Words by Lola Carron
Edited by Valerie Aitova
Solo travel has been flattened into an aesthetic of sunlit waterfalls and a backpack that’s bigger than you. But the actual experience is less about escape and more about exposure – to new places, yes, but mostly to yourself.
The movement becomes a mirror, reflecting back the parts of you that only surface when nothing familiar is within reach: the sharp flash of panic as you start the Ha Giang Loop without your headphones, or the stubborn pride that refuses to ask for directions even as the sun sets. You realise quickly that travelling alone isn’t a cinematic transformation – it’s the discipline of showing up for yourself each day.
On the Hà Giang Loop, the mountains really do look sculpted. Riding through them feels like stepping into someone else’s dream. But the part you don’t think about is the crash afterwards: the exhaustion that hits the second you stop moving, the instinctive need to lie still and let your brain empty out. Instead, you’re propelled into karaoke, “happy water”, and communal enthusiasm. You go along with it – it’s part of the rhythm, but burnout doesn’t care about itinerary. It arrives bluntly, reminding you that your social battery has limits even when the scenery doesn’t.
And maybe that’s where you start to realise what actually counts as “progress”. It doesn’t always look like pushing yourself to match the energy around you; sometimes it shows up in quieter choices, like stepping a little closer to the edge of a cliff even though heights make you uncomfortable. Not to prove anything, just to avoid letting fear make the decision for you. That Wolf Alice lyric, “to live in fear isn’t to live at all,” plays on a loop in your head as you stand at the cliff side, becoming a gentle reminder that the moments that shape you aren’t always the loud ones. They’re often the ones you could’ve easily stepped away from – the same kind that slowly start stitching themselves into the places you move through.
Because places don’t hit you all at once – they get under your skin slowly.
Chiang Mai becomes familiar from just wandering, Angkor Wat just rises out of the haze, huge and completely unbothered by your reaction. Koh Lanta winds down your evenings with those long, stretched-out sunsets that make time feel weird. Hanoi pulls you into its rhythm before you even realise it – the traffic doesn’t just fill the streets, it pushes the day forward. None of these moments try to be profound. They just stack up quietly until, looking back, you realise they’re the things that stuck.
Connections form the same way – through tiny, almost incidental moments. The couple running your Koh Lanta hostel handing you watermelon for your friends who slept through breakfast. A simple gesture that makes you feel cared for by strangers. Or the two Costa Rican girls you bumped into in Hanoi because all three of you were wandering around looking for the same vintage shop. You ended up thrifting together, huddled over a bin of 90s graphic tees, and merging your shopping plans for the rest of the day. The plans you hoped to make never happened, but it was one of those quick, easy connections that lasts exactly as long as it needs to.
Then there’s the pressure, subtle but present, to perform the version of yourself people at home imagine. The expectation that every day should be remarkable because you’ve flown thousands of miles for it. But the sunlit waterfalls of the travel aesthetic don’t come with an off-switch for your own exhaustion. Wanting a day in bed doesn’t make the trip less meaningful; it just means you’re a person. Eventually, you learn that travel doesn’t overwrite your moods or your limits; it simply relocates them. Resting in Hanoi is still resting. Feeling off in Siem Reap is still feeling off. Your emotional landscape travels with you.
You adjust without realising you’re adjusting.
Sometimes that means ditching an itinerary because the heat is unbearable, or abandoning a whole afternoon because the café you were excited about is shut. Being away from home doesn’t make you a better version of yourself; it just gives you more chances to meet yourself where you actually are.
Not every experience is transcendent – some are just mildly confusing chapters in an otherwise great story.
There’s no grand revelation waiting at the end of the trip. No cinematic transformation or sudden clarity. What you come away with instead is a subtle shift – an understanding that your experience belongs entirely to you.
You can be somewhere extraordinary without feeling extraordinary every second.
You can have an off day and still be in the middle of something worthwhile.
You get up, carry on, and the next day becomes different by default.
No reinvention. No dramatic arc. Just a steady sense of ownership – of your pace, your expectations, and the quiet interiority that follows you from place to place. And maybe that’s what travelling alone really looks like.
