Stranger in a Strange Land
As I come to the end of “The Sea & She” adventure (currently in Dar es Salaam preparing to fly to Dubai, and then home to Boston) I wanted to reflect on my first experience traveling internationally alone and offer whatever passes as words of whatever-you-need-them-to-be for those who may do the same. First, a little about me and my life as a traveler.
One of our haenyeo instructors took this picture of me on Jeju. I so appreciate it because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel about both the ocean and solitude: powerful yet utterly serene.
Traveling, both within my home country and internationally, has always been a significant part of my life. I owe this to my parents, both for my father’s career as an airline pilot and for my mother’s upbringing in the Alaska bush, instilling in her both a different flavor of aviation and an avid sense of adventure. When I was growing up, we traveled very frequently, and mostly on airline employee passes as a tier below standby passengers. This meant that we were never guaranteed to get on a flight or even arrive where exactly we intended to go, and often meant sleeping in airports, sprinting across terminals to try for a different flight that had open seats, never checking bags ever, and always dressing your best, in hopes of impressing the gate agents with spotless decorum. Anyone who flies regularly has experienced the stress of a delayed or cancelled flight, or traveling standby, or similar, to be sure. But employee family flying as a lifestyle is one of those things you have to experience to fully understand.
As you might imagine, such a life nurtured several skills and/or character traits in me and my brother (now an airline pilot himself), and over the years, I have become increasingly grateful for the effect this form of traveling had on my development. I most certainly wouldn’t have agreed in my formative years; we would have traded part of our young souls for actual full-fare tickets of our very own! One might think that airline pilot children who spent their youth bouncing around on free flights would feel entitled or take travel for granted. But this couldn’t be further from the truth, at least for my family and other “pilot kids” I know well. When you watch family after family waltz onto a flight to Disney World in front of you, you’ve been awake for 28 hours watching seats get filled with standbys on 5 other flights you didn’t get on and would gladly give a kidney just to get the last seat on a redeye to Newark, “entitled” is the last thing you feel. “Indignation” might make the list. You’re just a kid, after all.
Me with my dad at our air park home next to our Taylorcraft L-2, circa 1985.
What we learned: Patience. Flexibility. A capacity to entertain yourself. People-watching skills. Fortitude when your sleeping arrangements are sub-ideal. Ability to demonstrate gratitude across cultural lines. You sometimes end up staying with your dad’s pilot friends in new places, or per their recommendations, take an off-the-beaten-path approach to a location otherwise mainstreamed with only a tourist-eye view. Really, these are solid life skills for anyone, not just travelers. And I am certainly not going to sit here and preach them as if I successfully model these abilities all of the time; I definitely struggle with them on any given day, as we all do. But I will say that thanks to my parents and the highly unique version of traveling they raised me with, when I find myself in any kind of challenge, especially as a traveler, I feel these skills pop into gear, and a calm confidence comes over me.
That calm confidence couldn’t be better exemplified than in my parents. On their 2016 Vintage Air Rally Crete-2-Cape adventure, in which they, along with my brother, joined an international roster of about 40 pilots in flying insanely cool old biplanes from the island of Crete to Cape Town, South Africa, over a few weeks, all of these skills were put to the test in spades. The fleet was detained in Gambela, Ethiopia, for two days in an old airport terminal, their tech confiscated, due to a problem with their landing permissions. Multiple governments had to negotiate their release. My parents, no strangers to aviation kerfuffles or to related uncertainty, were the voices of reassurance and optimism for other members of the group who were, understandably, anxious and uncomfortable. They engaged everyone in games, storytelling, and took it on themselves to liven the spirits of their fellow aviators when there was no clear sense of what would happen to them next. For this, they received the “Spirit of the Rally” award at the conclusion of the event, which did indeed conclude safely in Cape Town later that month. I am so proud of them, and not the least bit surprised.
My parents next to the vintage wood-frame biplane the flew in the rally, a 1928 Travelair 4000. Incidentally, in this aircraft’s records, it was once confiscated by the US government during prohibition for transporting liquor. Badass.
My feeling about travel, especially during travel, deepens in awe every time I experience it. If at any time I took it for granted, I feel that I do so less and less with each adventure. I watch those around me at the airport and am absolutely bewildered at the fact that humans from across the planet can be here, at the same time, each of us a multitude of stories, seemingly endless lifetimes passing through this place (and a terrifying diversity of microorganisms, but that’s for another blog post). I watch families interact and wonder how their upbringings differ from mine, and what we have in common. I watch someone with a religious symbol on their jewelry and wonder what their path to their beliefs looked like. I watch someone intently focused on their laptop, working, and wonder what skill set they have that I’ve never heard of. I watch someone zoned out and wonder what nonsense song is stuck in their head, along with a breakdown of how the study of orca cognition is really damn cool, and we might be on the verge of a breakthrough (or maybe that’s just me).
And airplanes! If anyone should take airplanes for granted, it’s this girl. We lived on an air park when I was a little kid, and when we moved off of it, I didn’t initially understand that there were houses and neighborhoods that didn’t have hangars for their airplanes, just like you have garages for your cars. I should be extremely unaffected when I see airplanes in the sky. I fly them too. And yet! Every time I see an aircraft in the sky, I think “holy SHIT, we upright-walking apes made FLYING MACHINES that move hundreds of miles an hour, miles high in the sky, with hundreds of people inside. INCREDIBLE!” Don’t even get me started on space stuff.
However I change with age, I so very much hope that my awe continues to increase, like this. To a silly extreme, if necessary. I want to get excited about cardboard boxes when I’m 90.
Back to the topic at hand.
Up to this point in my life, I have been all over the United States (to all 50 of them, in fact, plus Puerto Rico and the USVI), Canada, much of Central America, some of South America, all over the Caribbean, the UK, New Zealand, Fiji, many countries in Europe…I know I am painting broad strokes here when I generalize “Europe”, but you get the picture. All to say that this “Sea & She” trip hit some major milestones for me. Prior to this, I had never been to either Asia or Africa. Had never set foot in the Indian Ocean. I will now have circumnavigated the globe. And I will have traveled alone internationally for the first time, and not for an insignificant duration or set of logistical circumstances.
Traveling solo certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. I’ll start with the downsides that I personally experienced:
Getting sunscreen on the hard-to-reach parts of your back (give up and wear a sun shirt, says I).
Tours that book a minimum of 2 people (you can accept that you’ll pay for 2, the solo traveler tax that shouldn’t exist but does)
Merchants and vendors are more persistent, especially if you’re female (and Maasai who won’t stop offering you a security detail)
Getting locked in a bathroom stall at the Arusha airport with no travel buddy to help break you out and nearly missing your flight (true story, this one was this morning).
It is easier to travel solo in some cultures than others. In my case, solo travel in South Korea was far more common than it was in Tanzania, for example, and so I encountered fewer barriers to my operations. While on Zanzibar, there was persistent infrastructure in activities and meals all designed for couples or families, which is common in high tourist locations. Something I am very grateful for finding was Nomad Her, an app designed for solo female travelers to connect. Nomad Her puts on the Haenyeo Camp on Jeju and organizes a variety of other activities for solo women travelers all over the world. It is a fantastic way for solo women to get together for day trips and provides an element of safety in checking in with someone. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re a woman and looking to travel solo.
Our intrepid Nomad Her haenyeo camp leader, Soyoung (in the t-shirt) with the group of us solo female travelers and haenyeo wannabes. We now call ourselves sea sisters = “seasters”.
My upsides of traveling solo get more personal.
While I also have and do deeply enjoy traveling with friends and family (truly, no offense, my loves), in embarking on this trip, I was insanely excited for the alone time in my own head. I am quite independent by nature and sincerely enjoy a kind of solitude that solo travel provides. This version of myself that I came to discover in my solitude while on this trip was quite intriguing. Apparently, I power walk everywhere, all day. My eating habits are extremely erratic. My sense of humor is somewhat mercurial at worst, but mostly hilariously feral. I go towards whatever piques my curiosity and never stay past its expiration. My sense of myself has no clear orientation with respect to what others are doing, except maybe as an inquiring observer. I feel truly like a “stranger in a strange land”, though maybe slightly less Martian than Robert A. Heinlein might suggest. I interact with those I meet politely, inquisitively, and to the best that my extremely limited skills with the local language will allow me. After several days of not hearing or speaking my native tongue, I hear it as a voice narrating my actions. It mostly has no clear gender, though depending on my activities, on some days it is David Attenborough, on others Sir Patrick Stewart, and on the strangest days, Kate McKinnon. No, it’s not schizophrenia (though I’d gladly take all three of those rockstars in my head any day), just a better voiceover for my own thoughts. I am alone, but I don’t feel lonely. Most of the time, anyway.
I wish I had done this when I was younger, traveled alone long enough to hear the inner weird really speak to me. Some cultures actually encourage this in their young people to go off and experience independent time away from home. The Amish, for one. More and more students I teach are taking gap years before college as a way to get to know themselves and the world outside of the academic lens. There may be something to this. I wonder if I had done this trip in my 20s, as many of my peers did, would I remotely recognize that version of myself today? To those of you who did, do you still hear that part of yourself when you’re alone?
This untamed me that I am starting to listen to now, how I am cherishing her. Perhaps this is actually the perfect time in a person’s life for a solo adventure, at the bridge of middle adulthood between youth and wisdom. You know the extreme value and importance of interdependence with those we love, but also you have felt the toll it can take on a person, year after year, to not hear this inner voice that only comes alive in the absence of the others.
Whatever solo travel can give you, I recommend it. With all my heart. Go listen to that inner weird of yours. Wander by your own curious whims and nothing else. Let your mind get a little bit feral.
Until next time,
Live Long and Prosper
