Why I quit my job to travel solo as a 22 year old woman

Words by Ella Griffin

So, let me get this straight, you’re travelling alone, as a woman, backpacking Europe, for 6 months, without a return ticket? That’s so very brave of you. Brave. The amount of times I’ve been told that I’m brave in the past three weeks since I quit my full time job in Sydney, Australia to don a backpack and finally go and drink in everything on my favourite continent has been, well, frustrating to say the least. Is it really so brave?

Why do you travel? Another free walking tour guide asked our eclectic group as we pushed through the Warsaw old town the week before last on my first day in Poland. I was sweating, it was an unexpectedly hot September day in Europe. The smell of log fires inside restaurants and Polish dumplings fill the air as we stroll through the Castle square. Some common responses? Food, architecture, culture, to meet others. No one could quite articulate how I feel about it though. I reflected upon my new found love of solo travel these past two years, from playing board games with a random group of beautiful Dutch people I met in New Zealand, to swimming in holy water with some American girls in Indonesia, to gallivanting through the alcohol filled streets of Berlin last December, to now. Why do I travel? To see something truly different. So many people I meet are so happy with seeing one thing. Having one life. One experience. But I don’t believe that is, fully, life.

Why do I travel? To be honest I don’t even really know yet. When I turned up in Copenhagen to begin this trip I found myself wondering what I was even doing there. But then sometimes I stroll quietly through a city and feel such a breath of life that I never want to go anywhere else. Overwhelmed by picturesque bike lanes and palaces with history so far beyond me that I will never fully understand it. Maybe I travel because I have nothing else. In Warsaw I befriended a lovely Czech boy, Giron, in my (disgusting, men-filled) dorm room. We strolled from the old town to a nearby supermarket over the Vitsula river, and I asked him the same question that has been demanded of me daily since I left home. He hates the sights and going to anything remotely touristy. He prefers to be on the train than actually in the destination. He’s the kind of guy who dragged me out to lunch an hour outside of the city centre just to find an authentic Polish milk bar. He just doesn’t have an answer to his life yet. A plan. A route. The fact that such a simple truth could be shared between two complete strangers baffled me a little. Unsure of our careers, a little unsure of ourselves, it’s kind of unbelievable how much you can discover away from the shelter of childhood and familiarity.

The real truth about travelling solo is that it is literally just like real life. There is a lot of sweat as I haul my backpack from train to train. My throat gets infected at every possible opportunity. I sit alone in restaurants day after day. There is a lot of mundanity mixed in with the cobbled streets and overwhelming vistas. But terrifying? In my months of travelling I am yet to feel completely afraid. I like to believe that people are inherently good, inherently helpful, and when they aren’t I just walk away. Things definitely go wrong, my overnight train from Berlin to Warsaw never arrived, and at midnight on the outskirts of the city I had to walk to three hostels before one had a bed I could sleep in for the night so I could rebook the train for the next day. I ended up getting the last bed in a female dorm, and met a group of English girls all getting ready for a night out, who comforted me for hours before making sure I got to bed safely. Just because we are women that does not mean that we require a partner or a man to enjoy the pleasure of travel, or need protection from the reality of getting from A to B aside from common sense and planning ahead.

Why do you travel alone? Are you not lonely? Won’t you get bored alone? Again, yes, there are moments when I arrive into my new hostel for the next 4 nights and no one is interested in where I am from or where I am going. Moments when I walk into the hostel bar and everyone stares blankly at me. But there are also other moments, when three girls from your home city and another from Germany all collapse on my dorm bed in Krakow after stuffing ourselves with more Polish food than we should, discussing every excruciating detail of our lives so far. Times when a nice American boy and French girl ask you to go for brunch, and after 4 hours you’re still in that cafe and your mind can barely remember a time when you didn’t know them. The commonality of travel, particularly backpacking, creates this strange bond where you can go from stranger to best friend to lover in the space of minutes. It removes the formality and the inevitable coolness everyone tries to hide behind these days.

Though being berated with a million questions from every person I meet on how dare I move through the universe doing something slightly different to the norm, I just tell them my own truth. And as I sit here waiting for my flight from Prague to Moscow I realise that there is no real way to sugar coat it — I just realised that if I do not go by myself, I will never go. These strange societal standards we’ve placed on ourselves that we must marry or buy a property or stay still. I don’t want to stay still. I want to stay in picturesque cottages on the Faroe Islands and trek through Tibet and go visit Estonia and Latvia and Yalta because why not? I want to use my time. I would prefer to see the world. So if you’re lucky enough to be reading this right now, and if you would also prefer to see the world, I look forward to meeting you out there very soon.