychologically, however, Wilkinson felt unsafe as a solo traveller staying in tucked-away Airbnbs. She also battled decision paralysis.

Wilkinson suspects that the liveliness of the solo travel social media sphere is because solo travel is, in the end, anti-social: “Are they posting all the time just for someone to share with?”

“When you’re travelling with a friend you just get up and go, don’t you, but I would have been lying in bed thinking: Oh God, no one knows where I am, then I’d get up and not be able to make a decision about my day,” she recalls of her 2016 trip. Wilkinson says she often dined on cereal bars on the road as she disliked eating alone in restaurants and that she struggled to summon up the energy to make acquaintances.

“I had the same conversation over and over again: where do you come from, what do you do?”

Dr Charlotte Russell is a clinical psychologist and the founder of The Travel Psychologist. She says that solo travel can present a range of psychological challenges that are glossed over by social media influencers.

“We know that social support is consistently one of the best predictors of mental health, so travelling alone does present a risk in terms of mood, as well as lack of support if something bad happens: such as harassment or pickpocketing,” Russell says.

Solo travellers, she adds, may “lean into” unhealthy relationships out of loneliness or need (consider the cliché of the terrible holiday romance).

“At home, we have other people around who give us helpful feedback on whether a relationship is right for us,” she adds.

Florence Archery, 49 and from south-east London, has travelled solo across Europe, as well as in the US, India, Morocco and South Africa, and now organises group yoga holidays.

Archery also struggled with loneliness and “filling up the evenings” after happy days pootling about galleries and shops.

On one occasion she was stranded at a bus station in Cape Town – in the dark with no mobile signal – after a delayed bus trip.

“To say the neighbourhood was unsavoury is an understatement,” she says. “I had all my luggage with me, including my camera, iPad and passport and a guard at the bus station told me not to attempt to walk anywhere as I would get attacked. Rats kept running over my feet and I broke down in tears, until at last a local woman and her husband took pity on me and dropped me back at my hotel.”

Mandie Holgate, 52, a business coach from Colchester, UK, says travelling in traditional cultures can lead to judgement for solo women travellers. “I’ve tried it and won’t do it again,” she says. “People look at you like you have a second head in restaurants or as if you are trying to steal their man [as a solo woman traveller].”

This cultural clash can, however, work both ways. Traveller Lisa Miller, 56, was once given a free stay at a hotel in Vietnam when “the owners discovered I was over 40 and unmarried and felt sorry for me”.

Wilkinson suspects that the liveliness of the solo travel social media sphere is because solo travel is, in the end, anti-social: “Are they posting all the time just for someone to share with?”

Broadcasting their best solo lives, that is, in lieu of company to marvel at the spiciness of the tom yam or the strange array of fish at the local poissonnière.

Russell believes that travellers who thrive on the road solo are a specific subset who are characterised by having high levels of autonomy, self-assurance and openness to experience.

Crucially: “No one should feel bad that they have a – very human – need for support and companionship,” she says.

Of course, travelling alone is rarely easy at first, and it’s important to give yourself time to adjust – don’t expect to thrive straight away.

That said, it really isn’t for everyone, and there is no shame in admitting that you find travel less enjoyable without familiar company.

The beauty of travel is that the way you do it is completely down to you – whether that’s backpacking the Camino solo, or touring the Greek islands with a gaggle of old friends.

The important thing is that you do it your way – after all, as the social media buzzwords have it, #yolo (you only live once).

The Telegraph, UK