Solo travel can be one of the most liberating and exhilarating things you can do in your life. If you want to change your life, and shake up the cage, then solo travel is the way to do it. It’s nice to travel with friends and family, but you really aren’t getting outside of your comfort zone like you do when you travel on your own. Solos there is nobody else there to rely on but yourself, you will find it stretches who you are as a person, and that you find more about your inner self. Here are some of the ways that it can change you for the better.
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Confidence
When you’re traveling solo, you have no choice but to make the effort to overcome any fear you may feel. You will find that confidence comes much easier once you start. At first confidence may be difficult, but each step you take where you push yourself to be more confident, the easier it gets. By the end of the trip, you will find which have more confidence than you ever believed you could have. When you stop relying on others you will find that it’s much easier to rely on yourself. People back home will notice the difference.
Meeting New People
When you travel by yourself you are alone, as obvious as that sounds. But as people like to have a social circle, you will find that you will talk to new people much easier and make an effort. You will find that you make new friends, and learn new things. When you travel with friends and family, you generally stay insulated from other people as you already have your own little social circle. But when you are on your own, you will find that you make an effort to talk to new people and you can make some wonderful friends this way. We have made some lifelong friends that we value dearly from when we traveled by ourselves.
New Experience
When you travel by yourself it is much easier to experience new things. Things that you might not do at home, or that your friends and family might not want to do. There is nobody else there to please other than yourself. If you want to go out dancing all night, or spend the whole day in a museum, there is nobody there to stop you. You can learn a lot more about who you are and what you enjoy by traveling by yourself. With different cultures, there are no set patterns that you can fall into like you would back home. People often get into a rut in their own environment, so stepping outside of your environment into something completely different can wake you up to things that you had forgotten.
New Skills
You will learn a tremendous amount of new skills traveling alone. Overcoming all the fears that you might have, you will learn the same thing that veteran travelers do, in fact, you may learn a lot of them from the veteran travelers themselves as you talk to them. You can experience every aspect of the trip, as you have nobody else there to do it for you, except you. As you travel to different cultures, you can also learn about them, and how to do things from that culture. Seeping yourself into a culture is a great idea to get a true feeling of what it really means to be from that location.
The Stories You Can Tell
For years after you have solo traveled, you will be surprised at how interesting you have become. When somebody brings up something about a location you have visited, or some travel experience, you can chime in with some of your own stories. Telling people how you took a cruise up the Nile, or visited an ancient ruin, and did it alone, will change how people see you. You will suddenly become much more of an interesting person to them.
Solo travel is something we suggest everybody does. Of course, you have to be careful, as there are bad people everywhere in the world that will take advantage of you. But just like anywhere, if you keep your eyes open, and don’t get too far off the beaten track, you are usually pretty safe. This doesn’t mean that you should stay at the Marriott and eat at McDonald’s, it means you should really stay in a local hotel, and eat at local restaurants, but just use common sense. We have never regretted solo travel, and we still do it when we can, so good luck and enjoy.
