TRAVEL FORUM
This Travel Forum is a place to reflect on the experience of travel, especially for solo women travelers, or women travelling in groups. I have jotted down some of my reflections about travel based on experiences I have had. If you, the website visitor, have reflections about travel that you would like to share, please email them to CarolynGregov@Gmail.com and I will post them on this Travel Forum. If you welcome contact with other travelers, please include your name and email address.
Reflections on the Issue of Traveling in Comfort
Do you have to travel uncomfortably to have an authentic travel experience? Absolutely not. My overall experience has been, however, that the level of comfort I experience on a journey is often inversely related to the enrichment I bring back from that journey, most especially if you are traveling in what is often called a developing country. My experience is that you will bring home richer memories by immersing yourself in the culture you are visiting, and that you will achieve the more profound immersion by living and traveling as do the citizens of that country you are visiting, within reason, of course.
Reflections on The Nature of a Journey
What is authentic travel? I think it is travel that feels right to you. For me, authentic travel is that which provides for me the opportunity to engage more fully in what we call the human experience. This changes over time and location and is often unique to a travel encounter. An emotionally powerful connection can color or change your entire experience of a place. An example from my travels is my encounter with a dying penguin in Antarctica.
My Dying Penguin
Even today, many years later, when my thoughts return to Antarctica, the first memories that surface always include that day I was walking alone on a path above the shoreline, savoring the vastness, the loneliness, the isolation of this most glorious and indescribable place. Suddenly I saw a penguin coming toward me on the path, walking slowly and laboriously, but determinedly forward. Mindful of interaction protocol, I stopped and waited, prepared to leave the path if the penguin came near.
Her steps grew even slower, and then stopped. With infinite measured grace, as though her actions were in slow motion, she sank to her belly. In that same slow motion, her head lowered to the path and turned gently to one side. She seemed to breathe a small sigh and was still. I knew she had died, and I felt like crying.
She lay there, unmoving, in the middle of the path, and a few quiet snowflakes fell on her. I stood for long moments just being with her. I saw traces of blood on her chest feathers. She must have been caught by a leopard seal while hunting her food in the waters offshore. She somehow escaped, made her way back to land, and with great and final effort made it partway back to her colony, finally accepting her destiny to let her life force return to this land that had given it to her, breathing her last not twenty feet from me.
There was nothing in my experience of Antarctica that evoked such a visceral engagement with that icy continent as that chance encounter with the dying penguin. That seemed to speak of the pathos of life, the unutterable, austere beauty of Antarctica, its savage disregard for humans, its certainty in the knowledge that here, in Antarctica, humans mean little in the face of the power of nature. The sheer massiveness of the blocks of ice floating in the water, the limitless silence broken only by the relentless wind, the extreme courage and resourcefulness of those little penguins, the uncaring brutality of the forces of nature, the snow, the ice, the frozen seas, and always the deadening isolation and loneliness – the one memory that brings me back to Antarctica will always be the penguin whose slow, stately, silent death honors the character of Antarctica.
Reflections on the Bucket List
It is sometimes unfashionable today and considered gauche among well-traveled people to talk about Bucket Lists, which they say smack of materialism and put travel into the realm of acquisitions, like butterflies you collect or, God forbid, belt notches that keep score of conquests. True travel, they say, is experiential, not acquisitional. I agree. I also see nothing wrong with using Bucket Lists to plan and keep track of true travel.
In fact, I like Bucket Lists, finding them easy and convenient and the source of hours and hours of planning fun. I have used them from the beginning of my travel. One year I even bought a large wall map of the world and found great fun sticking pins on it to denote places I had visited. I also confess to bringing back from most of my travels some meaningful memento that forever after reminds me of certain experiences I had, and the walls and shelves of my home are in truth a bit cluttered with all these artifacts. But the pleasure they give me when I pass them or lightly touch them far exceeds their inconvenience, for they speak of “faraway places with strange sounding names,” and they speak of all the people I have met on my travels who have blessed me with so many enriching experiences. I know they also provide for the people who create them, a source of income.
I still refer to my Bucket Lists, friends of many years, and I see no reason to drop them from my life. If you want to categorize your travel into Bucket Lists, I say do so. That is no one else’s business.
Reflections on Culture
As the steamroller of American culture and capitalist values continues its inevitable production of homogeneity across the globe, I think a lot about culture, what is lost with homogeneity, what should be preserved, if anything, and especially, who has the right to make those determinations. I came of age in the 50s, when America was very publicly called God’s gift to the world, and when Americans could seemingly do no wrong. Had they not saved Europe from Nazi oppression and grown incredibly wealthy through the energetic application of the American capitalist practice that allowed them to ramp up production to unheard of levels to meet the war needs of our Allies in Europe?
Churches preached the ideology that God had chosen the United States to lead the world into a new era of peace and prosperity through the application of Christian values, applied vigorously and with some force if necessary. God had blessed the imposition of the American will and culture on a world thirsty for it.
I know that we must have been both loved and loathed then, as we are today, but I was naïve and believed the gospel according to my government and my church. And the golden years for America did seem to go on and on. It would be many years before we managed to seriously tarnish that American glow that made the world envy America and made America the dream destination for many of the world’s people.
The most difficult part of travel for me has been letting go of my unconscious need to impose my American-bred value system on the cultures I visit. I have observed American travelers with attitudes of smug superiority or even voyeurism when exposed to unusual or repugnant cultural customs. I recognize those failings and try to avoid them.
To my chagrin, I find it too easy to fall into the feeling of judging and wanting to help, especially when faced with elements of culture that are bred in poverty. When I visited the pygmies near Lake Bunyonyi in Uganda, I wanted to contribute money to build a second school for them. But they could not get excited about a school when all they wanted was to get back their ancestral lands that had been taken from them and given to the mountain gorillas because the mountain gorillas generated tourist dollars. I was one of those tourists.
Standards of cleanliness in other countries are sometimes talked about by returning travelers. It is easy for Americans to forget that in many countries, access to water is limited. One time I had to hide my shudder when the family dogs at a home I was visiting drank thirstily and slobberingly from the basins in which we were going to wash our dinner plates.
When deep cultural and religious values clash with strong beliefs I have about human rights, especially the rights of women, it is particularly hard for me to reign in my inappropriate feelings. I must constantly tell myself: you are in their country, not your country, and you must accept their right to live by their values; you have no right to try to tell them how they should live. My memories of the incomparably beautiful Imam Reza Shrine in Iran are forever tarnished by the symbolism it evokes of the oppression of women in that country.
Are All the Good Places Gone?
Sometimes I hear a comment like, “All the good places have already been visited; there is nothing left for me to explore. All the authentic cultures are adopting western practices.” There is truth to these comments, but they miss the critical fact that travel is as individual as the person doing the traveling. You will never have the same travel experience someone else does, and if you visit the same place twice and it has not changed a bit, you will still have a different experience each time, because you have probably changed, and therefore your travel experience will change.
I remember visiting my husband’s hometown on an island in the Adriatic Sea on my honeymoon in 1965 and feeling like I had stepped into another century. There were no cars on the island, no televisions, few radios, everybody walked, the donkey was the beast of burden and the transport if one was needed, the silence was magnificent, especially when the sun dropped into the sea and the town turned quite dark. We used an outhouse, water was brought up by bucketful from the cistern under the front patio of the house. The quiet in the evening was so profound that I could hear the gentle soughing of the waves lapping on the quayside as I slept, even though the family house was not on the shore.
When I was there next, in 1972, the entire village had changed. There were now televisions in many homes, filling the previous silence with their tinny voices; tiny cars with their engine noises and bleating horns were trying to navigate the centuries-old streets that had only felt the passage of human and donkey feet. It was almost comical the way the tiny cars would force themselves up a small street so narrow that there was literally only an inch or two clearance on each side of the vehicle.
Distressingly for me, people no longer congregated on the quayside for an evening passeggiata along the water, talking with friends, meeting friends with hugs and back-slaps and jokes, spontaneously bursting into songs of exquisite three- or four-part harmony, their voices soaring out over the gentle lapping of the moon-crested waves, separating, coming back together with another group, perhaps going on to the tavern together. That evening walk along the harbor was such an intense and magical experience for me, almost spiritual in nature, that I felt its loss viscerally. I had not expected it would disappear so quickly, and I mourned that disappearance.
Was the place ruined? To my romantic imagination, yes, the village was totally changed, on its way to becoming a noisy little place of hustle and bustle, a modern little village and touristy spot. The old ways of gentle, quiet, slow-paced living were gone.
However, for those who lived there, all these changes I decried were minor miracles of comfort and a better life. You could drive your tiny car onto the car ferry, shop on the mainland, and return with a trunk full of provisions that you could drive right up to your front door to unload instead of schlepping them in your weary arms the mile or so from the ferry landing to your home. Just as miraculous, you were suddenly connected to that little magical box called a television, which opened the door to the whole world of commercial enterprise and entertainment and elevated you into the modern world.
Even as I bemoaned the lost world of romantic medievalism I had so loved, I recognized that only the people who lived on the island had the right to decide their way of life.
Travel as Loss
I believe that you cannot come back from authentic travel unchanged. Sometimes you experience those changes as an unpleasant loss of innocence or an unwelcome erosion of the carefully crafted life-script you may have drafted for yourself. I remember a work colleague who traveled to India and came back vowing she would never again go to any “undeveloped” country because she could not stomach the poverty and disease and suffering she saw there, which made her too uncomfortable and unhappy. Her reaction is unfortunate, but not uncommon. Many Americans have a poor understanding of how most of the rest of the world really lives.
India remains one of my favorite countries, because truly, there is only one India. Its long history of traditions both good and bad, its experiences under the Raj, under the British Empire, under the emergence into independence, the richness of its religions and their practices, the alien nature of some of those practices, the color and beauty and noise and scruffiness – the very gods of India seem to glory in sensory overload.
There have been many times when reality has slapped me in the face on my travels. A loss of innocence, such as my colleague experienced, can be uncomfortable. Loss in any form is hard, and travel can chip away insidiously at core parts of you. There may come a point where it seems that you have crossed a divide and can never find your way back again to who you used to be. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I cannot say. My instinct, as with everything in life, is to take the long view and consider that the divide may provide an opportunity, even if that is not clear at that moment.
The Issue of Money
Unless you are so wealthy you never think about money, you will sometimes have concerns about running out of money while on a trip. This may happen. It happened to me in Zimbabwe, and I learned that this embarrassing and stressful state is survivable. How much money do you need for a travel trip? If you are wired like my husband was, you will usually decide you need more than you have available and therefore the trip must be postponed. I often joke with my children that had I listened to my husband’s concerns about running out of money on a trip, we would never have gone anywhere. No matter how much you have set aside, you will always worry that it is not enough if you are a worry wort. There comes a point where you say, “I think this will cover my travel, so I will go.”
One delightful solo traveler I met on a train in Eastern Europe, a young Canadian woman, told me her secret to seeing the world. Her mother allowed her to use her old childhood room for a crash pad. She would stow her small suitcase under her bed, immediately get a temporary job, work until she had accumulated $500, then hit the road, doing due diligence on the internet to find cheap transatlantic flights, and then maximizing her use of the excellent European train systems for lodging and meeting fellow travelers who could share accommodations, cars, etc. Couchsurfing.com was one of her favorite platforms.
Caveat: because she was young and pretty, it was usually easy for her to find travelers, especially young male travelers, who would appreciate spending a day in Amsterdam or Florence with an attractive girl, and who would inevitably insist on paying her way, often driving her around. I was witness to one such hapless young man who seemed infatuated with his new travel companion and unable to tear himself away from her as she boarded the train and kept telling him, “Yes, I love you also, but I must go now.”
I also ran into solo female travelers who had figured out how to use the barter system effectively to make their way around a travel destination. One, for example, would offer “minding” services of an hour or two for harried parents who just needed a break from their sweet brats. Others would offer to teach a crash course in a language, like English, in exchange for lodging or food or transport. What I learned is that people who have been bitten by the travel bug can be endlessly creative to figure out how they can travel on little or no money.
My-all-time role model for true travel was a middle-aged woman I met on a train in Eastern Europe who was traveling for her two-week annual vacation carrying nothing more than her handbag. Most of my later travel was with a carry-on suitcase only, even for journeys of several months, but I never attained her level of proficiency.
The other really important point, for me at least, is that I discovered that the less money you spend on your travel, the more memorable that travel will often be. There does come a point, of course, when frugality becomes plain stupidity and your efforts to pinch every penny will earn you nothing more than a nightmarish trip. But by and large, money is not the huge travel barrier a novice traveler might expect.
If you do run out of money, things can get uncomfortable and difficult. The one time I really did run out of money I was in Zimbabwe when the country’s financial system was destabilized. My credit card would not work in their banks, and I was out of cash. This is where your appreciation of travel companions willing to lend you a bit to tide you over, or a helpful guide willing to spend his dinner hour helping you find a very spotty internet service so you could try to get money wired to you, becomes boundless. I was able to email my daughter to try to wire me money, but she ran into seemingly insurmountable challenges. My bank was loathe to have any relationship with the Zimbabwean currency and my daughter did not have access to my bank account. She eventually succeeded in wiring me money, but the process caused her an enormous amount of stress and anxiety. I think she had to sort of create a sympathy scene, with tears, about how her mother was stranded in Zimbabwe and could not get back home. “Surely there is some way to get money out of her bank account so she can come back home?”
The bank officers were not amused nor pleased to be put in such a position. My resourceful daughter did prevail, however, and in a few days, by some miracle I still do not understand, the money came through to that bank in Zimbabwe and I was able to pay back what I owed and continue my journey. If you are planning to do something like this, I recommend you do it early on in your travel. If I tried to do this today, at my age, I might well just die of a heart attack from the stress! Smile, smile.
But seriously, the takeaway lesson is that I did survive, and so will you. The lesson also is to pay attention to unlocking your credit card if needed, or using credit cards tailored to international travel, or researching more closely the countries you will be visiting. In today’s connected world, this is a slam dunk, but it wasn’t for me back then. I also started carrying emergency cash in large denominations in a small neck pouch under my blouse.
Issues of Personal Safety
What if you get robbed or mugged while on a trip? This situation is rare, but can happen, of course. It is your job as a savvy traveler to minimize the risk. The one time I came closest to being concerned about my safety was in a train station waiting room at 2:30 in the morning while I had to wait for a late train, a sole woman among perhaps six or seven men who seemed to be scowling at me. It is entirely possible that my imagination projected the scowls, and it is entirely possible that the scowls were simple bafflement on their part that a lone woman could be sitting in this out-of-the-way train station during the middle of the night in a developing country, very much alone and obviously a foreigner. None of their own women would do anything so stupid! I think they may have concluded that I was either ignorant, clueless, crazy, or possibly insane enough that in the end it was probably wiser to just leave me alone. But I do try not to be in that position.
For several uncomfortable hours that night, I sat on my hard metal chair, tucked my small suitcase between my legs, wrapped the straps of my handbag around my arms, and did my best to pretend I was a seasoned traveler who knew what she was doing. I am sure I fooled no one, but the train eventually did chuff into the station, and I quietly followed the last of the men onto it and found a seat by a married couple.
Can you run into dangerous situations during solo travel? Maybe, just as you can run into potentially dangerous situations anywhere. Again, it is your job to minimize the risk and then hunker down, doing the best you can.
My favorite strategy for not getting mugged has always been to travel as a beggar, metaphorically. I wear old clothes and have a battered carry-on and handbag that all fairly scream, “Don’t bother trying to mug her; she hasn’t got any money.” Another trick I learned very early in my travels is to carry my money, passport, and credit card in a small thin pouch that hangs around my neck under my clothing.
Many of my earliest trips were taken with small groups of travelers, and I found not only the expected safety and security of traveling with others, but friendships and opportunities to meet interesting, traveled people. I became comfortable sharing rooms with other women travelers, even when I had never met them before. My philosophy was that your travel experience with others will be what you make it. I have used online resources to find fellow travelers to share cabins, berths, etc. When I first did that, I was amazed to find that the seasoned, savvy sharers usually vetted me first! This was something that had not occurred to me then.
The Matter of Language
International travel that seems so easy to our European friends can be difficult for Americans because of language barriers. Many of the people I met on my international travels were fluent in multiple languages, often at least four or five. During my travels I did my best to try to learn bits of the languages of the countries I visited, but the reality is that I was grateful for the ubiquity of the English language as the language of commerce. I had become used to the fact that in many tourist destinations, there is written and spoken English to help the tourist. Many people in other countries do indeed speak English. But some do not, as I learned in Sophia, Bulgaria.
I traveled there by myself on the train, blithely ignoring the fact that I am not friends with the Cyrillic alphabet. My entire time in Sophia, an exotic city I had looked forward to visiting, was colored by my incompetence. The buildings and the sights, the foods, my frustrated efforts trying to read signs in Cyrillic, all seemed to point their accusing fingers at my linguistic failure. Above all, my inability to function in a world where no one spoke English and all the signs and notices were in Cyrillic, spoke to me loudly about all my personal deficiencies on the great stage of world communication. I managed a bit with languages that used the Latin alphabet, but when presented with only the Cyrillic, Chinese, or Arabic alphabets, for example, I could not function. I was also conscious of the fact that some of the people in other countries resent Americans’ expectations that other nations must all learn English.
The truth remains, however, that when you let go of your crutch to be with people who speak your language and understand your culture, you have the best chance to get to know other cultures. Those cultures are best communicated through their own languages.
Travel with a Camera?
There are those travel purists who insist that the most authentic travel will be without notepad or even camera, just the raw, experiential meeting of cultures. I like that ideal but find it impractical for me. I discovered that my memory is not reliable, and the notes in my travel journals always give the more accurate report and description of events. I am also quite addicted to photos, again because I find them more reliable than my memory, even though some of the richness and nuance may be lost with the constraints of photography. The proper protocols for taking pictures of people in other cultures should be observed but add a level of awkwardness.
An uncomfortable reality for me that I have never made peace with is that the intrusion of the camera, and tourism in general, carries the risk of objectification, of turning other people into specimens displayed for our study or interest or simple curiosity. That makes me uncomfortable. I remember one bus stop in Africa when nine of us white tourists hopped out of our vehicle with our cameras in hand and found a group of African travelers arrayed on the hillside, their cameras in hand. They began taking photos of us, and I felt shamed enough that I took no photos at all.
What To Do When You Make a Fool of Yourself?
In a nutshell, blush furiously, kick yourself for good measure, laugh sheepishly, forgive yourself, and let it go. My first travel experience as a widow was uneventful and a surprising joy. My second journey was a baptism by fire. I learned that I had a generous share of naivety, ignorance, innocence, and just plain stupidity that needed to be addressed, humbling but true.
Not only did I survive the fear of being arrested in the airport in Moscow after I, in an overabundance of excitement at the thought of being in Russia, forgot the specific instructions from airport personnel that there would be absolutely no photographs taken in the airport, I also survived the embarrassment of introducing myself to a classroom of primary students with the proud and smiling words, “Ja sam Baba,” which in their language mean, “I am an old hag.”
You who may be more familiar than I was then with the Russian language, know that Baba, which in my fledgling Croatian means Grandmother, in Russian is “old hag”. Naively I had assumed that because both Russian and SerboCroatian are Slavic languages, their words would be similar. This is a lesson I will not have to be taught again.
My utterance, of course, caused an immediate uproar of disbelieving tittering and laughing among the students as the teacher tried to regain control of her classroom. With her help I was able to explain my gaffe to the students satisfactorily. I overcame my extreme embarrassment and finished teaching that half-hour class about the English language.
When I joined my colleagues the following day, dressed in shirt, pants and jacket suitable for a safari, because I thought we would be exploring the ancient city of Suzdal, our Russian colleagues informed me they had arranged for me, as a representative of a foreign university, to say a few words to the entire student body of the University of Vladimir on the occasion of Knowledge Day, the first day of classes in the new school year, which is a formal nationwide celebration that demonstrates to students and city the importance of education.
There was no time for me to change into professional clothing suitable for the occasion. The students were dressed as though to go to a job interview. The Assistant Dean of the University took off her shawl and draped it over my shoulders and led me to the microphone. Today I have no memory of anything I said that day, which was undoubtedly bland and probably meaningless generalities about upper-level education partnering throughout the world in the interests of the advancement of science and learning.
There was polite clapping after my brief words, and I managed to smile brilliantly and in what I hope was a friendly manner, which may indeed have looked rather inane or even deranged, but I did manage to avoid creating an international incident, which was, as we have mentioned, my barometer for success.
These nerve-wracking and embarrassing experiences were so far eclipsed by the extraordinary encounters I had during that week in Russia, that I would happily go through them again for a like week of magic. I was grateful to get home after that trip, of course, but I also had a new confidence born of the simple fact that I had learned that you can survive most of the experiences you have as a traveler, and a positive attitude is your greatest ally.
The point I am trying to make is that I am grateful today for the humiliating experiences I had right at the beginning of my independent travel life, because the big lesson I learned is that I did survive them. In fact, that week-long travel in Russia remains even today a bright star in the firmament of my travel memories.