Why I Travel Alone (and Why I Keep Coming Back to It)

The question I get most often is some version of: don’t you get lonely? The honest answer is sometimes, briefly, in the way that being alone in any context is sometimes briefly lonely. But the more interesting answer is that solo travel involves a kind of company that group travel rarely allows: the company of your own attention, undivided and entirely your own to direct.

When you travel with other people — even people you love, perhaps especially people you love — the trip is partly about the relationship. You are negotiating, accommodating, translating experience through a shared lens. This is its own pleasure, and I do not want to dismiss it. But it is a different kind of trip.

Alone, you go where curiosity takes you. You stay in places longer. You eat when you are hungry rather than when the group is. You end up in conversations with strangers that would never happen if you arrived with your social context already intact. The locals at the next table, the man selling newspapers who turns out to have a strong opinion about the best coffee in the city, the woman on the bus who recommends a market that is not in any guidebook you have read — these things happen because you are, visibly, someone with an empty afternoon and no one to fill it for you.

The loneliness, when it comes, is real. But it is also productive in a way that busyness is not. It makes you curious. It makes you reach toward things. The best solo trips I have taken have been the ones where the loneliness was allowed to do its work before it was resolved.

The city I keep coming back to — Kuala Lumpur, approached without a schedule — rewards this kind of open-handed attention more than almost anywhere I have been. Solo travel clarifies something else too: the quality of your own company. The solitude of a long trip abroad is, in structure, not entirely different from the solitude of an early morning before the day gets loud — the same quietness, the same useful turning-inward.