An Introvert Wonders: Solitary Versus Solo
From an introvert point of view, is solo travel a form of solitude?
In the March/April 2024 issue of Outside magazine, Tim Neville describes his harrowing four-day retreat alone in a completely dark Oregon cave. His sojourn involved not a smidgeon of light and no cellphone or music, but he had a bed, a bathroom he could feel his way toward, containers of prepared food and a host who checked in on him for a few minutes every evening to make sure he was okay.
In the relentless dark, vivid hallucinations, time distortions and wacky sensory experiences assailed him, as if he’d eaten magic mushrooms. After he re-emerged into society and sunlight, a Zen equanimity lingered. “I’m more tranquil,” he wrote afterwards, “totally happy to sit alone without the urge to check my phone.”
To me, Neville’s retreat exemplifies solitude – and its perils and promise. Solitude means being alone and apart, as with Beryl Markham when she flew by herself from England to North America in 1936, untold Christian or Buddhist hermits, or Admiral Bichard Byrd’s five-month ordeal alone at an Antarctic weather station.
Can Solo Travel in Cities Be “Alone” or “Solitary”?
So when I came across the book Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude by Stephanie Rosenbloom, I was curious and skeptical. It’s a low-key travel narrative of solo trips to Paris, Istanbul and Florence, along with stay-at-home explorations in the author’s home base of New York City. Even before I dipped into the book, I wondered: Is it fair to call traveling within cities on one’s own “being alone”? Does exploring a city without a companion reasonably count as “solitude”?
Some people who travel solo do so in a way that’s clearly not alone in any sense of the word. I think of Andrew Zimmern, star of the TV show “Delicious Destinations.” On camera he often sits down to a dazzling array of plated foods by himself but then offers tastes to friendly strangers near his table. It’s his personality and his pleasure to reach out to people he doesn’t know wherever he is. I think also of ultra-extrovert Benny Lewis, who advocates practicing languages abroad by blundering into non-stop conversations with native speakers while knowing very little vocabulary or grammar of the local lingo.
In Alone Time, however, Stephanie Rosenbloom comes across as an introvert. The travel experiences she recounts consist mainly of her observing interesting places and scenes. She describes very few conversations at all, and no raucous drinking sessions in convivial bars. The two episodes I liked best were where she ventures cluelessly into a hamam (a communal bathhouse) in Istanbul and where she discovers a series of artistically altered street signs in Florence.
Back to My Questions
In the travels she described, Rosenbloom focused on getting to know the architecture, setting, ambiance, rhythms and special features of the places she visited – not the cities’ people. Alone Time has a contemplative tone. I finished the book not at all convinced, however, either that traveling solo was an essential element in what she observed or that while touring those cities she experienced solitude.
Had Rosenbloom traveled with a quiet companion who shared her interests, I believe she could have discovered and felt much the same as what she reported. And it’s still very hard for me to agree that someone visiting cities populated by millions, who was literally alone only in her hotel room or for mere minutes at a time while out and about, can tell the reader much about solitude.
Solo travel, while rising modestly in popularity, is distinctly a fringe phenomenon. According to the Association of British Travel Agents, around 16 percent of leisure travelers in 2023 vacationed solo. A December 2023 report from Gitnux, a market research company, estimated the worldwide proportion of solo leisure travelers at 11 percent. Contrary to the assumptions in Rosenbloom’s book, a majority of the solo travelers in the Gitnux survey stated that they traveled alone precisely in order to meet people! Indeed, the Internet overflows with tips for this: stay at a hostel, eat meals at a restaurant’s bar, sign up for a half-day walking tour, etc.
As for solitude, let’s reserve it for situations with very little or no presence of other humans, such as deep in the woods, lost in a desert or locked away by oneself.
Marcia, I’ve never before out-and-out disagreed with your essays, but here’s a first time, based on my experience as a sample set of one. I’ve done more solo travel than most, first from my work as a young construction worker building offshore oil platforms in distant waters in the mid-1970s. I’ll always be glad I had the experience, not only in working with men from other countries, but in seeing the ports and other destinations closest to my work— Malaysian Borneo, Singapore, Jakarta, Bahrain, and of course seaside towns in England, Scotland, Netherlands, and Norway. I enjoyed most of them mostly for their difference from Texas.
But really, the worst times were when i was essentially ordered to take time off. I’d go to places I really wanted to see— Hong Kong, Penang, Beirut, Paris. But I was alone in that desire, and when I’d get there I did like Ms. Rosenbloom did— go out and see things, then go back to my hotel room and eat room service or get things from a grocery store or market. My shyness, introversion, or both, overcame whatever desire I might have had to meet anyone. When I look back at that time, it makes me sad for missing out of the adventures I may have had. But I was usually surrounded by people when I left my room. Just as in school and college, I was alone amongst the people I was forced to share space and experience with.
The first definition of “solitude” in my dictionary is “the quality or state of being alone or remote from society.” That, I believe, encompasses both the actual quantity or lack thereof of other people, and the “quality of being…remote from society.”
Well, got that off my metaphorical chest.