Traveling alone is anything but lonely

In 2016, the average girl isn’t afraid to travel solo any longer. It’s been a few years, now, since travel bloggers like Adventurous Kate took the world by storm, writing their stories for those with access to the internet and an eye for the adventurous. Now, with cheap train tickets and cheaper SIM cards, women and girls the world over can travel feeling safe, secure, and confidant.

In 2016, your average female traveler might look like Sheeri, who calls the Westphalia area of Germany her home. Her family were refugees from Surinam; she has spent her whole life in Europe. She is beautiful in a white dress and a backpack that she brought back from a day on the beach on her shoulders. She speaks to us in English, describing words with hand gestures when she forgets some specific words.

The female traveler may look like Minnie, from Japan, who has spoken English in school since she was three, and thus can get around. Tiny Japan is far and closed, she says, but she loves it anyway. She also loves Barcelona, where she smoked her first joint and cigarette ever all in a day’s work. She keeps applying her chapstick and tells us that, in Japan, they like to eat American fast food – just in much smaller portions. She is a Zumba instructor, and we both love the sauce on the onion wings we’re eating.

The female traveler might look like me: 21 and from New York, getting around on mostly English and horrible attempts at Spanish pronunciation from my guidebook. Me, who is paying for her rent for the first time on this trip tonight, as I write this (holla!). Me, who studies literature and writing and hopes to make something of it. Me, girl with a family far from NYC but closer to Europe and with nothing but a backpack on my shoulders along for the ride.

Minnie and I meet on the train; Sheeri strikes up a conversation with us at the bar as she lights her hand rolled cigarette. We get to talking; what do we study? What do we like? What do we come from? Where?

The first ‘where’ is the best intro. We all met each other while wearing bulging backpacks, after all. We discuss Barcelona, and Andalusia, and Valencia and Spain; a country we all want to see more of, a language we all want to speak. All of us are educated, all of us can afford to travel on our savings, or through friends. All of us are presumably white, but really just different, with different histories and hometowns and storytelling to match.

After a bit, we are talking about the refugee crisis (did you know Japan is slowly opening its borders?). We all remark on that horrible buffoon Donald Trump. We talk about morality and society and the hippies in Granada, Spain, where we are at the moment, the hippies who scavenge for food and make something for themselves, something different than that of the lives of the republic.

Minnie takes a photo for her Instagram. I take my shoes off and walk the knotty cobblestone to the statue nearby. When I’m back, as we sit over the river, we think out loud to each other. Look how we’ve met! We are people from so many different places in the world, strangers who are talking immediately as old friends.

To be a girl traveler in 2016 is to take yourself and your backpack boldly forward, into cities and towns where no one will know your name. In 2016, traveling like this is safer than ever, though you will be catcalled if it’s hot outside and you wear a low cut shirt. More than anything else, traveling as a woman today is entrance into a community of girls of the world, smart women who can tell you things about the world as you may not know it.

Grab a backpack and vamanos. The world is waiting, and girls who travel solo are the next ones to take it.