Good Bad & Ugly – Solo Trip

After more than a month of solo travel across parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan, these are my takeaways.

Learnings

I tried to think about the best and worst things that I felt about solo travel.

Good

1. Decide anything anytime

You want leave town now? You can. You want to change plans to visit some other place? You can. You want to eat burger for dinner? You can. You want to skip lunch? You can. You want to intentionally miss a train? You can. You decide what you want when you want and how you want. You absolutely have no constraints or people with check with. That’s extremely powerful when you think about it.

2. Own the pace

There are certain times you just want to sit and see the sunset and no nothing else. In a solo travel, there is no one to tell you “Chaloo”. If you are bored with a place, you can see it quickly or leave without waiting for anyone. You want to spend more time doing something, you can. I spent four days in Pushkar learning how to make silver jewellery and nothing else. I could have spent another 5 days too if I wished.

3. Meet more people

You generally tend to meet more people and talk to more people. This is partially also forced as you have no other person to talk to. Meeting and talking to a lot of people gives you so many different stories and perspectives. I met people who were working and doing a masters in Philosophy. I met a person who was in India travelling last 4 months on an RE. And many more.

4. Know what you like and dislike

Since you are on your own, you can clearly find out what things you like and what you don’t. You will naturally not want to do things you don’t like and you will spend time doing things you like as you have no one to oblige to or convince. If you want to explore your likes and dislikes, solo trip is the best way..

Bad

1. No single portion meals

This is a common problem you will face when you go to any restaurant. Most restaurants don’t have single portion meals. If you order roti and curry, the curry will be for two people at least. You end up overeating or wasting food.

2. Only Selfies

After a while you will be tired asking random people to take your picture. So most of your photos will only be selfies with you staring into the camera in the background of the place you visited.

Ugly

1. You feel lonely

I won’t lie. There were times when I felt extremely lonely during the trip. I was wondering why the hell am I doing this solo trip. Most of the time, a walk and some fresh air fixed it. But the feeling was real and painful.

2. Repeated first time conversations

While you stay at different hostel you end up asking the same questions to people and giving same answers you have given a million times. Where are you from? What do you do? How long are you travelling? Where next? Etc etc. After a while I found it boring and borderline irritating to repeat what I said over and over again to different people.

Emotional Index

I journaled my emotion on a daily basis just to see how I felt during the trip. After coming back, I tried to derive some insights from the daily emotional journal. Engineer I am, what else do you expect.

I overall felt Good on around 52% of the days. And I felt both Good and Bad (which in my opinion is also Good) on 30% of days. I felt Bad (Lonely or Scared or Irritated) on 18% of days.

The interesting finding was my feelings were fluctuating. It was not like initially it was all Bad and over the course of the trip it became Good. There were Good and Bad and Mixed days and they fluctuated. Here is a graph of my daily emotional index.

Now the big question was if I will do a Solo Trip again? Thinking back, the answer is a definite YES.