I should really make more noise about solo female travel. I’m far from the only one who does it – it feels like the most popular form of travel after family package holidays , certainly the most popular kind you see online and you never see “solo male travel” but despite its ubiquitousness popularity, it somehow still feels niche. So I’m going to talk about how I got started. Everyone’s journey to solo female travel is different but I bet most don’t start quite how mine did.
Early 2000
I must have been fourteen when my best friend Catherine came into school with a leaflet for a raptor protection camp in Italy. We both immediately declared “We want to go!” and despite us both being fourteen, our parents immediately started making plans – plans which started with us getting our own passports for the first time and moved on to E111s, money belts containing traveller’s cheques and plane tickets. There were no direct flights to Reggio Calabria so we had to transfer, all by ourselves, in Rome on the way and Milan on the way back. We spent an orange-scented week birdwatching at an abandoned military installation overlooking the Strait of Messina, helped catch a Mafiosa and climbed a mountain in a snowstorm before going to a beach. Read the full story here.
June(-ish) 2002
On a school trip to Paris, we were allowed to go off unsupervised, in small groups, for entire afternoons. We’d done this before on the year 10 trip but this was the one that really felt like we were grown-ups doing our own thing in a major city and I was more or less in charge because Mr Moore thought I knew how the metro worked. I did, but no better than any of the others. We figured it out. We had waffles and I’m pretty sure we headed for the Eiffel Tower and I remember very few of the details, other than buying a carnet and going to the Trocadero but we were largely independent for a relatively large amount of time.
October 2005
I moved to Switzerland! I was now in my third year at university studying French & Spanish which meant a compulsory (for the 20-somethings) year abroad in a country where our target language was spoken. I spent a year in Switzerland, going to language school by day and spending my evenings and weekends adventuring, while my Anglophone “triplets” actually studied. I failed both my exams and my resits but I got into my fourth year and I saw a lot of Switzerland!
October 2008
By now I’d graduated and had a real job, but my life was an endless work-bath-sleep cycle and so I decided to break it by going to Norway. Norway became Finland thanks to easyJet not going to Norway at the time and with three weeks’ notice to stay in a hostel in Helsinki in November, I didn’t imagine anyone would want to come with me, so I didn’t even ask. I’d been practicing the solo travel thing for eight years by now and had spent a year going off by myself so it didn’t occur to me to be nervous. Not did it occur to me that I might encounter fresh new problems or a language barrier in a country I’d never been to. I possessed a long scifi-style grey wool coat and I bought mittens and a big pashmina/scarf thing and off I went.
March 2011
I think this is when I crossed from “sometimes I break out of my humdrum life by going somewhere interesting” to “I am a person who travels”. I did three trips in 2011, all to new and fairly exotic places. In March, thanks to a book I was writing at the time, I stuck a pin in a map and ended up going to Vilnius. In May I went to Norway – Trondheim and then my first trip to the Arctic in the shape of Tromsø – and in December I went to Iceland for the first time.
By this point, fourteen years later, I’ve been to Iceland seventeen times, I’ve dogsledded in the High Arctic, visited fourteen more countries and written two books. I’ve not made it out of Europe, unless you count Uralic Russia and Georgia as outside Europe but I’ve covered a reasonably broad spectrum. I’ve picked up the barest scraps of half a dozen languages, far too many mini scrapbooks, enough different bathing rituals to start writing another book and as solo female travel goes, I’m the barest amateur! I’ve never been backpacking, I’ve never been to Asia or the Americas or on a cruise or safari. I’ve never jumped out of a plane or got an ill-advised tattoo or a dodgy overnight bus. But when I hear people say things like “When I retired, I bought a van because if you don’t do things now, when will you?”, I never feel like I have a bucket list looming over the retirement I’ll never get, because by-and-large, I’m crossing a lot of things off my list as I add them. Oh, I do want to go to New Zealand and Egypt and Vietnam but if it all comes to an end tomorrow, I won’t be entirely dissatisfied.
I Am A Polar Bear 