Solo Travel (But Not Really): Finding a Family on the Road
The six of us arrived at Tayrona National Park groggy and simultaneously over- and under-prepared. Ally’s backpack contained two and a half liters of water and three packages of lunchmeat (necessary), but also a bag of rice he’d forgotten to take out that added a kilo of weight (less than necessary); Sean was carrying a single plastic grocery bag full of bread and peanut butter, into which he’d shoved the antibacterial cream for his mosquito-bites-turned-open-wounds, which was basically the only thing keeping him alive at the time. Tim’s backpack had a full baguette sticking out of it that hit him in the head each time he turned (we’d all decided to go to bed the night before, zonked from a day of travel from Cartagena to Santa Marta, instead of stay up and slice the bread ahead of time, so there it remained in its crinkly paper casing, soaking up all of his neck sweat). Some of us had sunscreen, some had bug spray, some had both; no one had any real idea of where the trail began or how we’d get back from it. We had worryingly low levels of cash on us; our only safety or survival instrument was a dull serrated knife double-wrapped in paper towel and banana leaves and then secured with a hairband that we’d swiped from our hostel kitchen that morning in order to be able to slice the aforementioned bread; and we were already sweating.
But we were together, so we’d probably be okay. We’d put our six little heads together and come up with a gameplan to get us home. I got to let my guard down a little, I got to not have all the answers, I got to share the burden of wrangling logistics—this was life in a group of other solo travelers, and it was fairly wonderful. Even when it was terrible.
We had lost Deric—he’d wandered off somewhere to find a taxi driver to ask about getting a ride back to our hostel. We’d all come to accept that Deric is to wandering off as other humans are to breathing, and that he’d find his way back to us eventually, more likely than not with his half-mohawked head bobbing to the beat of a song he’d heard or with a piece of news that he’d be excited to share with all of us, eyes racing from face to face as he watched comprehension spread.
The rest of us, having made it through park registration despite zero of us having the required passport (several of us got by on passport photocopies or on driver’s licenses; Sean had neither but snuck through with a phone photo of his passport and Irish charm), waited for Deric’s reappearance while trying to even out the weight distribution of everyone’s hastily-prepared packs. I tucked bananas into my rain jacket and thought about the bystander effect.
The bystander effect references the fact that we’re less likely to help someone in need if we find ourselves in the presence of other people; 1 that’s not exactly the situation that I found myself in while traveling with a group, but group travel did create a similar effect. That morning, everyone had assumed someone else had a plan, someone else downloaded the offline map, someone else pre-registered our permits.
After five months of completely solo travel, the longest I’d spent with any other solo traveler was two days in Mendoza with my beloved Anne. (My track record is particularly bad—my weird route and pace, wherein I flew across the continent as I avoided visa-demanding Brazil and Bolivia and then also regularly stopped traveling entirely to hunker down in a Workaway for a few weeks, made it especially difficult to find travel buddies on the same route as me, as did my high expectations for my trip and higher expectations for friends—the cool people I did meet weren’t cool enough for me to be willing to hitch my wagon to theirs and abandon my own plans for each country.) When I began traveling in Colombia with a group of people I met in Cali, I wasn’t used to thinking about the needs and desires of five other people, and I began our time as a big group taking on the planning responsibility for everyone—booking hostels, making dinner reservations, leading group trips to the supermarket to stock up on booze and birthday candles for the pregame party I’d planned for one of us. But then I realized that everyone was an adult, all of whom had solo traveled for as long or longer than me, and that they probably didn’t need hand-holding, especially when it came at the cost of slight exasperation on my part. When we got to Santa Marta, I let Chill Kath emerge from the cover of my dominant personality (it helped that I was sick and didn’t much feel like marshaling the troops). And then we ended up having to tack on an additional hour to a two-hour hike in 90% humidity at 85 degrees because no one had figured out that the trailhead started beyond the parking lot, and by the time we realized it and hitched a ride for all six of us on a pickup truck headed for the first campsite, hunched down alongside bags of produce and brand-new still-shiny sleeping bags, we only got to enjoy the ride for the 100 or so yards remaining until the trail started. We climbed down, disgraced but momentarily refreshed by the wind that’d dried our already-copious sweating, and recommitted ourselves to the trek.
As I walked with my head craned upwards, scanning the canopy for families of howler monkeys, I ignored the fact we still didn’t have a way home and instead came up with some of my favorite things about group travel.
You always have someone to go to the pharmacy or the grocery store or the gelato shop with you (especially important in Colombia, where I sometimes didn’t feel particularly safe walking alone). You get to share the burden of coming up with backup plans. You don’t have to choose between asking a stranger to rub you down with sunscreen at the beach or burning to a ruddy crisp in the places you can’t contort your elbow to reach. You get to leave your bag behind in the airport while you dart off for a burger, you get to go to the next hostel without having replenished your empty shampoo bottle because you know you can bum it off someone else for a while, and you get to show up in one of the most popular tourists sites in Colombia with a light wad of pesos, a bottle of water, and absolutely no understanding of the trail routes, knowing your friends won’t let you die.
We got through the three hours at wildly different paces. I found a half-hobble half-gallop that maximized for minimal movement of my right hiking boot against the unprotected, tender skin of my right heel (I didn’t lay out my hiking clothes the night before like I usually do; in the pre-dawn rush to make the 7 a.m. bus we’d booked, I grabbed the first pair of socks I could find, which were not a pair of the reinforced, specially-made Smartwool hiking socks Marta gave me); this allowed me to barely keep up with Mary Grace, whose tiny tanned legs trotted along with an indefatigable ease that would’ve made me want to trip her, if I didn’t like her so much.
Tim, who was striding like a drill sergeant and eating up massive swaths of jungle soil with each step, would pause every 20 minutes or so to give the rest of us mere humans a chance to catch up. Every time I reached his chosen waiting point only to have to set off again, I thought about how unfair it was that all Dutch people are tall and all American people are fat and racist. (A bit of a bummer that the international stereotypes for our country are not as flattering as height, for our friends from the Netherlands, or an ability to hold their liquor, like our friends from Ireland, or timeliness, like our friends from Germany…)
Eventually we arrived at our intended destination: Cabo San Juan.
It was like walking into a screen saver. Palm trees danced in the wind, cerulean waves cycled into the shore, families sprawled out on brightly-colored sarongs and the sun peeked out at regular intervals. It was a palette of tropical bliss, and we staked out our own corner of paradise to colonize for the afternoon.
Tim graciously offered his sarong as a general sitting area / sandwich plating station (as several people had forgotten to bring anything even resembling a towel to the beach) and then proceeded to grimace whenever tomato drippings splattered onto it. We all made sandwiches that matched our personalities: I couldn’t wait patiently for a knife or the avocado or civility, so I stacked sweaty cheese and red-orange chorizo onto the top of a hastily-ripped baguette while keeping mental track of each person’s bread fractions. Tim plowed through his first sandwich savagely but then built a nice once afterwards. Ally painstakingly prepared his sandwich over the course of ten minutes, getting his ideal ratio of avocado:bread right while also pausing his preparations constantly to help out the invalids around him who couldn’t do anything right. Sean took whatever leftovers there were and was happy about it. MG demanded what she wanted and mostly got it, and Deric dozed (on Ally’s towel) for some of the prep but managed to eat just fine in the end.
A few hours of sand and sun and surf zapped us of the already-minimal desire we had to go head back out on the same painstakingly sweaty three-hour trek, so Tim and I set off to look into other options.
We could ride horses back—same route, yes, but maybe the scenery’d look different from a few yards up—to the tune of 40,000 pesos (about $14) each, or we could brave the water and take a boat for just a little bit more money.
Tim and I polled the masses, who all preferred boat over horse (particularly for the extra two beach hours it bought us and the ease of getting home afterward; the boat would hug the coast for the length of the entire park and then drop us in the town just adjacent to our hostel, whereas the horses would have to meander down the east side of the park and leave us at the entrance, from where we’d have to beg, borrow, steal, or hitchhike a way back to town). He and I planned out on a good cop, bad cop routine (Tim was the good cop, of course) to negotiate down boat ticket prices, and a few hours later, we were piling into the least seaworthy vessel I’ve ever set foot in.
The lancha, or small boat, was white with blue speckles all over it, the kind you’d get by flicking the sodden ends of a paintbrush against a canvas. (The kind you don’t make again on purpose after doing it once and seeing how ugly it turns out.) But whoever decorated this boat was a heavy-handed fan of the technique, which at least gave us something to focus on as we tried not to lose our picnic lunch over the sides of the bucking boat.
We had thought that we were being clever by waiting til the last minute to get in so that we could claim seats in the back of the boat. We’d forgotten that we weren’t in a Western country with agreed-upon standards of common courtesy (like filling in the front rows first); when we arrived two minutes before launch time, the only available seats were in the very front. We climbed over the rest of the passengers, strapped on the remaining lifevests (all of which were children’s sizes), and hunkered into the bow. A grisly Colombian man with bowed legs yanked in the anchor, settled it beneath Deric and Tim’s feet, and we were off.
Because of where we were sitting, we felt every crash of the see-sawing waves. Every few waves, we’d get the brunt of the seawater rushing over the sides and into the boat. And “boat” is honestly a generous term for the water-bound (note: I did not say water-proof) pile of wood and rope that ferried us, riding on the crest of the waves at least half the time, to Taganga, but we did eventually get there safely. We crawled out, shook off our sea legs, wrung out our clothing, and found cabs to take us home. And then we collapsed into bean bag chairs and laughed together over that day’s adventures.
A group of otherwise solo travelers is a unique thing. Everyone’s used to being entirely self-sufficient, of providing for their own entertainment and sustenance and shelter and emotional wellbeing. Everyone is, at a minimum, competent, and often interesting, to boot. There are still the little personal idiosyncrasies that can either be wildly endearing or wildly annoying—I certainly don’t like every other solo traveler I meet, yet alone want to spend six straight weeks with all of them—but the middle part of the Venn diagram of me and any other given solo traveler is usually a significant chunk of my values. And when you feel safe and supported in a set of shared values—of appreciating new experiences, staying open-minded to new ways of living, of questioning your understanding of the world—you get to skip a lot of the superficial getting-to-know you and move right into a special kind of bond that lets you feel comfortable sharing personal space and money and problems and dreams and fears and insecurities. And all that sharing lets you explore yourself just as much as you’re exploring the world.
Traveling alone for five months gave me time and space to test out who I am and who I’d like to be. I got to do a lot of reflection on where I get joy, what I’m most proud of, what I need to work on. But until finding a little tribe to travel with for an extended period of time, I didn’t really get to put those reflections to the test.
For example: I know I need to be better at exercising empathy. I don’t always have the easiest time getting out of my own worldview and into someone else’s, but I believe working on my empathy is like studying Spanish—even if I’ll never be a native speaker, I can certainly get competent. Additionally: I don’t trust other people easily. That’s not to say I don’t share secrets or quickly build a rapport; I’ll go four rounds into family history on a first date. But I have a hard time relinquishing control, of trusting that someone else can see something through to completion in a way that I would find quality. It’s a trait that affects me as a manager, as a sister, as a friend. I realized that I could combine those two things I want to work on—empathy and trusting others / giving up control—on a daily basis with this group. Though we share deep-rooted values, the places those values came from–our experience with the world, our backgrounds re: socioeconomics, religion, country of origin, race, family structure, gender, language ability, political affiliation, romantic history, et cetera—are all different. And those differences play out in a million ways every day: how comfortable different people feel dropping a bunch of money on an AirBnB, how safe we feel in a particular neighborhood, what kind of cultural experiences we feel comfortable participating in.
So every decision I got to make, no matter how small (what we were eating, where we were staying, whether to bring up an article I’d just read on repercussions of the #MeToo movement), I tried to think through it from the perspective of the mini-United Nations (okay, European Union + North America) that I was constantly surrounded by. Where would my preferences be different from those I was choosing for, and how would my choice look from that perspective?
It just so happened that thinking purposefully about the experiences and motivations of my friends made it easier to let go and trust them when it was their turn to make a decision. I could either imagine how it’d differ from mine, based on what I knew about them, and get comfortable with the gap in final result ahead of time, or I could come around to see why their idea, formed from a different mind and a different point of view than mine, was actually better than the way I would’ve done it.
Maybe it sounds trite, all written out like this, reading personal growth into logistics decisions. But it was so meaningful to me. The more comfortable I got with these people, the more I got to explore the multitudes that I contain, the more I trusted them, the more I tried on different versions of myself—Chill Kath, as mentioned above, less-judgy Kath, more-outgoing Kath. Occasionally, I over-flucuated (for instance: stayed way too chill for way too long and ended up losing a ton of belongings over a one-week period—goodbye, flowy plane pants, goodbye, two (!) black long-sleeve shirts, goodbye, left Teva flip-flop, goodbye, favorite sports bra—because I was haphazardly packing at the last possible moment over and over again) (one more: I over-corrected the week after, in Palomino, and felt myself wanting to control every moment of everyone’s day and getting frustrated when people didn’t do exactly as I wanted; I first figured I just needed to get away from everyone and get back on the road by myself, but then I realized you can’t just run away from relationships when the other person annoys you and that riding it out, and reflecting on who you are in those moments, is actually really valuable). But overall, I plumbed the depths of truths I already knew about myself (how much I love meeting new people, how high of standards I believe in holding for the people in my life, how much I appreciate good communication) and worked on new ways of accepting and improving corresponding weaknesses.
The chemistry of a group is a delicate thing. You need some of every type. You need a contingent of by and large positive, go-along-to-get-along kind-hearted souls who everyone enjoys spending time with—we had Sean and Deric. You need vivacious lives of the party, people whose enthusiasm is infectious and whose orbit is magnetic—we had Tash (and maybe me, every five days or so). You need logical, calm problem-solvers who cut through decisions to maximize enjoyment—we had me and Tim. You need flexers, people who can settle into any personality type to round out a situation, who are easygoing and fun and thoughtful—we had MG and Ally. But in the end, what you really need is people who accept the others for who they are, who are comfortable moving the expectations around and taking on roles that might not be as natural to them to give everyone a break from being themselves.
Because after that initial coming together, once the group chemistry has been sorted out—once the covalent bonds have been made or the reaction has reached completion (I don’t like chemistry enough to make this metaphor scientifically accurate)—you have to be ready to jumble it all up again and reassume different roles, because group-solo travel is far from a steady state (from a stable isotope? Is that a thing?). People come in and out like air cycling through a lung, bringing in energy while they’re there, and not being irreplaceable when they’re not (there’s always another gulp of air to take in—there’s always another new person to adopt).
I wrote this piece as a bit of a love letter to friendships on the road. To the dichotomy of loving them for every second that they last and letting them go without a moment of hesitation when it’s time for them to come to a close. To the feeling of getting to be tethered to the world for a few days or a few weeks (or in this case, for a month and a half) by something other than a passport and a backpack and a body, or rather, in addition to those things—by a new family. To the moments of finding a unique brand of freedom on the road to be yourself and to better yourself and to let your guard down in the process.
As I wrote this, as I remembered the lyrical moments and put personalities on paper, I thought again about writing a screenplay (I had the same idea re: Bariloche adventures). A dozen scenes flash through my head: Ally matching with a Colombian on Tinder and getting excited to go on out with her, only to have her come out as a prostitute before their first date; me, Tim, and Sean huddled under a blanket on a couch in Solento, watching Spanish movies on the laptop balanced on my shinbones and eating popcorn while a 200-pound St. Bernard slabbered on the stone floor beneath us; Ally falling asleep at 3 a.m. on a bench outside our dorm in Cali clutching a guava-and-cheese pastry in his hand; Tim leading the way across a rickety, half-rotted bridge in the Valle Cocora while continuing to tell me and Sean about a recent sexual exploit, shouting the details over his shoulder over the sound of the rushing river beneath us; MG and I scouring the wooden baskets of vegetables in tiny open-air Palomino tiendas to find the most amount of dinner ingredients for the least amount of money, since once again, we were out of cash in an ATM-less vicinity—we ended up spending $2.50 on a veggie stir-fry that fed six; Deric venturing out on the back of a teetering motorbike from said ATM-less town with all of our debit cards and PINs, only to not be able to reach the ATM because it was being guarded by the police and his motorbike driver was apparently a wanted man; me teaching everyone Michigan drinking games on a concrete ping-pong table behind our rented villa and sweating so much (enthusiasm + a Caribbean night will do that to you) that we needed midnight ocean dips; Michelle having to pick up a group of American businessmen at the airport with drugs and hookers in tow; Tash and I befriending a birthday-celebrating group of Colombian gays and ingratiating ourselves into their group with our dance moves; Sean following a thief for two hours around Cartagena in the middle of the night and finally getting back his stolen wallet. There’d be a great scene of eight of us (the group had metabolized a few extra at the time) zipping around Cartagena on scooters—the ponies of the motorized-vehicle world: small and simple and obedient, not too sexy but definitely fun—and off-roading onto the ash-grey beaches of Bocagrande, drifting into U-ies and going the wrong way down one-way streets, accidentally losing Deric and Ally and coasting to a stop to wait for them in front of a 16th-century castle (imagine the shot: us, in crisp, modern hues [I’m wearing a blue-and-purple paisley dress, Tash is in green-blue-yellow zebra-stripe pants; they boys are all in matching light-wash jean shorts] and our candy-colored scooters bright against the crumbling beige stone), drag-racing along the main thoroughfare and blaring reggeaton from a handheld speaker, begging a police officer to let us charge the battery of a dead scooter in the police station and suffering a translation mistake that led him to think we had a bomb, rolling our scooters back to the rental office, sweaty and dirty and tired and happy happy happy, and finally clinking beers in the air-conditioned laundry place as we waited to pick up freshly cleaned bundles of our sole worldly possessions.
But then in thinking about my friends as characters and our antics as scenes, I ask myself: what would the plot line be? Why would these people be together in this time and this space? What would they be journeying towards? Should I put them on their way to a wedding, could they be on the lam from the law? Maybe they’re a rag-tam team come together to search for a rare jungle cure (Sean, what with his oozing wounds for most of our acquaintance, would be cast as the invalid; maybe I’d have to kill him off to give the script some gravitas)? I realized: in real life, we don’t recognize traveling for traveling’s sake as an integral part of the human experience. It’s not one of our ingrained heuristics for understanding characters’ motivations. We don’t see, as a society, traveling as a reasonable thing on its own; we get traveling as running away, or as a way to get from point A to point B, but traveling for the sake of the journey? For the sake of the open-ended exploration? Not yet a thing for all of us. But a thing for me, and a thing I love and appreciate, and a thing that was made so meaningful over these last six weeks by this rag-tag crew of mine.