I Love Traveling Solo - Medellín

Medellín, Colombia

Medellín skyline seen from the rooftop restaurant of Dunn Carlton Hotel.

Up in the air

I’m starting to write this blog post on a plane somewhere above the Atlantic, flying from Madrid to Bogotá. The seatback screen has an interactive map and I play with it for a moment. The distance is about 8,000km, fascinating. I switch off the map and get back to my computer.

This is the second of today’s three-leg itinerary to Medellín. Umberto and I visited Colombia nine months ago, as part of our Latin American tour, and fell in love with the country and its people. So much so that I wanted to come back even before we left.

This time, I’m traveling by myself. This is primarily because I’ll be attending a Spanish language school. My husband and I have many shared passions but studying foreign languages is not one of them. Also, Umberto could not leave his business for six weeks around this time of the year. Solo travel was therefore an obvious choice.

The decision-making conversation went pretty much like this:

“I’m sad to leave Latin America, I don’t want to go back,” I whined as we were boarding a homebound flight from Peru at the end of January.

“We’ll come back, or you can come back even sooner if you want,” Umberto replied in his customary nothing-is-a-problem-except-death style.

“You know what, I’d like to learn a Colombian accent, I really loved the way they speak … maybe I can go to a Spanish language school in Colombia,” I continued a few minutes later, as I was flicking through our tour photos nostalgically.

“Go. Book it,” was his response. End of conversation. He inserted earplugs in his ears and started to watch a movie on the seatback screen.

So I did, I booked the school two weeks after we got back home.

Talking about solo travel can attract strange comments.

I’ve traveled alone a lot in my life, both for business and pleasure. During my single days as well as when I’m not single. Short trips and longer stays. Domestic, European and long-haul. For me, it’s normal.

Not everybody agrees. This trip has attracted particularly many strange reactions and comments. Partly because of the destination, I suppose. Many Europeans have stereotypical negative preconceptions about Latin America and Colombia.

But it’s not only that. Even if most people mean well, some of the questions leave a peculiar aftertaste. As if solo travel was something suspicious or inappropriate.

“All by yourself? How come?”

“What does your husband think about it?”

“Couldn’t you at least go with a friend or a family member?”

“Six weeks, all alone? I would never.”

The thing is, I love traveling solo…

I love traveling in great company.

I love traveling by myself.

And I intend to keep doing both, as long as I can.

…and I think everybody should travel solo, at least try it once.

I pause to gather my thoughts and switch on the seatback monitor again.

Playing with the world map is intriguing. I make the globe go around with my fingers and trace flight routes between Europe and the Americas. So many flights, so many memories… and so many places still to discover!

When my forefinger touches the east coast of the USA, I remember the first time I traveled abroad all by myself. I mean, completely alone, which excludes staying with relatives overseas. I was eighteen and had found a summer job in the US, as a camp counselor somewhere upstate New York.

The employer paid for the flights from Amsterdam to New York, whereas I had to pay my way from Finland to the Netherlands. I chose the bus, even if the trip took a couple of days that way, but back then there were no low-cost airlines. The bus option was radically cheaper than flights.

That summer was unforgettable, and the memories still make me smile. It took me decades, however, to understand how significant the experience was. It was my first semester at the University of Solo Travel.

Two Sabaneta buses on a street in El Poblado, Medellin, Colombia — I went for a walk to combat jetlag on the first day. The city is incredibly green, just as I remembered.

What are the benefits of traveling solo?

When you travel in company, no matter how compatible, you get distracted by the people you’re with. You get absorbed in the interactions, naturally so. Many details escape your attention, and your perceptions get influenced by your travel companions. And vice versa, of course.

Solo travel enables sharper observation and deeper perception. When you travel alone, your mind is more focused on what’s happening around you. You have to focus for safety, but it goes far beyond that. You have more mindspace to observe and freedom to interpret what you see and experience, from your own point of view. You have the liberty to make your own, unique memories.

Solo travel allows you to realize your dreams. Sometimes it’s easy to find a great travel companion, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the person you’d love to travel with cannot find the time or budget. And sometimes even your partner or your closest friends have different interests and passions. If you don’t ever want to travel alone, you limit your choices in life.

If I had waited for someone to join me, I would have missed out on some of the most amazing travel experiences of my life! I would not be the same person without solo trips to Argentina or China, volunteering in Chile, a three-week Interrail in French wine regions, or the summer job in the USA… and, now of course, without this trip.

Solo travel enriches your life. You learn about the world and make new friends. Traveling alone does not mean being lonely. You can choose to be by yourself or to be in company.

Traveling solo makes it easier to open conversations with other people, and other people are more likely to open them with you. Traveling solo, you can have fascinating, inspiring and thought-provoking conversations with people from all over the world, and get important insights from local people wherever you’re visiting.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the casual conversations develop into friendships - or even more. For example, I met one of my best friends on an airplane. And that summer when I was eighteen, yes, I did fall in love in America. Not to mention what happened on a certain trip to Italy thirteen years ago… to say that solo travel can enrich one’s life is an understatement in my case.

Solo travel is important for self-discovery and personal growth. This is the most important benefit, to my mind.

We human beings are incredibly complex animals. We display different personality traits depending on the context and company. Traveling alone enables you to discover qualities and characteristics in yourself that do not emerge in your daily habitat. And it forces you to build mental muscle in a new context.

I like to group the personal growth opportunities of solo travel in four buckets:

Problem-solving. How do you handle problems when there’s no familiar face to help you? Delays and cancellations happen, luggage gets lost, you can get sick, lost or robbed.
Connecting. How do you connect with people that you don’t know? How do you deal with language barriers and cultural differences?
Self-reliance. How do you manage situations where by social convention, we “should not” be alone? For example, how comfortable do you feel dining alone?
Enjoying your own company. How much do you like being by yourself? How do you have fun if you have no company?

This is precisely the reason why I believe every one of us needs to try traveling solo, at least once: getting to know yourself more deeply. And developing personal characteristics that will serve you in life also when not traveling.

It could be that you hate the solo travel experience. That’s fine, people are different, we don’t all like the same things. People have different characters. But if you don’t try, you’re operating based on prejudice and fear. If you do try, at least then you know, and you certainly learned something in the process.

And who knows, you might like it and want to do it again. Traveling by yourself, you could discover pure diamonds inside yourself. Those are sources of real, unshakeable self-esteem.

Time to close my Mac. It’s well past 3am and I’d better try and get some sleep. I close my eyes, smiling happily.

After thirty hours door-to-door, finally in Medellín.

I arrive in Medellín early in the morning. The trip took about thirty hours door-to-door and included one severely delayed flight and an almost missed connection. Luckily, I’m a runner and happen to be wearing comfortable shoes, so I made it seconds before the gate was closed. The rest went smoothly and as I’m carrying only hand luggage, there was no risk of losing a suitcase.

Driving from the airport to the city, I get that special feeling I always do in Latin America. I cannot quite explain it, it’s a blend of excitement and happy anticipation. It’s a feeling of being fully present, more alive, full of energy, all my senses attuned.

I watch the Medellín skyline from the taxi window. The red and white high-rise buildings draw a striking silhouette against the green mountains around. The driver is friendly and speaks with that beautiful local accent that I like so much, soft, a bit musical. For a second, I feel like a character in one of the Colombian telenovelas we watch with Umberto.

It’s too early to check in so I take a seat in the hotel lobby and write away. I’m feeling jetlagged and smelly but who cares! That’s part of the adventure.

*****

P.S.

The first blog post I published on this site was about Medellín - here it is, if you’d like to read it: The Spirit of Transformation - Medellín https://anitadvisor.com/blog/the-spirit-of-transformation-medelln