Traveling by yourself is one of the best ways to immediately get outside, and grow, your comfort zone. It can be terrifying at first, but once you have traveled to a new city or destination, made friends, explored an area together, and then left with vague promises of skyping sometime down the road, only to meet new people you won’t see again in the next city, you will always have a confidence about yourself and your ability in new places that you just can’t get from anywhere else.
That being said, there can be long stretches of loneliness, of a feeling of being trapped inside your own head as the unfamiliar seems to coalesce around you as a kind of monolithic other that you are permanently separated from. It’s these times that you wish you had someone to travel with. This can be especially true in areas that don’t have lots of other travelers, which can be both the best and worst places to travel to on any given day, depending on your mood and level of travel anxiety at the moment.
I say all of this because I recently took a tour with Travel Indochina, an Australian company that offers tours throughout Asia for reasonable prices. They have every sort of tour you can imagine, from China tours
, to tours of Cambodian temples, even tours of Burma. With their tours you can still see areas most travelers don’t see, as well as the ones they do, and never get stuck with those travel blues. Many of the tours are made for single travelers. They let you pay for a shared accommodations, and you are paired with another single traveler of the same sex. If there isn’t one on the tour, you get a single accommodation for the same price. Great deal.
The tour sizes are small enough (there were twelve Australians, Canadians, Americans, Brits, Dutch and Germans on my tour) to know everybody without being forced to spend all your time with a few people. These tours are really fantastic for people who just got the travel bug, but are still a little intimidated to be hitting a foreign country by themselves. These tours are small enough and intimate enough to feel like you are really traveling, not just hopping on a sightseeing bus.
I was going to have my own Thailand Holidays
, but instead I joined one of the many Thailand tours that Travel Indochina offers, and I couldn’t have been happier. I met some great people, and saw sides of Thailand that I never saw before on my previous solo journeys. I got the official tours of the sites in Bangkok, which I hadn’t done my previous trip, and now realize what I was missing. I took a Thai cooking class, which has come in handy on more than one occasion since. I rode bikes around ancient ruins. I traveled over the River Kwai.
We ended the trip in Chang Mai, and I was ready to continue on my own, having had a great time with the people I met. We all made vague promises to keep in touch, and I might with a few of them. But after that trip I was ready to go out on my own, and meet more people to adventure with, who I may or may not talk to again.
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