Let’s talk about how I built up to solo female travel. My first real trip was five days in Helsinki in November 2008 but I’d had a lot of various practice over the years which meant it wasn’t quite such a shock to the system – or to my parents – when I first went away.
Italy, April 2000
I’ve talked about this before. My best friend Catherine and I went off to Italy to join a raptor protection camp. We were fourteen years old! The two fourteen-year-olds got on a plane unsupervised at Heathrow, flew to Rome, got off the plane, got onto a different plane, aged fourteen and unsupervised and arrived in Reggio di Calabria where we were hoping to be met by someone – someone we didn’t know – from the camp. No escort service from the airline for us. No idea why not. Our first plane was delayed so we were thrown onto an earlier one so we didn’t miss our connection. Twenty minutes from walking in the terminal door to being in the air has to be a record for Heathrow, doesn’t it? We had an escort who ran us through everything to get to the plane on time but once we were in the only two empty seats on the plane (and not together! This was my first time on a plane and I was facing it without Catherine!), we were left to our own devices, including the transfer in Rome.
This was back before fourteen-year-olds carried their own mobile phones. My dad probably had one by now but between it costing about as much as a house and the prohibitive cost of using the thing abroad, there was no way I was taking it with me. So the two fourteen-year-olds went off to meet a stranger and spend two weeks in Italy and the next thing our parents knew of us was when we got back to Heathrow after changing planes in Milan alone, unsupervised and ages fourteen on the way back.
My parents have said no way would they let that happen if we were fourteen again today and I expect Catherine’s parents feel the same. I definitely do – imagine if two of my Rangers said they were doing this!
This all looks a lot more serious in 2022 than it did in 2000. The raptor protection camp is now run by a German committee and funded by a foundation and participants appear to wear t-shirts with BIRD GUARD in massive dayglo yellow letters on the back. It’s not something I’d want a fourteen-year-old involved in.
But back then, we spent the whole fortnight on this camp being dragged from one birdwatching site (taking photos of Sicily and doing “closed-eye drawings”) to another, taken to Reggio and Messina and Scilla, except that one wet afternoon we spent just sitting in the car waiting while the adults brought the police to some poachers they’d caught using birdsong cassettes to entrap small birds. We were always in the company of either a couple of the grown-ups or as a group thing with everyone else but otherwise, yeah, this was solo travel (Well, Catherine was there but we were fourteen – two teenagers don’t quite add up to one solo adult, as far as I’m concerned). This is no different to going alone to join any other group trip.
Paris, June 2000
This was a school French exchange. The trouble was that my parents decided to go on holiday at half term – something they’d never done before and never did again – and those two trips overlapped. Well, I wasn’t missing the French exchange! How could this be done? In hindsight, the easiest way would be for me to stay with someone until the rest of my family got home a week later. There were at least three candidates for me to stay with but somehow I don’t think we ever considered not coming on the half term holiday as an option.
Where there’s a will there’s a way and eventually, aided and abetted by Mr Warbis, teacher in charge of the trip and all-round good egg, we found a way. A way that would never even be considered in 2022!
On the last day of the French exchange, everyone would get on the coach to drive home. Everyone except me. Mr Warbis would leave me, aged fourteen, in Paris with a family I’d only met less than a week ago. My exchange family would take me to the station where I’d be collected by my dad, who would get the train up to Paris from the campsite near Besançon, some three to five hours to the south-east. Once I was collected, Dad would phone Mr Warbis to assure him the plan had worked and I was safe, except the way the timings worked out meant he was on the ferry at the time with no mobile signal and couldn’t be 100% sure I was safe until he was in another country and unable to do anything.
It’s not solo travel by any means – I was never at any point out of the supervision of a succession of adults – but I think it’s worth including in the litany of building-confidence-abroad, being left in Paris rather than going home with the rest of the school trip.
Paris, some point in early 2002
Fast-forward to the French/art sixth form trip. There was an educational itinerary – we went to Louis Vuitton’s house for champagne and went to the Stade de France and the Opera Bastille and all that good stuff.
But we were also allowed to go off by ourselves one afternoon and I was put in charge of my little group of friends on the grounds that I could navigate the metro. I’m not entirely sure why Mr Moore thought I had any more knowledge of the Paris metro than anyone else. Nor did I have obvious leadership skills aged sixteen, so that wasn’t it either. I’d been to Paris before and I’d been on the Tube in London many times but I don’t think I’d ever been to either alone and getting on the train your dad says to get on is no qualification for being able to figure these things out yourself.
But nonetheless, I became the leader that afternoon in Paris. I have photographic evidence that we went to Trocadero and had waffles or crepes but I have no idea what else we did. Obviously we got back to the hotel ok so Mr Moore’s faith in me wasn’t misplaced. This was probably the first time I’d done anything abroad without meekly following someone else, if you don’t count going off in the grounds of Versailles in year ten (and being late back). Again, not solo but starting to develop some of the skills I’d use when I did go solo.
Switzerland, 2005-06
Now I’m 20, living in western French-speaking Switzerland as a language student, and naturally I’m spending all my free time travelling around making the most of my temporary home country. I started off taking my “triplets” around – there I am in charge again, and again at an age, experience and confidence level when I wouldn’t expect to be doing that, and moved on to just going on my own when they lost interest in exploring.
Regular day trips around the country where you live isn’t solo female travel, strictly, and yet what else would you call it? I spoke some French but that’s not the language of 80% of Switzerland so I’m travelling around a country where I don’t speak the language, navigating the public transport system, planning how to get where when and solving problems when they come up, like the time the train home from Spiez was cancelled. That was a big deal but my scrapbook says we waited at a tiny station for about twenty minutes for another train and otherwise got back almost precisely as planned. Not such a big deal, then.
I also learned how to navigate an airport and get on a plane by myself. I flew home for Christmas and then back again the following autumn to retake (and re-fail) my exams. See, I’m racking up the skills I need to travel solo.
Helsinki, November 2008
So by the time I’m on an orange plane on my way to Finland, I’m pretty comfortable with everything I’m going to need to tackle.
I’d never spent a night by myself in another country, unless you count a school year in student accommodation – in fact, I’d never even been off on my own for a night in London; that was still another year away – but that’s the easy bit. Just because the teacher or my classmates aren’t somewhere else in the building, it doesn’t make it harder. If anything, it’s easier. No need to sneak into your friends’ rooms after lights-out, no need to sneak back to your own in the middle of the night while knowing the teachers are listening for the slightest sound. I can come and go as I please and I get the room all to myself.
Finding the hostel was the first problem. I dealt with that by planning it in advance, printing my confirmation and handing it to a taxi driver outside the central station. The language barrier was an issue – it still would be today; Finnish has nothing in common with any language I’ve ever studied and after three months on Duolingo is still largely incomprehensible – but Swedish is an official second language in Finland. Swedish is sufficiently like German for me to get by – I didn’t speak German and still don’t but I’d picked up a certain amount from my year travelling around German-speaking Switzerland and I can manage a respectable amount of “tourist German” with no lessons.
The plane? Fine. Public transport? Fine. The confidence to go around by myself? Fine. By the time I was on my first solo trip, I’d already done all the training and I was ready to go.
What about you?
That’s why I tend to recommend building up your skills over just throwing yourself in head first. It’s what I did – or rather, what a series of circumstances ended up doing for me. You probably can’t replicate those circumstances and wouldn’t want to but it makes the whole solo thing much less intimidating if you trust yourself to be able to manage the various things you’re going to have to do.