Part three of the A-Z of Solo Female Travel already and C, as you’ll have seen, is for Communication. There are three arms here: communicating while you’re away, keeping in touch with home and the language barrier.
These days, travelling with a phone is non-negotiable, unless you’re on a digital detox retreat. You’re going to need to be able to communicate both for your safety and your convenience. We’re well past the days of “don’t use your phone in public, it makes you a target for muggers” – pretty much everyone, the world over, has a smartphone these days and unless yours is particularly flashy, maybe encrusted with diamonds, you’re no more a target than anyone else. Don’t wave it around, don’t yell about how much it cost and don’t encrust it with diamonds and you should be fine. In fact, the biggest potential problem you may have is making sure it stays dry. For the sake of being careful with your phone, keeping it out of sight and staying analogue by using a guidebook to find your way rather than your maps app or something like that, is an idea in some ways but in others, it really emphasises that you’re a tourist and therefore vulnerable, so weigh that up and decide what works for you.
Communicating while you’re away
The first arm is the necessity to communicate while you’re away. You might make new friends and want to be able to plan to meet them, so you’ll want to be able to send them a message. Even if nothing goes wrong, you’re going to want to have the capability to call for emergency help. You might find your travel plans go awry and you need to call your accommodation to tell them you’re going to be late. You’ll probably find you need to receive texts to be able to log into your email or social media.
There’s a lot more wifi around nowadays but if you’re going to use your mobile data or make calls, there are a couple of things to note.
Number one – and this is specifically for UK folks – is that within Europe at the moment, you mostly seem to be able to use your data as if you were still at home. How long that’ll last now we’ve “taken back control” remains to be seen but for the time being, nothing has changed regarding the cost of using your phone abroad. But beware of that and check that nothing’s changed when you’re travelling. In the past, people have assumed it’ll cost the same and have run up truly horrifying phone bills by just using their mobile data abroad and we could very easily be looking at a return to those days. I’d be careful around Europe and assume that it’s going to be very expensive anywhere outside Europe. Where exactly does the line between Europe and elsewhere start? Well, that depends, doesn’t it? So be careful.
If you’re going to be away for longer than a couple of weeks, it might be a good idea to get a local SIM card which means you can get access to data at local prices. Because you’re a tourist, this will be PAYG, not a contract, so you may have to figure out how to top it up, which may well require you to go into a shop and speak to a human (who may or may not speak English). Remember, once that new card goes in, your phone will answer to a new number so calls home (if you’re still using the phone function of your phone – is anyone??) will become expensive and verification texts sent to your normal number won’t arrive until you put your old card back in. That thing is precious – don’t lose it!
You’ll also have to remember to put in country codes when you wouldn’t have before – phoning your mum’s 07xxx number isn’t going to work from a Thai SIM, for example. I don’t speak for all systems but as a general rule of thumb, using a country code means starting with 00, then the code (UK is 44) and then knocking the first zero off the number. My mum’s 07xxx number, dialled from a foreign SIM, therefore becomes 00447xxxx. Forgive me if you already knew that but if you’re a first-timer taking advice from a blog, you might not know that.
Keeping in touch with home
Arguably, this is the least important of the communication questions but try telling your mum that. You might want to communicate with people back home – or perhaps more accurately, they might want you to communicate with them. Some people will want regular reassurances that you’re safe, others might want updates on your adventures and to see pictures of amazing places.
Are you going to phone or text home every day? Now everyone has a phone and access to either wifi or mobile data, that’s become a lot cheaper and easier. Who cares how much an international phone call or text costs when you’re going to do it for free through WhatsApp? We’re all so much better at remote face-to-face chats since March 2020, so having a Zoom call is pretty standard these days.
But if you don’t want to organise these things in advance and send a link, or calculate the time difference between wherever you are and wherever they are or, or you just don’t have the time to catch up with all the people who want to hear from you and especially not as regularly as some of them want, you have so many social media options!
I know, you know that. Hi, a decade and a half into social media being an intrinsic part of daily life for everyone under sixty and a lot of people over it, have you considered using social media?
Instagram is made for this kind of thing – pop up a story whenever you’ve got a moment and people can see and hear exactly what you’re up to. Put up a stream of candid, unedited photos – don’t worry about whether it ruins your grid’s aesthetic. Having an adventure is aesthetic! If you feel that strongly, create a second account which is just quick photos and do the pretty ones when you’ve got time to devote to it. I have a second Instagram (behindthepolarbear) and I really should have been using that to throw pictures on every day when I was away so I could then take my time a bit more on my main account (polarbearjuliet) when I got back. I’m going to make more use of that, then. In fact, I’ve just taken a photo of me writing that and put it up as a promise so by the time you get here, there should be a dozen or more pictures of my daily life and next month, there will be a load of Iceland winter pictures.
My mum has taken to Twitter recently. I don’t think she actually tweets but she’ll sit and read it for hours on rotation with Facebook, the Da*ly Ma*l and, for some reason, Quora. She doesn’t follow me on Facebook – both my parents follow my sister but not me, which I’m absolutely not taking personally – but I created a Twitter account which is followed by three or four old school or uni friends who don’t use Twitter anymore, and my mum. I can pop things on there whenever I have twenty seconds free and she can read it in her own good time, which results in giving her a running commentary on some days. My blog automatically cross-posts there too so she doesn’t have to go and check it because it’ll just appear her on her timeline when it’s good ‘n’ ready.
Reels and TikToks can act as a pretty quick video diary to give people a rundown of your day if that’s your thing. Write a blog – I have this one but when I’m away, I have another one which acts as a diary. There are no pictures because I tend to write it from my phone in bed without bothering to transfer the photos from my camera but my mum can read it and see that I’m still alive and I can use it as a resource for this blog later on. In fact, in communicating like this with other people, you’re creating a big archive of material, a multimedia diary that you can look back on later, created very quickly and easily and with very little extra effort. I wish someone would invent an app that could pull all these things together, in chronological order, to make that multimedia diary.
The language barrier
I could write an entire series on language-learning but I’m going to try not to get carried away…
When you’re travelling, you’re almost definitely going to encounter other languages, and knowing the state of language-learning in Anglophome countries, those are going to be languages you’re not very familiar with.
Exactly what languages those are will depend on where you go, obviously. To be honest, you can get by surprisingly well with just English but… look, you’ll hear people say “just learn the language” in a dismissive way and I’m here to tell you it takes years to attain any kind of fluency. It’s simply not realistic to expect someone to “just learn Thai” or “just learn Spanish”.
If you’ve got the time, sure, do as much Duolingo as you can squeeze in, anything will help but equally, it’s not realistic to think you’re going to learn to speak fluently from Duolingo. I know people who’ve completed entire language courses on that app who’ve then said “but I still don’t feel like I could actually have a conversation with a real person in that language”. It might give you the “good day” and “my name is” and “I am from…” but you’re also going to spend a lot of time discovering that mice write newspapers and that you’re cleaning the basement and that sort of nonsense, which has a purpose long-term but is a waste of time if you’re trying to cram in an entire language in three weeks.
Other people will tell you to at least learn the simple niceties like “hello”, “goodbye”, “please” and “thank you”. I don’t disagree with that but again, it’s not always necessarily that simple – for example, “please” basically doesn’t exist in Finnish. But yes, some basics are always appreciated. Learn the phrases “Do you speak English?” and “I’m sorry, I don’t speak [language]” and some getting-around words – learn to recognise “entrance”, “exit”, “tickets”, that sort of thing. I remember someone at work crossing the Channel and being stuck in the ferry terminal because they didn’t recognise the word “sortie” as meaning “exit” in French. If you can’t “just learn the language”, at least learn to recognise an exit sign when you see everyone else walking towards it!
The other thing I would do, if the language barrier was seriously going to be a problem, would be to have a notebook, or a note in your phone, with a list of useful words. Days of the week for identifying when shops & attractions are open, foodstuffs to find in the supermarket (I know you’ll probably just recognise them but how many English-speakers have been to Scandinavia and bought sour milk instead of normal milk because you can’t tell the difference from packaging alone?), words like “city centre” or “station”. Every time you think of a word that you might want to recognise, add it to your list. You don’t have to learn this list but at least keep it handy for consultation.
And treasure Google Translate! When I was in Russia in 2019, I stayed in hotels in three cities, with English-speaking reception service, but I also stayed in two apartments and my landladies didn’t speak any English. But we had Google Translate! We could write down what we wanted to say and the phone would translate it into something we could understand. I don’t claim it’s a 100% accurate service and I wouldn’t use it to write my PhD thesis in French but for asking questions like “what time do I have to check out?” and “what’s the alarm code?” it does the job very nicely.
Don’t worry too much about the language barrier. Travellers have been coping just fine for a long time without being fluent in the local language of everywhere they visit. Learn what you can and English will do the rest – just try not to be too Emily in Paris about it.