The way to see the world, I’m convinced, is alone. As a solo traveler, you can absorb new surroundings according to your own whims, at your own pace, without the distraction of constant companionship.
But this mode of travel sometimes gets lonely. Luckily, I have found other, like-minded travelers nearly every time I’ve begun to tire of solitude. This is one of the benefits of traveling on a shoestring: The transportation you most often use and the places you most often go–trains, buses, hostels and public markets–are also where you most easily meet other travelers.
Whenever I leave on a journey, I leave alone, but I always look forward to chance encounters with fellow wayfarers. Such meetings have resulted in unforgettable opportunities I would have missed had I not been traveling alone.
In the fall of 1991, for example, I met Chris Pouncey, from Amherst, Mass., in a seedy hostel in Barcelona, Spain. Chris and I had come to Barcelona with vague ideas of teaching English and wheedling our ways into the 1992 Summer Olympics. But jobs were scarce, our determination was tepid and soon, we were both down to our last peseta. Chris decided we could wash windshields to survive. I was game, so we bought a squeegee and a sponge and hit the streets.
Our parents would have been appalled, which, of course, made darting around traffic in downtown Barcelona a bit more enjoyable. Whenever traffic stalled at a red light, Chris threw himself across a likely car and sponged furiously. I followed with the squeegee. Sometimes a driver, less than enthusiastic about our sudden appearance, banged the windows or screamed obscenities.
Chris would lean over the windshield, wag a finger and say, “Momentito, senor, momentito.”
Often, the driver was so flabbergasted that we could finish our work and then ask for a handout–which we usually got. For a few weeks, until the exhaust fumes became intolerable, we each made the equivalent of $10 per hour.
A few months later, after I’d given up on staying in Barcelona for the Olympics, I traveled to Morocco. Near the main square in Marrakech, in the tiny, $5-per-night Hotel Medina, I met Australian Anthony Body, who invited me to travel with him over the High Atlas Mountains to the edge of the Saraha.
“You’ll enjoy it. Besides, I need you because you’ve got a better guidebook than I do,” he said with a huge, lopsided grin on his thin face.
It was his grin, actually, that made our journey together into the Draa Valley memorable. The Moroccans were taken with Anthony’s smile, towering height and shambling gait. We were invited to dinner several times. Once, in a mud hut in an oasis, Anthony and I were fed royally by our host, a soldier in the Moroccan army, and his three wives. It is unlikely I would have had such an adventure if I’d been on my own.
A year later, I ran into Anthony in London. He took me straightaway to one of his most cherished finds, a restaurant near Waterloo station. Its every surface was covered with porcelain tiles “like an enormous loo,” Anthony said. There, I was treated to my first traditional, British working-class meal of pie (meat pastry), mash (mashed potatoes) and pickled eels. Revolting but unforgettable.
The following summer, in Central America, I met many travelers who still stick in my mind. On the island of Utila off the coast of Honduras, I met a trio of Irish women who had come to Utila, like I had, to learn how to scuba dive.
At the end of our diving course, they invited me to join them and a few other travelers on Water Cay (pronounced “key”), one of 13 tiny, sandy islets dotting the shallow waters off Utila. We hired a boat, bought some provisions (including a pile of lobster, shark and barracuda) and motored to the cay’s, which was about 200 yards long and 30 yards wide. We each paid a dollar to the cay’s caretaker then set up camp, slinging hammocks between coconut palms shading the caye like a Moorish hall of columns.
It felt like “Gilligan’s Island,” except none of us had any desire to leave. That afternoon, we boiled the lobsters and wrapped chunks of barracuda and shark in banana leaves, cooking them under the coals of a coconut husk fire. All evening we feasted and drank rum, and long after midnight took blind, splashing swims. When we finally collapsed into our hammocks, our only concern was whether the gusty winds that had begun blowing at nightfall would loosen the coconuts above our heads.
Wandering the world on a skimpy budget, sooner or later you meet other shoestring travelers. Invariably, such travelers are good-humored and adventurous. When you’ve been traveling alone for a while, and are feeling a little road-weary, there’s no better kind of person to befriend.
