Jonathan Raban on the advantages of traveling alone
“Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You’ve got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you’re never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you’re traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You’re never going to see anything; you’re never going to meet anybody; you’re never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you.
“Whereas traveling alone, everything happens. And also traveling alone puts you in this position where you will do almost anything to make contact with other people. My experience of traveling with somebody else is that you just hang around with them. Half the point of traveling alone is that you get so lonely you need to talk to other people.”
–Jonathan Raban, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)
October 25th, 2004 at 11:49 pm
That’s a riot. Try not having anyone to talk to BUT your spouse for weeks at a time in remote areas. Nothing will get you out and about faster.
October 26th, 2004 at 10:45 am
My experience is almost exactly what Raban describes. I spent a couple of weeks in Germany last year, by myself. I’m usually pretty reserved, don’t talk to strangers, etc., especially when I have a very tenuous grasp of the local language, but by the third day or so I was reaching out to anyone who was willing to try and chat. For example, I spent a very memorable train ride talking with an elderly woman who spoke no English. I speak very little German, so neither of us really knew what the other was saying… but we had a great time anyway. If my girlfriend had been with me, I wouldn’t have even tried to talk with that woman.
September 15th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Yeh i found travelling alone without my girlfriend was great for the reasons stated and also it really gets you out of your bubble.Although now she has gone travelling by herself and now im the one at home worried about her safety and of course worried about her getting it on with some european dude … lol it sucks when the shoe is on the other foot !
September 15th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Yeh i found travelling alone without my girlfriend was great for the reasons stated and also it really gets you out of your bubble.Although now she has gone travelling by herself and now im the one at home worried about her safety and of course worried about her getting it on with some european dude … lol it sucks when the shoe is on the other foot !
July 30th, 2008 at 1:44 am
i think,we should travel with girlfriend or one family,because it is easily for us to make exciting and can heip each other when we have problem.