On rolling solo

Happy Reunification Day from Hanoi, where the country is celebrating the American withdrawl from Saigon and the resulting reunification. It’s also the beginning of summer break so shit’s going wild on the street below me. It’s been a month since I left Portland and I’ve got about three and half months before I go back to the US to do some backpacking and roadtripping. It’s hard for me to grasp that already a month has gone by but then I think about all that I’ve seen and done in that time. I’m also getting to the end of my time in Vietnam. I’m taking a night train up to Sapa, a city created for tourism in the hills of Northern Vietnam to try to spend some time at a homestay in the hills, and then am planning to take what sounds like a slightly tortuous bus ride into Laos. Speaking of Laos, the proper pronunciation for this country does not include the “s”. It’s only called Laos because some French Cartographer added it by accident, even though he probably didn’t pronounce it, and the name stuck.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about my experience as a solo traveler. In general I would say that SE Asia is a very easy place to visit by yourself. The infrastructure is well developed for travelling: there are frequent transportation connections, cheap and decent accommodations, and ample tours and activities you can jump on. Hostels will book your transportation for you and if you take the bus, the company will even pick you up. There are a ton of other westerners here and a fair number of them traveling solo, including a fair number of other Americans. Oddly enough most of these Americans tend to be men though there are lots of solo women from Europe. Finally, even though crossing the scooter filled streets of Hanoi or Saigon is a hairy adventure I feel very safe here.

Having said that there are also challenges to going alone. For one, it’s more expensive than traveling with a buddy, particularly if you’re like me and don’t sleep well in dorms. I will do it now that I’m adjusted to traveling but about ⅓ of the time splurge for a private room (which cost about $20 a night at hostels or guesthouses instead of the $6 dorm) so that I can get a good night’s sleep and don’t develop a deep hatred for humanity. Another challenge to solo travel is that you always have to be like George W. Bush. I’m the Decider. Usually I love this about traveling solo. I get to decide what I do, where I go, and whether I try to find other people to do it with. I can wake up in the morning and figure out what to do based on how I’m feeling. It can be fantastically liberating. The flipside is that I actually need to know what I want to do, where I want to go, and sort out who is cool, and this can be a challenge.

The greatest challenge, and probably what keeps most people from traveling solo though, is that you are by yourself. You don’t have a friend or partner to share the experience with, to play cards while waiting for a bus, or to help you figure out where the hell you are. In reality, this is one of the reasons why I am keeping this blog and regularly posting photos; it’s a way for me to stay connected to the community I have back home. The double edge of this sword is that I wonder if this keeps me from fully immersing myself in life over here.

Realistically, while I’ve met some pretty cool, interesting people here at hostels, on the bus, on tours, and even for the past few nights, out at dinner, where restaurant staff ended up seating me next to other solo traveling guys actually staying in the same dorm room that I was though we hadn’t yet met, for me all of these friendships have been short term and after a few days we’ve parted ways.

A big part of the short term nature of these friendships has to do with my personality as well as my travel plans. I’m an ambivert; according to the Industrial Myers Briggs Personality Test Complex I straddle the line between Introvert and Extrovert. I seek out other people but then get to a point where I want to be alone. I’m also trying to exercise my independence on this trip and so have not been too interested in finding a pack to travel with at the expense of going to the places I am most interested in, which is the best way to develop a long term friendships on the road. In spite of my boyish good looks, I’m also a bit older than most of the other single/solo. I definitely can muster the energy to roll with the late 20s crowd for a few days at a time but I feel a bit like an imposter and hate to admit it but also have a bit of a superiority complex about how much more life experience, including being a person formerly known as married. I try to keep this in check but I think my mentality keeps me from connecting with people. Finally, most people I meet seem to be traveling Vietnam from North to South and going from there to Cambodia and Thailand. I’m doing the opposite, I started in Cambodia and am going South to North in Vietnam and will mostly skip Thailand entirely. As a result, for most of the people I’ve met our paths will cross for a few days and then we’ll part ways, with memories, Facebook friendships, and WhatsApp details.

For me the result is a paradox. I am probably more social than back home but also more lonely. Conversations tend to revolve around our travels, geopolitics, or what life is like in our home countries but I have yet to get to a place with people where we have our own inside jokes that can go on for days the way I have with my friends back home. While this was hard at first, I’m starting to see this as a good thing. I find I’m getting more comfortable being by myself, more confident in my abilities to strike up conversations with strangers to the point that maybe in a few weeks I’ll be comfortable approaching the hottest woman sitting alone and the bar at the bar, and am getting to be just as content with an evening with my Kindle listening to Despacito and Ed Sheeran on repeat in the hostel restaurant as I am talking with Europeans and other North Americans about how Portland is probably more like Copenhagen or Lyon than most places in New Jersey or Nebraska.

I have absolutely no regrets about this trip so far. These challenges are part of the experience of traveling and probably will be more beneficial to me in the long run than anything you will see on my Instagram. Plus, thanks to the miracle of Al Gore’s internet my friends back home and all of our inside jokes are as quick and easy as text message away. Assuming I have signal and we are all awake.