Why I Travel Solo?

As a motorcycling enthusiast, there is a certain kind of conversation that I have had more times than I can remember. It usually starts very normally. I tell someone where I’ve been recently and how great the trip was. Sometimes its somewhere in the mountains, other times its a town hundreds of kilometres away that I had wanted to see for a long time. Then, as the conversation progresses, they realise that I didn’t fly there, or take a train or even a road-trip in a car. Their worldview takes a hit for a moment. They struggle to understand what would compel someone to travel such a long distance on two wheels when far more comfortable and practical options exist. There is usually a brief pause as that realization sinks in, followed by the inevitable disbelief:

“You went all the way there… on a bike?”

That pause and the question tells me almost everything I need to know. In those few seconds, I realise just how differently we see the world and perhaps, more importantly, how differently we understand what it means to truly experience it.

For many people, travelling far means planning everything in advance. They need a fixed itinerary, a group for mental and physical support and a guide in case anything goes wrong. For them the hotels must already be booked, every stop must be carefully planned, the route must be fixed with little room for deviation and every morning’s departure time must be decided well in advance. For them, there is comfort in knowing exactly what comes next. There is safety in having someone else hold the answers when things don’t go according to plan. For these “travellers” its all about the photos, Instagram posts and engagement. They travel for beautiful photos and perfectly edited videos. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Many of them are good at what they do and create incredible content. Others simply enjoy capturing moments they can return to years later.

But sometimes, I wonder whether they are travelling to experience a place, or simply to prove that they were there. For me, their “travel & adventure” thus reduces to nothing more than a few likes and shares. And I have deeply personal reasons for believing this. A perfectly captured photograph can show us standing beside a mountain or a lake. A carefully timed candid can even capture us in our supposedly “candid” state.

A photograph can preserve the visage of the mountain, but its our presence on that mountain that carries a sense of the biting cold that came with being there. The camera freezes the serene waters of the beach in a frame, but not the strange sense of peace we felt as we sat there watching the world slow down around us. And our gallery may not even remember the genuinely candid conversation with a stranger at a roadside tea stall, that went on for so long that, by the time we left, we knew pieces of each other’s lives but had somehow forgotten to even ask each other’s names.

And for someone going through it all on a motorcycle the camera, misses out on a lot. It almost never captures the moment when the road disappeared into a fog and you had no idea whether you should continue. It never captures the exhaustion of riding for hours on end, the anxiety of watching the fuel gauge fall to almost zero in the middle of nowhere, or that relief when a tiny roadside shop finally appears around a bend. For all that is worth, these are the moments I truly remember.

Travel itself is a luxury. It demands money, time, a healthy body and, perhaps more importantly, a healthy mind. To be able to leave the routines and responsibilities of everyday life behind, even briefly, and experience a world beyond our own is a privilege in itself. There is nothing wrong with celebrating that privilege or with wanting to carry a few memories of it back home. But, if capturing the photograph becomes more important than living in the moment and the journey itself becomes secondary then I think, travel begins to lose the very charm that made us leave home in the first place.

For me travelling isn’t just about the place I am visiting. It is as much about the journey and the experiences along the way as it is about the destination itself. And when I finally arrive, it is about experiencing the place for what it truly is, its people, its rhythm, its character and its spirit. I travel for the experiences and sometimes for earning those experiences we have to surrender the safety of knowing exactly what is exactly going to happens next.

When we travel with a tour group, there are invisible walls around us. Someone has already decided where we will go and how long we will stay and what is worth seeing. We may travel thousands of kilometres and still remain inside a carefully constructed bubble. For people who love this preciseness, this is exactly what they need. If one is older, travelling with family, physically constrained, or simply looking for comfort, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But when we are young, as I am for now, I think we should occasionally allow the road to make us uncomfortable. Being outside of our comfort zone builds character. When everything is planned for you, there is very little left for you to figure out. But when we are by ourself and the plan starts falling apart and there is nobody around to make the important decisions for us, we are forced to rely on your own judgement. Through this uncertainty and discomfort we learn to stay calm when things go wrong. We also learn to make decisions without knowing whether they are the right ones.

When we go through this cycle of losing our way and finding it again often enough, we start trusting our own judgement a little more, and our instincts slowly become the guide we instinctively turn to when there is no one else around to show us the way.

There is a deeper parallel with life here. Through all the hardships we learn to navigate seemingly difficult situations with calm and composure. We realize that we don’t always need someone to guide us through every step. Over time, we learn to trust our own judgement, make the best decision we can with what we know, and, perhaps most importantly, keep moving forward even when we are not entirely sure where that decision will lead us.

But hey, that’s life!!!

Of course, I also understand that travelling alone doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

So why not start with someone. Travel with a friend or with two people from your book club. Spend days together in cramped rooms, on terrible roads, all hungry, exhausted and irritated. There is a good chance that during that trip you will look at your travel partners and come to think “Next time, I’m going alone. I cant be bothered with all this hassle”. Someone wants to wake up at five in the morning and ride till sunset but someone else might want to sleep until ten and stop every 50 kilometers. I think that this is an important stage of learning how to travel alone. You come to realize that riding alone gives you the freedom that each one of us so dearly crave. Riding with others takes that away. We have to match each others wavelengths and plan together and the group becomes more important than the individual. Do enough uncomfortable journeys like that and eventually you just stop wanting someone else to come with you.

Many people think that travelling alone makes you lonely. But its actually quite the opposite. When we are standing somewhere completely unfamiliar, surrounded by people whose lives are entirely different from ours, even ordinary things become fascinating. We start to notice things because there is nobody beside us to distract us from them. And when there is no familiar person beside us to share those observations with, our curiosity naturally begins to turn outward. The people around us stop feeling like strangers in the background and start becoming part of the place we are trying to understand. The conversation begins with a smile or perhaps asking for directions and before we realise it, we are talking to strangers. And because there is no guide or group waiting for us to move on to the next stop, we can afford to linger a little longer. There is no itinerary pulling us away and no clock that belongs to someone else. We ask them about their stories and lives and find ourselves becoming a more happier and more curious version of ourselves in these conversations. The newness of the place and the people make us a little more inviting and humble. We smile a little more and listen a little closely. To them, we are also the stranger. They also want to know where we came from, why we are travelling so far, why we’re riding that motorcycle there of all places. A brief exchange turns into a great conversation and we end up with a new friend in an unfamiliar place.

And this is travelling to me. Its more about collecting pieces of people and leaving tiny pieces of ourselves behind.

But there is another side of solo travel that isn’t nearly as romantic. Things, can and generally do go wrong. Its murphy’s law in action. You miss a turn or the weather changes without any warning or the motorcycle develops a problem in the middle of nowhere or you reach a town long after sunset, and just when you need your phone the most, those little network bars disappear. Everything that can go wrong probably does. Suddenly our world becomes very small. The thrill of the ride give way to exhaustion and panic. There is no tour operator to call and no guide automatically responsible for figuring out what happens next.

The million dollar question then is “What do I do now?”

Make the right decision and you move forward. Make the wrong one and, well, you still have to move forward just with another problem to solve first. The first few times this happens, we question our sanity “What in the world possessed us to do this?” But go through this enough times and problems do not become emergencies anymore and we start seeing these “terrible” situations in a new light. A wrong turn just becomes a detour and a bad hotel is just a place to sleep before we are on the road again. Just because things go wrong, doesn’t mean the ride and the adventure was bad. Instead everything that happened make it all the more worthwhile to remember.

Lets play a little game. Try remembering an ordinary trip from a few years ago. One where everything went buttery smooth and nothing demanded much attention from you. Chances are that the memory of that experience has already begun to blur. You know you went, you know you had a good time, perhaps a few images still remain but much of it has dissolved into the years between then and now. Now try remembering a journey where something went terribly wrong. I am a sure that you will be a lot more confident in your abilities to recall that journey much more clearly. You probably remember the moment when you realized you were in trouble with crystal like clarity. That moment was never etched in the frames of your camera, but your mind made sure that this memory is what made that trip memorable and despite no evidence of it in the gallery of your phone or Instagram posts you remember it vividly. Now you look back at the situation and laugh, The fear has softened and frustration of the day just makes the retelling more funny. What once felt like a terrible day on the road becomes an anecdote we find ourselves telling again and again at parties years later.

Yes, the polished Instagram tours are often easier and involve a lot less hassle. Just pay the tour fee and viola nothing else to worry about. Everything is arranged and the decisions have been made for us. Its all about the posts, likes, shares and aesthetics. The price we pay for the comfort a tour, however, often takes away the feeling that makes an adventure truly like an adventure. We pay for comfort and give away the uncertainty. But uncertainty is where many of the best stories begin. Travel enough and we eventually become surprisingly good at doing it cheaply and comfortably (just about as comfortable as an adventure can be). We learn which comforts actually matter and which ones we can live without. We stop needing everything to be perfect.

I also genuinely believe that travelling teaches communication in a way no b-school classroom ever can. While travelling even an introvert eventually learns to walk up to a stranger and ask a question or share a meal and somehow have a twenty minute conversation despite barely sharing a language.

Everyone begins travelling for a reason, although I don’t think we always understand that reason ourselves when we first leave home. For some, it begins with a simple curiosity about what exists beyond the places they have always known. For others, travelling becomes an escape and a chance to escape the monotny of everyday life. Some begin because they want photographs and stories to bring back home. And yes, some begin because being somewhere beautiful, distant or difficult to reach just feels like a good achievement.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with any of those reasons. What fascinates me is how rarely we acknowledge how deeply travelling changes us. The influencer ocassionally stops clicking every little interaction on the road, and the introvert starts opening up more easily to strangers.

And enough time on the road changes your relationship with travel itself. The discomfort, uncertainty, fleeting friendships, moments of fear and mornings so beautiful that they seem to justify every difficult kilometre begin to settle into us. What once felt unfamiliar becomes natural and what once demanded courage becomes something we instinctively crave. Eventually, travelling is no longer an activity we occasionally return to. It becomes a part of how we understand ourself and the world around us.

Maybe that is what being a “Banjaara” really means. And perhaps that is why I ride a motorcycle to places far away. It is not the easiest way to travel, nor is the safest. It most certainly isnt very cofortable either. I do it because every time I step onto the road, every kilometer I cover is a new adventure and a new story waiting to happen. And it is in these stories that I feel most alive.