Why I Started Travelling Alone

Solo travel is not about loneliness. It is about the strange, expansive freedom of having no one else's preferences to consider except your own.

The first trip alone was to Japan, a country I had been planning to visit with someone who eventually could not come. Rather than cancel, I went anyway. I spent three weeks making decisions entirely based on what interested me in the moment: a ceramic shop in Kyoto, a ferry to a small island, a restaurant with no English menu that I entered based purely on the smell coming from the kitchen.

What you lose when you travel alone is the shared memory, the shared reference point. What you gain is attention — a quality of attention you rarely have when you are also moderating someone else's experience of a place.